Battery Vehicle Society

Hi Greg, The upper limit for a DC power source is 75V (50V for AC), if you want to avoid getting the vehicle approved under the Low Voltage Directive. This only applies to something that you sell, as far as I am aware, but I think that it's inevitable that some jobsworth somewhere will start thinkin...

The regulations don't actually ban non-filament lamps (in fact, if they did then both my present car and my previous car would be illegal, as the current one has HID headlights and a LED brake light and the last one had LED brake lights - both were/are unmodified). What the regulations say is that f...

If the motors are parallel connected and driven by a conventional controller that doesn't motor-current control then one motor won't realise that the other has failed, unless it shorts the supply as it does so. If the failed motor simply goes open circuit, and stops working, then the other motor wil...

There's a world of difference between a racing vehicle and a road going one, though. If some simple safety features were built in, like driving both motors from a common controller, or arranging for a dual controller system to shut down in the event of a single controller failure, then the risk woul...

Unfortunately with one motor only a car still needs a differential and as Paul says, probably a 5:1 step down. This section of the modern fwd transmission is a large chunk of it's mass, so there is not so much to be saved there after all. Adding a clutch puts it back up of course, but I'm not setti...

The answer is a qualified yes. Big capacitors (normally referred to as "ultra capacitors") are being developed and used for just this purpose. The snag is that the voltage sags on a capacitor just as it does on a battery, so you actually need some pretty big capacitors to hold up over heav...

My only reason for dropping down to 24V was to do with the ready availability of controllers that will work at this voltage. There are few RC motor controllers available that will work over about 30V and those that are available are very expensive. This is the reason I've been researching the possib...

Thanks for the info, Del. Have you seen the electric recumbent powered by a Plettenburg Terminator? Here's a link: http://www.recumbents.com/WISIL/shumaker/default.htm Matt started out with an AXI, then upped the power with the Plettenburg; the details of this are on the second page of his site. Mat...

I too am interested in a very light, aerodynamically clean, reverse trike, this motor (if it works) could be a contender as a power unit. Years ago I contemplated building a trike from the front of an old Formula Ford, with a motorcycle engine and rear wheel grafted on to the back. I looked far and ...

Thanks that, I'm a relative newcomer to the RC motor scene - I bought my first outrunner to fly a scale model of a new design of full size aeroplane only a years or so ago. The reliability issue comes down to only two main things with the motor; keeping it cool and making sure it has decent bearings...