Every plausibly cool electric car innovation leads me to the same thought: “5-10 years from now, the restomod potential will be wild once these come down in cost.” For this, I am imagining retrofitting a Pontiac Fiero to reduce as much weight as possible and see if extended flight becomes possible.
Here’s a build series of an ex-Apple/NASCAR/Tesla engineer turned YouTuber swapping Tesla Model 3 drivetrain to a 50s Jag.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6i_C38pwQyg0pBG...
As an antique BMW enthusiast, I know some people that have swapped electric motors in to 2002s and 2000 CSLs and they said it was actually a pretty disappointing experience. You lose the vintage driving experience entirely.
Yeah, it was also so sad to lose the vintage brain damage when we migrated away from leaded fuels: https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/20th-century-lead-ex...
Number 1 problem is battery weight though. Not electric motors.
I have a 84 w123 300D, and would love to add some more power to it. Lightweight hub motors would be great, but any decent size battery would be at least 200lbs+, which is hard to do on a old chasy.
Reducing the motor mass by 200 kg means you've just removed 10% of the weight of the vehicle. You could theoretically now reduce the battery pack by 10% as well.
Something to keep in mind with hub motors is that they’re unsprung weight, vs the battery pack is pretty much always sprung. While that’s not a huge differentiator for efficiency, it sure cuts down on the abuse the wheels and hub motors will experience
its less hard than you'd think unless you're really going for long range.
for my sailboat I am getting rid of a 300lbs diesel and a 30gallon fuel tank with a 45lbs PMAC.
That means I have opened up about 465lbs for batteries.
Now, with a sailboat you're never truly out of range -- but the point stands : these things are so much lighter than ICEs on average that there is a lot of opportunity even with battery weight as it is (and it's getting better daily).
I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.
I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.
As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.
For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.
Uh, car batteries are much heavier than most ICE’s. The curb weight on teslas’s are crazy high.
BYD can be lighter because they skip on safety gear and proper structural elements - in my experience.
Jeep/Stellantis certainly had problems trying to do this:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/jeep-tells-4xe-hybrid-owners-t...
i know series hybrids aren't as efficient as parallel hybrids (thanks technology connections!), but i wonder if they'd be a good candidate for fun restomods.
drop in a tiny, powerful electric motor and a small battery (crammed in whatever location is best for weight distribution), and then wire up a little genny powered off your existing fuel tank that can jump in as a range extender
Yeah, my comment was hand-waving away a bit of the reality of it, but swap the Fiero engine for a battery and some of these and it's got to be close to achieving full lift.
I think the cited weight loss comes from energy efficiency gains leading to less battery capacity needed.
Electric engines are already very efficient (particularly compared to internal combustion). If you go from 90% to 95% efficiency, you don't save much in terms of battery.
ETA: Internal combustion engines half a century ago had an efficiency of 20%, now they're at 40%. That cuts the fuel you need to carry in half. Electric engines are near 100%, and as I said, going from 90% to 95% efficiency cuts required battery by a bit more than 5%, so peanuts.
Going from 90% to 95% efficiency you're halving the thermal loses, thus reducing the need for cooling by half. It's a big deal.
Same with going from 99% to 99.5% efficiency. It still reduces the cooling needed by half.
> reducing the need for cooling by half
But the motor is not the only thing that needs to be cooled. It’s mainly the battery, which has a narrow operating range. The power electronics that convert AC to DC also need to be cooled.
So you’re halving the cooling needs of the motor, which is nice but small compared to the other two. And even then, total cooling doesn’t impact range that much compared to warming the battery in cold climates.
I think you’ve overstated your case.
In the video the yasa guy said most of the weight loss is from getting rid of the yoke.
I'm going to replace the differential and the automatic transmission in my truck with a 4-cylinder engine and an electric transmission.