Battery Vehicle Society

I was thinking, there must be sufficient expertise and experience on the forum and in the club for us to design and build a single seat, longer range commuter vehicle that could cruise at 55mph on the motorway with a top speed of, say 65mph. http://www.bikeweb.com/images/cedinevblezinquasweb004-141...

Well, Jim is 'the motor guy'. I know that there has sometimes been a problem with twin motor setups in getting the motors to match. Garry Flo had a lot of trouble years ago with a twin drive Porsche 944, but I have a feeling that was ADC giving miss-information about their motors brush timing. Somet...

My approach is simply to try to avoid any complexities which can be eliminated; the approach of the one-off builder rather than large manufacturer. In which case; Keep the gearbox! You get most of your engineering done for you, driveshafts, bearings, mountings, etc. All you have to do is couple you...

Have you pulled the brushgear yet?

On many of the Prestolite motors I've dealt with in EV's the brushes were angled over about 15 degrees in the direction of rotation.

If you are stretching the range of a vehicle you won't get the best life from the batteries. All battery types exhibit a curve relating depth of discharge to cycle life and it usually has an exponential component. Lead acid is the worst. An Optima YellowTop is rated something like 200 cycles @ 100% ...

You do have to consider what would happen in the event of one motor failing. I saw this happen in EV racing, though more accurately it would have been called an 'energy run'. The FWD car speared off into the track wall coming onto the straight. This was the result of a poorly thought out chain drive...

The one remaining unanswered question is, why hasn't a big motor mfr. taken this design and scaled it up ? They have. Most production EVs from major manufacturers have used brushless motors (Pugeot and Citroen excepted). Some have been induction motors, some have been permenent magnet. Technically ...

I remember when the Fiat X1/9 was considered to be a VERY heavy small sports car at 960Kg in 1500 version. It was built to comply with American crash regs that were never actually implemented. Dumping the American impact bumpers (1/4" thick alloy extrusions) saved quite a few Kg. I thought the ...

The original question was: what ratio of kw to GVW is required, roughly, to enable single speed clutchless design ? The answer is; It depends! Sorry, that's just how it is. The reason for requesting kw is that most motors seem to put only this on their plates, and since output kw derives from torqu...

I wonder what the life expectancy of these motors is.

500 hours would be a lot of weekend flying, but not all that much driving every day.

Persuading a University to put one through a driving cycle simulation on a dyno would be a big help.