Greg Coleman has built an electric car for $800.00. We’re not exactly talking Tesla type functionality here, it’s an old Yugo that he’s converted, but the mere fact that an ordinary person can do this proves that there’s a lot of misinformation going around at the moment from the motor industry and beyond. Go Greg, go.
I have driven the car home tonight for the first time. Road speed is about 35 mph because of the 5 HP motor. This will do as I drive a backroad with light traffic. I built the car so inexpensively that the complete conversion cost for materials is under $800.00. It cost me almost $350.00 just to legalize the car…title, license and a windshield. I bought everything off eBay and got all new motor, controller (alltrex) and potentiometer, for 1/3 of what others wanted. For batteries I went with 4 deep cycle from Farm & Fleet on sale for $46.99 each. I have my own machine shop so I made the adapter for $30. Then used a double roller chain with twin sprockets to connect the Baldor motor to the 5 speed trans and no clutch. The car weighed 1800 lbs before the conversion. Now it weighs 1640 lbs.
An excellent step by step guide on how to build an electric car can be found at http://www.didik.com/ev_build.htm. It is a part of the Electric Car Society.