Electric Car Conversions: The Benefits for You
Electric cars aren’t a pipedream or decades-away option. In fact, it’s possible to convert a car to electric power for the same cost, or less, than buying a gas car. In this excerpt of a comprehensive resource for electric car conversions, you’ll learn why an electric car may be right for you.
October 28, 2009
By Seth Leitman and Bob Brant
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You can convert it! Build Your Own Electric Vehicle details everything you ever wanted to know about converting a gas car to reliably run on electric power.
MCGRAW-HILL
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(The following is an excerpt from Build Your Own Electric Vehicle by Seth Leitman and Bob Brant (McGraw-Hill, 2008). The excerpt is Chapter 1: Why Electric Vehicles Are Still Right for Today! The book is a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in electric car conversions, covering the advantages of electric cars, choosing the right car for a conversion, the components of an electric vehicle drivetrain, batteries, maintenance, and resources to learn more and engage with other electric car conversion enthusiasts.)
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Why should anyone buy, convert, or build an electric car today? Simply put, they are the cleanest, most efficient, and most cost-effective form of transportation around — and they are really fun to drive. When I worked for the State of New York, we always used to say that electric cars were almost maintenance free: they never require oil changes, new spark plugs, or any other regular repairs. When a person would say, “Really?” I would then say, “Well, not quite — you need to change the washer fluid for the windshield.”
Electric vehicles (EVs) are highly adaptable and part of everyday society: Electric cars are found on mountaintops (railway trams, cable cars), at the bottom of the sea (submarines, Titanic explorer), on the moon (Lunar Rover), in tall buildings (elevators), in cities (subways, light rail, buses, delivery vehicles), hauling heavy rail freight or moving rail passengers fast (Pennsylvania Railroad Washington to New York corridor). Are they all electric vehicles? Yes. Do they run on rails or in shafts or on tethers or with nonrechargeable batteries? Yes.
EVs were designed to do whatever was wanted in the past and can be designed and refined to do whatever is needed in the future. What do you need an EV to be: big, small, powerful, fast, ultra-efficient? Design to meet that need. General Motors’ EV1 is an excellent example of what can be done when starting with a clean sheet of paper. Closer to home and the subject of this book, do you want an EV car, pickup, or van? You decide.
As car companies continue producing sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that cannot meet federal fuel standards or reduce emissions that are harmful to our environment, think about some of the statistics and facts from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and various notable sources: The DOE states that more than half of the oil we use every day is imported. This level of dependence on imports (55 percent) is the highest in our history. The DOE even goes on to say that this dependence on foreign oil will increase as we use up domestic resources. Also, as a national security issue, we should all be concerned that the vast majority of the world’s oil reserves are concentrated in the Middle East (65 to 75 percent), and controlled by the members of the OPEC oil cartel.
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