A Honda Civic With no Gas Tank (Video)

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It took Dr. Adam Blankespoor two years and $14,000 to convert his 1996 Honda Civic into an all-electric plug-in vehicle. He's an automotive engineer and researcher, but if he can do it, you can probably follow in his footsteps and create your own electric vehicle if you are so inclined. He talks about a 45 mile range, with 30 miles as a practical limit. That's not competitive with the Tesla S, but there's also a massive price difference to consider. This is another person Slashdot met at the Ann Arbor Maker Faire. If you want to see what kinds of electric vehicles other have made, possibly for inspiration, the Electric Vehicle Photo Album is a good place to start. And if you want information on how to build your own electric car, using "electric car conversion" as your Google search term will put you on the track of more electric car information than you can shake a Tesla Coil at.

Adam Blankespoor: My name is Adam Blankespoor and this is my Honda Civic, a ‘96 Civic that I converted to full electric battery power. Took out the engine and added the motor and a lot of batteries. So, I drive it every day to work and back. My commute to work is 15 miles and it takes about three-and-a-half hours to charge that. If I use the full battery capacity, I could probably go 50 miles, but I rarely do that and rarely have a need to do it, living here in Ann Arbor. If I use that full battery capacity, then it would take 10 hours to charge on a 110 outlet. The charger that I have, it can use 110 or 220, automatically switch between the two. And so that would cut the time in half. I finished it a year ago. It took me two years to convert and I finished it a year ago and have about 2,000 miles on it. And one of the things that amazes me still is that, I haven’t had to do any maintenance really or any kind of tuning. Once I got everything connected, it’s basically been trouble free for the first 2,000 miles. And I think it’s less of a testament of my prowess and more of a testament of the simplicity of this system and the elegance of an electric drive. Interviewer: Could you walk us through the various parts of the system? Adam Blankespoor: Sure. So, everything from the flywheel to the lug nuts is original Honda and I have a WarP 9 motor and it’s a DC series wound motor. It can handle 160-volts nominal and up to 1,000 amps of output. This is a WarP-drive controller. It acts a lot like a dimmer switch. So my accelerator pedal controls this controller and it controls how much power goes to the motor. I have 45 lithium ion battery cells and they are 100-amp-hour capacity at about 150 nominal volts. This controller is liquid cooled and that’s regular engine coolant. And then I have 25 cells in the back along with the charger and a DC-to-DC converter.

Practical?

[mhajicek]

$14000 buys an awful lot of gas.

Wow, I guess.

[jtownatpunk.net]

But, for another grand or two, he could have bought a brand new 40+ MPG IC vehicle with a warranty, all kinds of new safety features, and a range of hundreds of miles with a "recharge" time of about 5 minutes.

I don't understand why this is a story at all. People have been building short range electric vehicles since the 70s. Unless the summary was supposed to read 450 mile range with a 300 mile practical limit, I don't see what's exciting about this.

Re:Practical?

[lobiusmoop]

Lighten up AC. It's the guy's _hobby_, it's not meant to be especially practical, you know? (great fun though)

Re:Wow, I guess.

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

It is geeky and cool. If you don't get that you might be on the wrong website.
Geeky and cool does not mean useful. In fact most of the best geeky and cool things are not useful at all.

Re:Practical?

[Joce640k]

Sure, but paying somebody else to do it for you is like using Windows instead of Linux.

Re:Wow, I guess.

[fahrbot-bot]

It is geeky and cool. If you don't get that you might be on the wrong website. Geeky and cool does not mean useful. In fact most of the best geeky and cool things are not useful at all.

I now know how to describe my penis - thanks.

Re:Practical?

[jenningsthecat]

You should consider the $14000 + the cost of the original honda civic as the total cost of the finished vehicle. Then compare that cost to a similar quality gas guzzler. The real savings will be found in the difference between those two prices, not in the original cost of the conversion.

When doing a cost analysis, don't forget to deduct the cost of oil changes, filter replacements, and exhaust system repairs/replacements for the life of the electric car. Discount the cost of brake jobs as well, if the car uses regenerative braking. In Ontario, Canada, (and possibly other jurisdictions as well), you can also deduct the cost of emissions testing every two years. And then there's the cost difference between fixing the things that typically go wrong with an I/C engine in the course of a decade or so, and fixing the problems that crop up with an electric motor and controller.

As usual, this is a more complex question than it first appears to be.

Re:car conversion: "don't start from here"

[YrWrstNtmr]

The Smart Four Two is safer in a crash than any SUV ever made, but a lot of people dont have the IQ to realize that.

I suggest you go to youtube and watch some of the Smart crash test videos. Against larger cars, the Smart usually gets punted quite far.
If everyone drove something that size, sure. But mass does matter.

Re:Huge waste of money

[gmhowell]

So you're complaining about wasting time...on slashdot?!

There's a difference between wasting my time and wasting my employer's time.