battery pack

My battery pack needs to be replaced and I'm looking into lithium. The new pack is 144 volts using CALB CA180BFI. The new pack will be 45 cells 34 in the engine battery box and 11 in the gas tank box. this will free up the front trunk battery box so I can carry a spare tire again. I'll be mounting the charger, relays and 12v battery on the wall between the gas tank/front trunk.

The current battery pack weighs 1152 lbs. and the new will be 562 lbs. saving almost 600 lbs.

The down side is the price about $13,000.00 and the people selling the batteries have the same ethic as Electro, no phone/email replies.

Battery pack dead

After 3 1/2 years the battery pack couldn't make the 15 mile round trip to work anymore. I think I would have gotten more but last fall they tore up the road in front of work and rerouted it so I drove the truck to work for 6 months.

I'm thinking of going the LiFePo4 route with 60 - 180 Ah cells/ 192 volts.If anyone has a good suggestion as Ross Perrot said "I'm all ears"

The exterior was finished and the car washed and waxed this weekend. I realized that I wasn't going to paint the hood & trunk after 2 years so I gave it to the pros. Glad I did they did a nice job!

Still ticking along

I just thought I'd add a quick post on how the car is doing, GREAT! My commute is 14 miles round trip and the car gets driven daily unless there is wet snow on the pavement with salt. Hoping to make the body last. The DC -DC converter failed and a couple of relays but never left me stranded. Second year of batteries and still doing well.

Running

As some of you know the car has been running and I'm going to try to get this to a real time - so here goes.

I had a bad potbox, here is the the replacement ready to go in. The extra piece of aluminum is because I couldn't mount the potbox as the instructions because the brake regulator is in a different location. The neutral relay was bad and needed to be replaced. The second relay for the charger also was bad and like Tim K. I didn't use it. I intend to go back and replace it but it's not a problem right now.

The motor ran about 30 RPM full throttle. After a couple of emails with Beth @ Azure and switching the encoder direction the car was up. The first test drive was poor. I turned around and changed the parameters that Ross posted on his blog. The cars performance still is poor but I drove it to work a couple of times ( 7 miles each way ) and was working with Beth trying to get the car to keep up with traffic, when I had a battery terminal melt. The lead melted around the bolt that was cast in the terminal. The store claims the terminal was not tighted and I believe the lead broke off with the bolt. I will post pictures next time of the repair.

The problem with the lack of power seems to be the controller cuts the voltage allowed when the voltage in the pack goes down to 138 volts. The battery pack completely charged will drop the first time it is floored to 133 volts. Beth said this is done to get the most out of the pack and based on 12 volt batteries. I didn't see this parameter and asked here to send me a new .ccs file that includes this and the one Tim used to hook up his tach. I'm goig to use one of the regen wires the go to the cabin and hook it to the tach rather the find the wire in the engine compartment. I'm thinking I can move the pin at the controller and crimp a connector--done.

brakes

The brakes were upgraded to the 911 master cylinder and BMW calipers. Here the caliper is being cut to size.
Painted and installed with new disc. One note make sure the caliper is not already the 19 mm master cylinder like mine was!

conversion part 2

The controller and bushings installed.
The engine wiring done after Tim helped me figure out the problem with the AC instructions. The brown is dust from the sanding primer and will wash off. The relays have the stickers from the bags on them so I don't mix them up. The shunt is above out of view.
The transmission had a lot of oxidation so I scuffed it with scotch brite, cleaned it with brake clean and painted it with Aluminum cast high temp.
Installed!
The front batteries installed and wired up. Two thing to note; the batteries have no posts and I believe this works better. The other is the bitchin prop for the charger.