Hello all,

Sadly the day-to-day demands of family, work and life have made the max too impractical to keep as a daily driver. instead, i thought to reincarnate it as an electric car. i know it's not the ideal candiate for such a conversion but you it satisfies the "need" to keep it in the family and the 'hope" that it one day stops sucking my wallet dry.

i'll keep you guys posted on process and progress.

 

a) if it's too impractical to keep as a DD.... how on earth is it 'practical' to convert it to electric??
b) with the amount of money you will have to spend on it, you will NEVER recuperate the costs..... ever....... so it will never stop 'sucking your wallet dry'
c) and with the tiny tiny range of electric cars... what would you even use it for? honestly it WOULD be best to use it as a DD if you made it electric.. figure 20 miles to work, 20 miles back, charge it at night. You can't use it for long trips. It won't be fast. Commuting is the whole point of an electric car.

if you really want to make it economical and versatile, put a 2.0 TDI engine in it from VW.... good luck figuring out everything necessary to do that tho.

 

wow...thanks for the input CC.

Ii guess we have different views on a few things here. For me, the max as a DD was impractical because I never knew if I was going to get to work or able to get my kids home. Also, as I did rely on it for some fairly critical trips, when it did fail, the time urgency factor never really let me budget or shop around or even entertain the idea of doing the work myself. For me, this was the impracticality of it all.

I don't think I ever mentioned wanting to recuperate costs. I don't think that such a thing is possible in the world of automobiles. With respect to sucking my wallet dry, sure it will be an expensive venture but unlike the above scenario, I will be able to shop, budget and explore options. More importantly, this will be a planned project which will not affect my day-to-day ability to go to work or get to soccer practice and so on. If the max doesn't start - it's ok. There's no time sensitivity to it. It's now a pleasure to work on it again because the stresses have been removed.

I understand that most may see commuting as the key application for EVs but I prefer the expereince of the conversion and simply making the statement. I'm not certain exactly what I'll use it for - perhaps simple errands or something of the like.

I'm more excited about the journey than the desitination I suppose. I am fortunate enough to have friends and family in the fork lift industry. At the end of the day, the EV is just a glorified electric forklift so I don't think I'll need much luck in figuring everything out.

My biggest concern now is just not to waste all the ICE related parts. I'm sure some folks on this board will need some of them.

Now I just need a cool license plate to match.

 

yea but even if you can shop around... it's going to suck your wallet dry to build it. you're going to have to spend more during the conversion process than you would simply keeping the car down for 6 months, fixing all the problems you find, then putting it back on the street in its normal gasoline V6 form and running it for years to come.. and that's before counting the electrical costs of charging it. so overall you're going to spend alot more money for a much slower, less practical car.

Not to mention that, if something suffers a critical failure in your EV system, odds are it's going to be tougher to get a replacement partfor it than you would for the normal gas-engine configuration where you can drive to autozone and get a quick-fix replacement part if you need to.




BUT... in terms of a "hey look what I can do" project, it's a neat idea. I just disagree with your reasoning for doing it. If the original post had said "well i got a 2005 such-and-such that i use as my DD these days so barely drive the old girl anymore, so here's what i've decided to do something totally over-the-top as a long-term project" i would have been a lot less, er, critical.

now if you really DO posses the ability to do this... which 99.99999999999999999% of the people that say "i'm gonna ________ to my Max!" don't...... since you would not need to worry about the gas tank being in the way, you might as well adapt the rear suspension of a WRX (spindles, axles, xmember, etc) onto the maxima, and bolt one of the electric motors to the front of that diff (and maybe another one in front) to make it electric AWD.

 

The maxima is pretty far down on the list of cars I would choose to convert to all electric. Too heavy and big, plus you need to worry about things like steering and braking. Adapting the maxima's equipment to work with an electric motor probably won't be easy at all.

 

once again, i am agreeing with you that this is an expensive project. no need to harp on that point. the point you are missing though is that the time and money lost in terms of lost work is greater than what this project should cost. the costs extend beyond the sum of the parts needed. i am not doing this because it is cheap. i have a car that i would otherwise sell but instead prefer to keep it as a cool little project. i'm not sure why you are so opposed to such a thing.

as for replacement parts - again, EVs are really just electric forklifts and there's plenty of them rolling around. AND since electric forklifts are built for much greater load cycles than the crap from auto parts stores, the likelihood is that the failure rate will drop considerably.

i don't think i ever mentioned anything about going over the top either. this is just a simple driveway conversion project - nothing too fancy. it might also be useful to learn to walk before running. who knows maybe there will be an AWD version down the line. it would be foolish though to intriduce another power robbing differential. electric AWD run a motor to each wheel.

as for the cost of charging - i work for a solar electric distributor

i'm just doing this for fun CC - not because it's cheap or practical. i am not looking to keep the max as a DD but rather just as a tinker toy. it's one thing to have to spend money - it's a complete different thing to choose to do so.

i'm sorry that you don't approve of my project and feel so compelled to trash it. thanks for your opinion. i'd really rather this thread be focused on the issues related to the actual conversion than on the decision to do so.

 

i wasn't trashing the project, and never said i disapproved of the project itself. it's just the way you introduced it, that the maxima 'wasn't practical enough', and that you were tired of it eating holes in your wallet, neither of which will be remedied by this conversion. but as a project-for-fun, i think it's a cool idea.

anyhow, the reason I suggested a diff is b/c if you put a motor on each wheel that's a LOT of unsprung weight, which is going to make the car drive like total crap compared to using axles and a body-mounted diff.

 

I like this idea because it's unique. It might be more cost-effective than some people realize, since EVs are considerably cheaper to operate than vehicles running on internal combustion. Cheaper per watt-hour consumed, more energy efficient, fewer moving parts to break, etc. Once the project is completed, it will save you money to use it instead of a gas-powered car. Whether those savings will ever exceed the initial cost of the conversion is a matter worthy of debate, but you've already stated that you're not really concerned about that. Good luck. I'm excited to see how this turns out.

 

This is a good point. Connect axles directly to motors to get the best of both worlds.

 

also it might be more efficient to run 2 motors thru diffs than 4 motors directly. kinda like having 2 gas engines in the front and rear of the car for an AWD car is PROBABLY less efficient than running a transfer case and a single engine. plus it would be easier to do than mounting motors directly on the hubs.

 

believe it when we see it completed. Otherwise sounds like a lot of hot air.

 

So based on your back and forth between Caped... Your saying that the max is now a car that is no longer being used by the family... thus not relied on for anything, because you have replaced it with another vehicle??

If you want to do it then do it!

Not many people here are going to give you technical advice on how this would be completed, your sailing into the dark alone on that one...

But if the max is not being used anyway, IMHO why wouldn't you just restore it to its previous glory and fix what's wrong with the thing and have a great car that will last you for the next decade? Since time isn't a factor, you can do everything to need to do in a spaced out manner that way it's not a crunch on the wallet...

But it's up to you to do what you want to the car....

 

i mean i can understand the idea of taking on projects that, to most, are a waste of time or money. Granted some crazy projects are better ideas than others, simply due to parts availability, and the original configuration of the car to begin with (ie the Chrysler Sebring in particular is a horrible candidate for a RWD conversion due to the fact of how far back the front wheels are, compared to a 1st gen Acura RL)

but i don't see this car as being any better or worse than any other car for EV candidacy.. my car, without driver, was 3060 lb at maxus. the 09 camry hybrid is 3600lb.... and only 300lb heavier than a 4dr 08 civic. so the 3rd gen maxima isn not actually THAT heavy compared to newer cars. question is how much do the necessary batteries weigh for an EV conversion compared to the engine and transmission that would be removed. And where would you put them? some in front some in back? all in the backseat and just make it a 2-seater?

 

Really? Last time I checked replacement battery on electric Civic was quoted at $15k with expected lifespan of 4 years. No, thanks.

 

i've heard that preposterous amounts of cellphone batteries can be substituted if necessary. i might worry about heat tho, so you might need some way to remove excess heat away from the batteries.. like maybe some sort of heatsink or liquid-filled pads between batteries that work similarly to the cooling system on an engine. i think that the Tesla operates at 480v... so you would need probably to make enough parallel packs of batteries to then connect those packs in series to get the required voltage (unless you want to wire all in parallel and use a transformer)

then just plug it into your cellphone charger at night! well not really haha.

 

What speed are you expecting it to run at? I mean, IMHO EV is not a forklift. If you take 10kW at the wheels (pretty lame, around 14hp) it will require 1000 amps from the battery at 12V. This is already impractical, so you'll have to run motors at > 100V and it still be quite slow.

I have some experience in 'conversion' - I converted electric lawn mower from lead acid batterries to LiPo. Even that proved to be a challenge. As CC said, parts avalability will define how far you will go with this as developing everything yourself is quite impractical.

 

There are some tricky places you might not think of for those batteries. For instance, since the gas tank will not be needed, many of the EV guys will put batteries in its place. Also, it's fairly common and smart to put as many of the batteries under the hood as possible in a FWD EV for the obvious reason of weight distribution. It's not the best idea to keep lead-acid batteries in the cabin because they release fumes, but if he's going Li-ion, he gains more options.

 

Sounds like too much to me, but that's a proprietary battery pack that's hard to come by. The typical price range for an entire EV conversion is 8k-15k. Of course, it depends on how many and what sort of batteries he's going to use, as well as the exact drivetrain used, and that depends on what he wants to be able to do with this project. Also, individual batteries can usually be re-celled for considerably less than the cost of a whole new battery, so when it comes time to do some maintenance, it shouldn't cost as much as the project will initially.

 

yea but given the ability to be creative as such... why keep it FWD when he could (compared to the difficulty of the conversion as a whole) rather easily adapt a WRX rear suspension/axle/spindle/strut setup and make it RWD or AWD? but central weight seems like the best idea. even putting some in front of the firewall but behind the front axle isn't a bad idea if going the awd route. i guess he'd need an electric vac pump for the power brakes and an electric motor to drive the power steering, else adapt the Cobalt's electric power steering (which sucks btw because the steering wheel re-centers when you are backing up, and turns itself into a turn when going forward..... the opposite of what a car should do)

 

A lot of the EV guys I've seen on the interwebs like to keep their manual transmissions and attach their motors directly to the input shaft. You can't shift that way unless you're awesome at clutchless shifting, but you usually don't need to because of the broad torque band of an electric motor. It keeps costs down by providing a convenient mounting point and enabling the builder to use only one drive motor, and it can help with the typical torque deficiency.

If the vehicle is to be used in harsh winter conditions, I'd say go with some of these live rear ideas, but for normal driving conditions, it's probably not worth the hassle.

 

you know when you think about it, how much does the 3rd gen max weigh without an engine, fuel system, full gas tank, and exhaust system? i would estimate you could shave close to 700 pounds by removing all that stuff.

and just how much weight would an electric engine, batteries and associated wiring weigh? that being taken into consideration the maxima could be a very strong candidate for this conversion since the end weight would probably be the same or less than a stock ICE max. as long as he uses some type of Li or comparable batteries, of course.

and this has been done several times with other cars. an adequate electric engine takes up less room than the max's transmission. so you could put batteries where the gas tank used to be, in the engine bay, where ever the OP likes.

 

all i have to say is ''JUST GET A TOYOTA COROLLA'' or Suzuki Swift..dam thing gives u over 37 MPG in CITY and over 44 on highways...

 

Regardless of expense or magnitude, I think you have a neat idea on your hands. I say go for it. Could be a fun project and yield an interesting result. If nothing else, you're showing innovation and creativity - two things that seem to be sorely lacking these days. Have a good time with it and learn something new.

 

live rear? WRX has independent rear, not a live axle. or by "live" you meant driven by any means? i mean the whole thing "isn't worth the hassle"... if you are going that far into the process to do a conversion like that and you have the opportunity to add rear drive power to it... WHY NOT? just because it's not going to have 200hp and won't be able to do JDM-tyte doriftos doesn't mean you should restrict it to FWD.. even my grandpa's RWD olds cutlass felt very nice to drive (minus the fact that it pulled hard to the right), and it has a blistering 110hp for a 4000lb car.

but for the tranny idea... might as well gut the tranny and attach the motor directly to the diff geartrain (ie putting the same helical gear on the motor as is normally present at the base of the mainshaft in our trannies) to reduce the gearing losses, since you only need one gear. tho i suppose bolting a flywheel to the motor and using the clutch/tranny might work too, because you can still use the tranny to multiply the torque output meaning you might be able to get more efficiency out of it.

 

that's a good idea, i'm a big fan of simple. though why not a custom 2 setup? first could be the normal all around gear and second could be a cruising gear to keep battery draw down.

 

AFAIK electric motors are much more flexible and wouldn't require any gears: if you hold shaft of DC motor it produces the maximum possible torgue in this situation automatically. Electronics can get quite sophisticated though. As CC said, it's all in the parts.

 

while it does produce maximum torque automatically... what if that amount of torque isn't quite enough? you can use a normal transmission to multiply the torque for better takeoff at low speeds then gear up when you don't need as much mechanical advantage. meaning you could potentially use a smaller motor to do the same amount of work and have better low-speed acceleration.

 

Theoretically, you're right but in practice they produce quite enough torgue for the car to accelerate. Well, specifically designed motor, of course. The challanges in designing EV are more on the batteries/control system/energy recuperation sides than pure mechanical. I read somewhere around 199X that some company already produced prototype with 4 motors 40hp each mounted in the wheels. They used new kind of magnets which just became available at the time to get those numbers. So, if those motors were light enough you could program FWD/RWD/AWD behaviour into control system software together with stability control and such . 160 hp is not bad at all. If OP goes LiPo route it will be much more promising as they pack several times more energy per given volume and are very light. They also have few other characteristics which make them much better choice exept one - price. Pack for my mower cost me 4 times its lead equivalent. Where is OP BTW?

 

Hey you can do it. One guy at my job converted his Ford Taurus (possible Contour) to an plug in EV. But later he sold the car and bought a Tesla. He's a Senior Electrical Engineer though. May have also worked on GM's Project Impact.

Corverting the car can be an expense challenge. At best you should buy a plug in car's materials (battery, transformers, etc.) and go from there. I consider this too if ICE became illegal / obsolete.

Remember EV motor have a lot of torque so the right motor controller is vital or bye bye tires.

 

... or bye bye battery together with the part of the car they were installed in - LiPos for example cannot withstand short circuit due to very low internal resistance and this is how motor looks to the battery when its shaft is stopped. Lead batteries are more tolerant but it also shortens their lifespan. So controller IS vital and the tires are the least of its problems.

 

 

electric motors are extraordinarily versatile. but, like on a gas engine, the higher the rpm the greater the fuel draw, which in this case is electricity.

 

Yeah, that. This was one of those situations where I knew I was using the wrong term but was having a brain fart and just decided to go with it.

I would think the problem putting a motor in the rear though would be more of a space issue. A motor that's big enough to move a Maxima is typically almost as big as a small gas engine. If anything, he'd just have small helper motors in the back if he went that route IMO.

Mounting the motor in the tranny housing would look funny as hell. I like this idea. Seriously though, the great thing about a project like this is the variety of options. Depending on what motor he uses, he may or may not need to put gears between the motor and the axles. I would prefer to have the tranny, personally, even if I would use 3rd for hills and 1st for stump pulling.

 

http://www.diyelectriccar.com
they have more knowledge there than you will find here on this subject.

 

if i were doing it i would get the wrx ****-end, and attach a motor directly to the front of the diff, and then get another diff for the front and fab mounts for that, and attach a motor to that too. then just wire them in parallel.

as for gears/no gears... if you think about it, alot of power drills actually have a gearset in them for "hi torque/lo speed" and "lo torque/hi speed"

ibwescaredOPoff

 

repost! that's kinda what i was getting at with my 2 speed tranny idea.

 

Thats awesome!!! I just "shared" it on facebook lol

 

there was an s10 on pass time that ran 10 sec 1/4mi but i dont think thats what u want haha

 

for some reason i'm thinking converting to bio-diesel would be an easier solution.

good luck w/ this.

 

full engine swap you mean, right? or attempting to retool the VG to run on bio-diesel?