In the early 2000s there was an Italian company in Emilia Romagna doing these combustion → electric makeovers on an industrial scale. Their average customers where municipalities and large businesses (airports, for example) converting their existing fleet of ICE cars into electric vehicles.
They lost most of their businesses around 2012 when Italy passed a bill making all these converted cars not roadworthy without an explicit permit from the original manufacturer, permits that very rarely where granted. (That law got partially overturned in 2017, but the FUD and the chilling effect remain today.)
An Italian friend of mine told me that Fiat group and Eni, the oil and gas company, lobbied hard against this and any other electrification efforts in the country.
Could this be the reason?
As a Fiat owner, I feel disgusted, but while they do make decent ICE cars, they have been worringly absent from the electric-car stage.
Probably is seeing how VW/BMW/Mercedes, PSA/Renault and Fiat are important to their respective host countries (Germany, France and Italy). Those companies are always lobbying hard regulators at national and since the 90's at European level to gain advantages and protect their market.
There is a very telling anecdote from the 80s/90s in Europe, where supermarket grew in size and were ready to take on all retail business including car resale. This was made an exception so European car manufacturer could keep their high profit margin (relatively) allowed by their approved resale points.
The Fiat 500e has been in production since 2013 (by Chrysler, in Mexico), but due to weird regulatory incentives, is only for sale in California and Oregon.
> The Fiat 500e has been in production since 2013 (by Chrysler, in Mexico), but due to weird regulatory incentives, is only for sale in California and Oregon.
You mean, due to it being a compliance car only? Fiat actively discourages people from buying them - or at least the CEO does/did.
Interesting. The existing version uses stock powertrain components from Bosch that are common to several other small EVs. I wonder if they have developed a new lower cost system internally.
Often called a “compliance car.” Any electric car produced in low numbers and only sold in certain states is probably being sold at a loss to meet some efficiency, emissions, or electrification target in the law.
I'm aware of at least 100 people that took advantage of a screaming good lease deal on them a few years back, that was ~$80/month with 0 down for 3 years. They were desperate to move them. The deal was absolutely insane, though. Given the cost savings on fuel, it was virtually a free car, and that's before you even factor in other kinds of savings.
Looks like Fiat/Chrysler banked on a merger, they just recently tried and failed a merger with Renault, which has a successful electric car programme with the Zoe. They look significantly behind the times.
I don't often believe conspiracies, but I cannot understand these sort of things... what was the justification for such law? security? Industry protectionism?
Safety is a legitimate reason, unless they were doing the full-blown car certification, including crash-testing. I'm definitely in favor of giving green technology a pass to some extent, but it would be hard to figure out exactly to which extent. Unregulated cars were deathtraps.
Safety and ‘explicit permit from the original manufacturer’ are unrelated. If they had required say crash test data that could have been a safety issue, but permissions from the manufacture is simple corruption.
Agreed, if that's the whole story. I was thinking that permission from the manufacturer would be an alternative to doing tests which were infeasible at their scale.
>Safety and ‘explicit permit from the original manufacturer’ are unrelated.
Maybe. But your source is an anonymous poster on the forum. I'm not saying they made it up, but that there's likely more to the story. It isn't exactly far fetched to think there is strict regulation about how you can modify your car for the roads. The "explicit permit" might be to signify that everything is done to the highest standards.
I don't need to get permission from Jeep to modify my car, I just need to get it inspected and approved. This is clearly a power move to protect their industry.
You aren’t doing mass volume conversions adding fuel tanks in areas where they were not intended which is basically what happened when you add lithium batteries
>This is clearly a power move to protect their industry.
You're arguing against a conspiracy for which not a shred of evidence has been provided.
Obviously a power move? Do you, in fact, know that paperwork from the manufacturer is required for any modifications, and what the source and/or requirements of it are? Or have you dreamed up some conspiracy where permission from the manufacturer is required to modify your car because you read a random comment on HackerNews (despite the fact that there's a massive aftermarket modding community in the real world)?
I also find it quaint that some posters here think we need to regulate mortgage loans because people aren't capable of calculating interest and what they owe, but the same people should be able to replace the fuel tank in their vehicle with 1000lbs of combustibles, in their garage, and then take it out onto the road. With no oversight.
This is an interesting point. I'm totally on-board with people being able to do this in their own garage. I'm fine with a person doing that contracting an engineering firm to build components of their conversion. I think even if a company provided the bits in kit form I could live with that. It starts getting a bit iffy to me when you can turn up with a donor and drive away in an electric vehicle and certainly if you can turn up and ask for an electric [insert car] and they source all of the parts and do the conversion.
A lot of this has parallels in the world of aviation. For example there are provisions for owner supplied parts on certified airframes. Experimental / homebuilt aircraft have to meet a standard of the amount of work completed by the original builder (usually 50%).
If an airplane has multiple, cascading failures, it can fall out of the sky. If an EV fails, it can pull over.
Personally, I do think that this poses some risk- I might be hesitant to put my kids on a converted EV school bus, for instance- I think it's probably a better idea for a specialized contractor to outfit a fleet than it is for the fleet's mechanic to do so, especially if it's something that they've never done before.
It's gonna be very hard unintentionally build a deathtrap if you're starting with a modern car and not going out of your way to do dumb things that make it likely to go up in flames.
Furthermore, in the case of an EV conversion you can basically just make sure the EV power-train does not occupy physical space that the ICE power-train did not and your crumple zones and airbags will work fine.
Edit:
Making batteries that don't catch on fire is a solved problem. Getting those electrons to the motor without starting a fire is a solved problem. You really only get fires when you're trying to push the performance envelope which is generally a low priority for commercial conversions.
Cars are not hyper-complicated non-deterministic black boxes. It is possible to modify them without causing unforeseen consequences. Just because you may personally lack the expertise to understand how the systems interact does not mean that nobody can understand it. A qualified engineer with an automotive background should have no problem creating an EV conversion that is every bit as safe as the base vehicle though it will probably be slightly less efficient in terms of materials and labor usage than a conversion for the same vehicle designed by an OEM team for manufacture at scale. The OEMs don't have people that are magically smarter, or different laws of physics if anything they will have a harder time engineering an equivalently performing system because they have many more constraints to optimize for than a conversion company.
I don't know. Some parts could be heavier or lighter and thusly change behavior during a crash (apply more stress to a member) that changes properties.
I'll point out that there are companies that make 4WD conversion kits for vans. And some of those companies will do the conversion for you. I can't really see the difference between that and replacing a diesel drive train with electric.
Re the "physical space" argument, battery-electric systems tend to come up a /lot/ heavier than an equivalent ICE drivetrain as I understand it, and are in different places in the vehicle. The engine/motor becomes smaller and lighter, the fueltank/batteries become larger and heavier. The mass balance and overall mass changes, which will change the vehicle's crash characteristics and handling.
Agreed that they're not black-boxes and there's a lot of assumptions you can carry over, though. The NCAP rating of the donor vehicle won't be valid any more, but all that tells you is how well its siblings survived destructive testing - it's likely to perform similarly.
TLDR: it's not quite that simple, but assuming you're not driving like an idiot it'll probably be fine.
With regards to weight, my friends here in Austin (that run a company that specializes in ICE-to-BEV conversions) tell me that the most important thing is to maintain the relative distribution of weight between the front and rear wheels.
Cars are designed to operate in a certain range of weights, as they get loaded with drivers, passengers, cargo, etc.... so long as the distribution is roughly the same, then the careful tuning of the suspension and handling, etc... should all still mostly work the same.
Sure, it might be a bit more sluggish if it is significantly heavier, but that should be about it. You might b able to largely solve that problem by just putting some stronger springs in the suspension, which might already exist in the third party market for other people who are doing other kinds of work on the same type of vehicle.
Of course, you’ve got to actually do the work to make it right, but keeping the same basic weight distribution will probably solve at least 80% of the problem.
With regards to components being really heavy, consider that the engine and the transmission are two of the heaviest components in most any car. If you can eliminate those in your BEV conversion, that gives you quite a bit of weight to work with for the new heavy components.
From the outside, it’s a hypocritical show when there is an established market of dominant companies, and then a new company enters the scene capturing a new secondary market related to the established market; then suddenly those established companies are up in arms screaming, “Regulations! Regulations!”, ready to support the government to throw the book at the new companies for <reasons>, as long as no regulations impact the established companies and they can continue to selectively skirt around which regulations they don’t like.
And once they establish business units to compete against the new company in the secondary market, suddenly the established companies aren’t so pressed about needing to enforce regulations anymore.
Every time a car is repaired and a piece replaced its lifetime is also extended. Maybe they have feared that it would also have an impact on yearly GDP since car sales are very often used as a metric.
This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do for common light goods vehicles in the UK - the Vivaro and Trafic vans. They are great apart from the gearboxes, and of course the engines are ICE. You could replace the engine and gearbox with a motor, and there's a HUGE amount of space under the van for a battery pack to give it a good range, with strong mounting onto the chassis possible. Lots of these vans do very little mileage, just working locally - think of the pollution that would be reduced in London, for instance.
The problem was that I priced it up, and it would cost about £20k for a conversion, which obviously isn't going to happen. If you could get it do say £5-7k, then anyone with one of these who's faced with a new gearbox being needed, or needs the injectors replaced and they're seized in place because the scuttle under the windscreen leaks water onto the engine (which can be a £2k + bill) might think it was worth doing.
However, I'm also sure that the insurance situation would need looking at - it's effectively a different vehicle and you've definitely had it modified.
Another one of my pie-in-the-sky ideas, but I'm sure it'll be financially doable at some point, and given that the Vivaro had a 12-year model lifespan and didn't suffer from rust, there are plenty of them about.
I wonder what that £20k would turn in to if you could commit to your suppliers that you would be buying a thousand units worth? What about only 100 units worth?
I would guess that it's mostly labour. Unless you could get a fleet of identical cars or vans, then every vehicle is going to be a bespoke job, slowing things down.
My 'plan' was thought of because the Trafic/Vivaro/Primastar are all the same van, and the labour wouldn't be much - getting the engine and gearbox out can be done in a couple of hours when you're using a ramp, and if the conversion kit was intelligently made to pick up on the same mounting points as the standard engine/transmission then it would fit back in really quickly.
The same powertrain is also used in their larger models - Master/Movano (can't think of the Nissan one), so that would also be another market. The labour would be minimal compared to the cost of the batteries.
TBH I never found out - even doing a one-off is beyond me financially, so it's not something I bothered pursuing. I'd imagine you could get a good cost reduction on the parts if you were committed to volume, but no matter what the batteries to give it a worthwhile range would be the lion's share of the cost. My van has a 700+ mile range on diesel (it gives me about 40mpg on a run), and while you wouldn't get that, I think lots would want 300 mile range before they'd consider it as most workmen do a fair mileage.
In addition to the other reasons given, it’s possible that the gearbox wouldn’t hold up with the new motor. Tesla originally built the Roadster with a two-speed transmission but the high torque of the electric motor kept shredding them, and they finally shipped the car with a single fixed gear ratio.
I think there are a couple of super high end EV models with transmissions, but almost all EVs just have a fixed ratio.
Because an automatic transmission is just a waste with the power "curve" of an electric motor. An automatic transmission basically replaces the function of a clutch by letting you put power to the wheels at super low rpm while keeping the engine spinning a decent rpm. An electric motor does not need this, it is just wasted energy in that application.
Some sort of direct gearbox with multiple speeds would probably be useful in a work vehicle application. However, one from an automotive application would be totally overkill because an electric motor's power band is too wide to need more than two or maybe three widely spaced gears. A purpose built high/low gearbox (like on a drill) would be better. Sure, you can always spec a bigger motor but that has trade-offs.
Most early EV conversions had fairly low horsepower motors and retained the manual transmission and used it to avoid overheating the motor when leaving a stop wide open (which you did most of the time when you only had ~50hp). Obviously that's a non-issue with the higher power motors that are commonly used today.
Wouldn't the advantage of being able to cruise at low RPMs massively increase range with the same size battery?
And wouldn't not replacing the transmission result in lower costs for the retrofit? If the upfront cost of a retrofit is the major hurdle preventing adoption, then reducing complexity of the retrofit would seem more important than reducing overall complexity of the drivetrain... particularly since you'll still be better-than-parity complexity following an electric retrofit.
I understand the non-trivial power-loss of connecting a motor to a transmission, but to me this seems like an acceptable trade... particularly as someone who enjoys rowing through my gears.
>Wouldn't the advantage of being able to cruise at low RPMs massively increase range with the same size battery?
Not really. An electric motor does not lose much efficiency with increased speed.
>And wouldn't not replacing the transmission result in lower costs for the retrofit?
In a longitudinal application it would be cost neutral to retain a manual transmission.
In any application it would be dumb to keep an automatic transmission. In a longitudinal application replacing any transmission is as easy as a couple carrier bearings and a different drive shaft.
If I was really trying to cut cost but perform a large volume of conversions on FWD cars with transverse mounted engines (i.e. basically all FWD cars) and automatic transmissions I'd keep the transmission housings but replace all the clutches, planetaries, etc with a single solid shaft. While machined parts are expensive they're still cheaper than coming up with another solution for the differential.
Because there is no need to transmit power mechanically when you can stick wires to electric motors and drive directly to reduce complexity, improve efficency, and save weight.
It's that model's Achilles heel - they go wrong for a pastime, a combination of weak design, poor manufacturing tolerances and no way to measure bearing preload.
I think the point was that if you're looking at an expensive replacement anyway, it might be worth doing a somewhat more expensive replacement to convert to an electric drive train.
I seriously gave thought to doing this exact thing. The problems I was uncomfortable with:
1. when you are working with multiple cars+models it is much harder to scale, every car is its own challenge, as such the operation is likely to remain small
2. customers might expect the rest of the car to also improve which would be problematic when you have to source parts or fix 10 to 15 year old car models
3. every new model you work with is a bit of an experiment, you don't really know whether your configuration is going to cause problems until it does; what worked with another model might not work with this one, in the worst case scenario, people get hurt and you're to blame; if you read any of the 100s of EV conversion blogs, they never get it right the first time round, there's always something that needs rethinking
As a side note, you don't have to buy anything from Tesla to do this. You can furnish yourself a whole package relatively easily from various suppliers. People were doing it before Tesla was even a thing.
I thought that Renault has it different than Peugeot/Citroen. The former has common parts with Nissan and the latter with Opel (also part of PSA) and Fiat. Am I wrong?
The grandland shares platform, it's actually built in the same factory than the 3008. It comes from an accord previous to the acquisition of Opel from psa
There is the example of LPG conversions, where you can take pretty much any naturally aspirated gasoline engine and convert it to LPG for a modest price.
LPG conversion requires a lot less changes though. The gearbox and braking remain exactly the same. You need to make very few changes to the motor. Then you just add a little more equipment (fuel tank, computer and control system) on top.
Just make a shaft to replace the shifty gear reducing bits of the transmission and then bolt your electric motor to the now gear-less transmission. It should be pretty easy to standardize a coupling and mounting bolt pattern for the motor and then just bolt on whatever transmissions shaft and bell-housing adapter you'd need for the particular model.
I'm glossing over the details but you'd need about half a dozen precision machined features and like three or four parts that are specific to a particular ICE engine/transmission application. Dimensions are such that you could probably buy cheap axles for a common application and then have them machined down to make your part. Parts cost should wind up under $200ea unless you need something expensive to machine (like blind female splines).
I hav some friends here in the Austin area that have a company doing this. And yes, it’s all custom one-off work for each car.
My most vivid memory is climbing into the “frunk” of a Porsche that was owned by a famous cardiologist, and measuring the heater core slot so that we could make our own heater core enclosure to fit for an electric unit we bought. And I took very careful and accurate measurements and very carefully applied them to sheet metal on the hand brake press. Only to discover that I had not accounted for the thickness of the metal or the enforced bend radius, and so the finished unit was off by about a millimeter and wouldn’t fit.
I tried to convince them that they should partner with certain kit car companies, buying only the non-BEV components from them, much the way Tesla started out with Lotus. But that never went anywhere, and I haven’t heard from them since. I need to get back in touch with them....
BTW, the biggest issue they found in doing conversions is doing the electrical wiring work according to code.
When there is a crash and the emergency rescue team has to use the “jaws of life” to cut the car open, you want to make damn sure they won’t be cutting through any of your high-amperage cabling. And if you are converting an ICE car to BEV, you don’t want to surprise them by routing your power cables through unexpected places. When they see a certain model of car, they are going to expect to be able to cut through in certain manufacturer-approved locations.
You don’t want to risk killing the guys who are trying to save your life.
From the company pitch: Electrification of thermal city cars : we replace the thermal engine by electrical engine and batteries (100km of autonomy and 110km/h of maximum speed). This autonomy is a engaged choice to avoid oversized car capabilities and avoid reproducing the opulence on lithium-cobalt that we have on oil.[1]
Ah, the good old days of "if you want an electric car, you have to suffer."
This isn't really a company yet, it's a pitch for funding.
It's perfectly possible to convert existing cars to electric drive. Conversion kits exist.[2] Those guys have conversion kits for most early VWs powered by the little four-cylinder opposed engine. Cost is about $17,000 with battery. Which is a used Tesla pack. Unclear why this new conversion is so much cheaper, unless it doesn't include the battery. Other sellers have conversion kits for other vehicles.
The usual result is a rather heavy car with limited range. Also, conversions tend to leave the transmission in the power train and use a DC motor, which is obsolete electric car technology.
100km range fits the commuting needs of 95% of the people in western Europe.
In any case, the target demographic is likely not wealthy, so for them, less range for less money would be ideal. Plus, the smaller the battery the easier it is to fit, meaning less potential problems later on. Particularly important because these cars won't be crash tested.
I don't understand why this needs to be said, and I agree with you. There's no point owning a car that is more expensive only because if has to face specific conditions one or two days a year.
Renting a car seems to be the obvious solution, but there might be two reasons why it doesn't appear to be so for most people. The first one is that in general car drivers don't know how much they pay per day or per kilometer driven. Then renting a car seems to be expensive. The second reason is that cars have an almost religious status in our society.
It reminds me of Ath, a city in Belgium that has a yearly event where the people go through the streets wearing huge statues. This tradition can be found in other countries as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantes_y_cabezudos. Car culture looks like a big daily procession to honour the values of power, speed, and freedom from physical limitations. No wonder some people can't leave their symbolic attire, and instead want to own it, the way they own their daily clothes.
It's even worse than that: in countries where caravans are popular (which is most of Europe), most people buy heavy and overpowered cars just to be able to tow their caravan twice a year.
Pretty sure people everywhere buy second hand cars, but somehow car makers still sell millions of new cars every month. Surely more people can afford this kind of electric conversion kit than a new electric car.
Yeah but I'm pretty sure that most of those here who use cars to go to cities are those with low cost second hand cars. The nice ones are usually sitting parked in garages, used mainly for out of city or whole family trips - public transport is actually being used a lot here, however the current issue is that it doesn't connect out of city areas well, forcing people living out of city to use cars to commute.
The car isn't going to make a trip to Italy for vacation. On the other hand drive to their vacation a lot less than in the 70s or 80s since flying became much cheaper.
Also lots of families have two cars to manage commute, and one of those doesn't really need more range than necessary for the commute.
Yea, EU vacation is starting to be fine from 200km range if the car supports 40+kWh/h charging. You're tired and need to make a stop just when the car needs a recharge.
Just did a weeks vacation in Norway, where I live, with my BMW i3 94Ah model. It has a tad over 200km range. The biggest issue was finding an available, working charger. Due to this, we didn't feel safe having less than 50km range when charging. Overall I estimate we spent about 40% of the total stopping time waiting for or finding an available charger.
The main leg was a 350km drive we've done several times before, and due to the charging it took us an extra hour or so compared to previous years with our previous ICE car. Interestingly my girlfriend said she actually felt it was shorter, because the trip was broken up by the longish charging stops. We also felt much less exhausted when we arrived.
I'm sure charging will get better with time though. Increasing range will help a lot, and more charging stations will be built.
> 100km range fits the commuting needs of 95% of the people in western Europe.
There's a bunch of problems with this though:
* Finding charging spots can be difficult, most workplaces don't provide them, many residential buildings don't either, if you live in the city and park outside just forget about it entirely, finding a spot is already hell; having to waste an hour charging every two days makes the "fit" way worse, even more so when the few charging spots are completely out of your way.
* The range figures are usually without A/C or heating, both of which eat significantly into EV range.
* It's nice that 100km range fits into people's commuting needs, but there's no provision for non-commuting, how do you go see your parents, or on holidays, or drop by friends a few cities over, or go to your cousin's wedding?
My own commute is like 15km, but if I were to get a car (rather than use public transport) I'd get a plug-in hybrid: sure a 100km EV is more than enough for my commute (I even have an electrified parking spot), but a trip to go back to the family is 600km, and that's if I don't go and see cousins or whatever.
Even if there were enough charging stations on the way (there aren't) transforming a ~6h trip into 8~10 would not be fine.
Hell, with a 100km range I couldn't even round-trip to the nearest ikea on a full charge.
So sure, if you've got the money and room (aka a house at least) to own two cars and keep one charging overnight you can get a short-range EV for your commuting.
I don't doubt it's enough range for a lot of people, but seriously doubt it's enough for 95% of people.
I also think you effectively need to half the quoted range figure, as there is little guarantee of a charging point at your destination - so it's max 50km/31miles each way. Of course, even if there is a charger at your destination, it's going to take a long time time charge, so may not be convenient in any case.
A 30 mile journey in most of Europe isn't the same as a 30 mile journey in the US. There's a saying - Americans think 100 years is a long time, and Europeans think 100 miles is a long way.
A 60 mile round trip is probably about the longest daily commute you could manage in many parts of Europe
> A 60 mile round trip is probably about the longest daily commute you could manage in many parts of Europe
I think you're quite underestimating distances in Europe. Here in Belgium, it's common enough to commute from West Flanders to Antwerp, a 100km (60 miles) commute one-way. My case is a bit special as I commute from Antwerp to Lille in France (130km or 80 miles) although only one day of week thankfully.
30 miles one-way is the average commuting distance for people who live in Wallonia and work in Brussels, for example[0]. Looking at the stats in France[1], I see that the median commuting distance for the 1.7 million people that commute between two different urban areas is 30 miles, meaning half of those have a commute longer than 60 miles round trip.
Such commuting distances are not nearly as uncommon as you seem to think.
> A 60 mile round trip is probably about the longest daily commute you could manage in many parts of Europe
I don't understand this? I'm in Scotland, and know multiple people that commute 120 miles (round-trip) in a day; not sure why you think the location in Europe matters.
Retrofitting an existing car is also much better from a pollution and resources standpoint than building a new one. This probably is the true way of the future anyhow.
I don't know about cars, but most drones use brushless DC motors, which are often just 3-phase AC motors with a motor controller that creates the correct AC from DC and a speed signal.
I just did a long drive using my BMW i3 2018 (94Ah), where the majority was done at 100-110km/h. Based on the battery range estimation of the car, we "lost" about 20% range driving at such speeds.
> The whole pack, bought from a Tesla Inc. parts reseller, weighs 120 kilograms (265 pounds).
and here lies the problem. Tesla doesnt (afaik, please correct me) sell their car batteries, those are second hand post crash written off car packs(1). You cant build a scalable (planned 4000 cars a year) business around digging rare parts out of the trash.
(1) going rate for used Model 3 pack is ~$12K with maybe 10-20 available at any time in whole world
>You cant build a scalable (planned 4000 cars a year) business around digging rare parts out of the trash
No, but it should bootstrap you enough capital to be able to do your own R&D and develop your own battery pack, or at the very least enter into talks with manufacturers to lease existing battery packs for your business.
Also, Tesla is making ~5,000 cars a week. Of those 5,000, 77 have to crash and be written off (1.5%) for there to be enough battery packs for 4,000 cars a year. Not considering the 100,000+ Teslas on the road already.
This is revenue, so rent, parts and labor will significantly reduce that. I'm not sure how this would result in a good R&D budget.
As for getting supplies from written off Teslas, it doesn't take into account location. What percentage is in Europe within a economically viable shipping distance?
That's assuming that this company manages to buy every single wrecked Tesla. Given that they're a French company I would assume that this is only economically feasible for Teslas that crash in the EU, as otherwise the cost of shipping across the ocean would make a significant amount of the price. There are much less than 5000 Teslas a week just going to the EU.
If you could reduce new battery prices to the level of crash salvage with just a little R&D of your own, you would not waste time with cute conversion kits, you'd take on Tesla, China and the rest of the car industry directly.
My thoughts exactly. Are they expecting investors to look past this obvious fact? I assume their business model will start working once batteries become significantly cheaper in the next 2-3 years (optimistic).
When batteries become significantly cheaper in the next 2-3 years, there will be many companies entering this market. But only one (this one) with 2-3 years of experience in the market. That is a huge advantage.
>and here lies the problem. Tesla doesnt (afaik, please correct me) sell their car batteries
They have sold not just batteries but complete powertrains to Toyota for the RAV4 EV and to Daimler for the Mercedes-Benz A-Class E-Cell, the Smart ForTwo and the Mercedes B-Class Electric.
There are no off the shelf parts, only off the back of a towing rig if/when someone is unlucky enough to total a Tesla. You can build ~2-5 cars a month business on that, not 10 per day.
And that doesnt even touch the realities of retooling for many many used car models they would have to support in order to meet that 4000/year projection.
I have recently seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4CPBHj0UQk a garage in California specialized in changing oldtimer engines to electric engines. They seem to be booked out months in advance.
Another company I have heard from is doing this specifically for supercars, so special Porsches etc.
I feel like both the margin and the clientele would be much more fun to deal with, as with this approach (as many have mentioned) the scaling will be the difficult part.
For anyone interested, the "garage in California" is EV West. Here are three more in-depth videos from the wonderful Fully Charged channel about EV West:
I aplaude the initiative, but I am skeptical about this.
To convert and ICE car to electric you'll need a battery pack, BCM, inverter, motor, charger, heater core and mounting hardware at minimum. Even if they source all parts from the used market, I doubt they can do it for €5k.
Then there is the practical part. Converting an ICE car to an electric drivetrain messes with weight distribution and crash safety. In most EU countries you'll need to do a full technical inspection to get the car road legal again (even if you used a certified kit). Air conditioning and most gauges in the dashboard will no longer work. And on most modern cars they'll need to do some serious software hacking to get the body control modules to accept the fact that there is no ECU anymore to talk to.
They don't. They do it for 8300€, of which 3300€ are (re)funded by the French tax office/Ecology Ministry. So it's 5000€ from the driver's pocket (in the end).
It seems to use the conversion bonus where you discard an old fossil car to a new more efficient one, it can't use the EV bonus because it needs to be a new car, in this case this is a 5000€ bonus, if the law was changed to accept conversion it would make the whole thing free.
To address the later points (regulatory certification, ECU compatibility, etc), I think the point here is that they're designing kits to target specific popular models so that much of the work only needs to be done once per model.
Once you have designed a set of compatible, tested parts, doing the conversion on a lot of similar vehicles becomes faster and cheaper compared to developing a bespoke solution each time.
Not sure if they actually replace the ECU or just fake the missing inputs to keep the existing one happy. Either way, I'm sure they retain existing wiring and keep all the dashboard gauges working.
> I think the point here is that they're designing kits to target specific popular models so that much of the work only needs to be done once per model.
I wasn't talking about type approval.
In most EU countries (at least Germany and the Netherlands that I'm sure of) you need to pass through technical inspection if you modify a car. Especially if you change the fuel type or change the power output of the vehicle.
> I'm sure they retain existing wiring and keep all the dashboard gauges working.
Most gauges are no longer applicable (coolant temp, oil pressure, fuel level) or display the wrong range (the tachometer for instance).
In EV conversions I've seen, the fuel gauge is typically repurposed to display battery state of charge, and the tachometer to display power output/regeneration.
In modern cars these gauges are all controlled electronically, so it's not so difficult to make them display whatever you like by sending them different signals.
Whether or not this particular venture is successful, retrofitting existing operational cars - especially ones that have a dead engine - is a big part of what we should be doing.
Many families have two vehicles, one of which is primarily used for local tasks. These are ideal to convert if the rest of the car will last for another 5ish years.
Meanwhile, public transport, biking lanes, and other options should continue to be developed. There is never just one solution.
The economics of this are pretty attractive. A VW Golf Diesel would do about 70-80K km for the amount of fuel that about 5000 euros buys. This is assuming 4.8 litres for 100km and a (current) price of 1.38 euro per litre in Germany. I pulled both numbers using Google. In the US Diesel would be cheaper (79 cents according to Google). I'm guessing this excludes taxes that may apply in some states though. But assuming that's correct, in the US, the same amount buys you about 150K km of range.
So, a conversion like this starts earning itself back well within the lifespan of the batteries either way based just on fuel cost savings. Of course if you drive an older Diesel, it would be unlikely to actually last another 150K or have anywhere near the fuel economy of a newer model. Additionally, older cars tend to need expensive maintenance on their engines to keep on going before they finally become to expensive to repair.
Of course the problem is going to be finding batteries. I'd expect this kind of stuff to quickly go from a novelty to being a very common thing. This may drive up prices and limit availability. However, with second hand batteries the value proposition might be quite good still.
True. A number I've heard for Teslas is 4.4 mile per kwh. So, a 150km is about 100000 miles (nice round number) and lets round down the milage to 4. So we are talking 25000 kwh. It depends on where you get your power of course or whether you have your own solar panels but at 10 cents per kwh that would be 2500$
So about half the price. That would be on the expensive side and things get more interesting if you have access to cheaper sources of energy. E.g. bids for solar power plants are below 2 cents now so that cuts it down to about 500$.
My father in law converted an old Chrysler to electric some 10 years ago. It worked great but the car was so old that nobody in the family wanted to drive it.
I got into the whole idea of electric conversion a few months ago and came to the conclusion that it's really just not worth the time and money, unless you have a classic car that you really want to make electric just for fun.
There's some great videos out there explaining the process and EVWest sells kits for older VWs and Porches (the ones with the simplest motors and drive trains). https://evwest.com/catalog/
I'd love to swap the engine out of my 2007 Mini Cooper soft-top for an electric motor and zip around town silently with it, but unless I was willing to both spend the equivalent of a new car and do all the work myself, it'll never happen.
There really aren't any electric convertibles out there though, so it's tempting.
It will make even more sense once the battery market gets going. Battery factories bigger than Tesla's are under construction in China and Germany. We'll probably have a battery glut in a few years. It's not really that hard to build a battery factory.
> unless you have a classic car that you really want to make electric just for fun
You'll have to do the conversion if you want to keep driving the car as cities and eventually whole countries ban ICE vehicles. Aston Martin has an EV conversion program for that reason:
It'd be best to leave it for as long as possible in order to get the best batteries available at the time. A EV conversion with a solid-state battery pack might offer some practical range.
disclosure: I work as a professional diesel mechanic for a midwestern chain of shops.
old diesel cars are literally the worst. I wholly endorse anything that will turn a 1986 Mercedes E class from a smog belching iron yacht into a functioning member of polite society. the price quoted here is a steal. take it.
If i were hired to make an old diesel car come up to modern emissions specifications, it would easily be three to five times the cost. Im looking at ripping the engine apart, machining new entry points for sensors, buying a new ECU, finding a place for urea tanks and pumps, and retrofitting a nox scrubber somewhere not to mention the labor charge. the engine will run hotter, so ill need a new radiator or intercooler too. it also has to be retrofitted with a limp or purge mode for when the vehicle runs out of urea or is due for regular service to prevent violating emissions regulations.
This is not an option for older Merc engines, no practical options exists.
Or I would be gladly stand corrected in this matter as I own quite a few old collectible Mercs all in desperate need of modern technology update (invisible of course, like ECU + EFI).
When I was a teen (late 1990's) there was a website geared around "kits" for converting small American trucks into all electric. Think Ford Ranger and Chevy S10. I think the "kit" was around $5000. You basically pulled the motor, and installed custom built motor mounts to hold the new large electric motor. There was a custom built adapter that allowed the motor to bolt up to the transmission. Only manual transmissions were supported and the instructions just said to "leave it in 4th gear". Then there was the electronics and wiring for the power and charging circuits. You had to source your own batteries though.
I really wanted to buy the kit but to get any kind of actual range you basically had to fill the bed of the truck up with lead acid batteries. I figured the inefficiency of having to carry around a truck bed full of lead would never catch on and hence electric vehicles would never be a thing so I gave up on the idea...
It's a good thing if it would scale, but I would like to see kits to reduce NOx emissions. It should be far easier to do and scale. After cheating scandals people, like me, are left with the cars that increasingly can't be driven in city centers. What will happen with those cars? They will head east. If such kits would be available one could dream about governments forcing car companies to pay at least significant part of the bill. However with current lobby it seems impossible to get a penny from car companies.
From what I understand those kits would need to tank adblue as trucks do. But whatever, I prefer that to breathing NOx.
I would like to see an initiative like this but with hydrogen fuel cells. I think it would be more complex but more interesting in terms of: certifying road worthiness, since no more dealing with weight of batteries; no lithium-based batteries; more autonomy.
Despite being less efficient in terms of pure energy usage, I think hydrogen-based fuel cell-powered vehicules solve 2 problems for most users: autonomy and time of replenishment (refueling). We just need to invest in solar-based hydrogen generation plants. Hydrogen can be generated on site for replenishment.
You will need batteries with hydrogen fuel cells due to the fact the cells do not throttle quickly based on energy demand. The battery is required as a buffer for quickly discharging larger amounts of energy. So in effect you require a full blown electric drive train but with a smaller battery. In my opinion it is way less complex to just increase the size of the battery and get rid off the hydrogen parts.
The biggest problem with full electric powertrains is size of batteries and its weight. Keeping the size of batteries small and weighing less is a bonus in ICE car conversions, like I mentioned in my initial comment. Plus better replenishing time, which in most hydrogen fuel cells cars is around 3 minutes.
Edit: the Riversimple Rasa uses a hybrid lithium based battery/supercapacitor pack for this purpose.
With regards to weight - hydrogen tanks are heavy, even if the fuel is light. The tanks on a Toyota Mirai weight 87.5kg (193 lbs). In addition you need the fuel cell, piping, more wiring.. The actual weight advantage is not as great as it might seem.
I see people talking about refuellig time of hydrogen beein an advantage. Although most videoes I see on youtube seem to use ~10ish minutes - and it depends if the pumps has the correct pressure). Recharging an electric car is usually done in a few seconds of active time (plugging in the cable when you park), only if you exhaust the range during one trip you have to wait for recharging.
> Recharging an electric car is usually done in a few seconds of active time
You forgot the 5 minutes spent trying to download and install their own proprietary app, creating an account, just for the app to fail to start the charging...
These are not the only ones doing stuff like this: I've met a guy with a huge, blue Van (older Mercedes Sprinter?), charging his car at an IKEA in Germany. The ICE was removed and he could go 200km on battery; this was done by a shop/company which do this on a bigger scale for that specific car model (hence he did not have to get a custom certificate for the car, which costs easily as much as a new car).
I had this idea in the back of my head to create an open source electric car based on existing ICE cars and with open source software, mechanics and electronics. That would be awesome if anyone can change/adapt build plans to different cars and if anyone would be able to iteratively improve the each other ideas and cost saving measures.
This approach using repurposed Tesla batteries seems more of a proof-of-concept than anything (although that's entirely fair, given they currently produce [probably] the best examples).
However, this is probably the tip of an iceberg to come. There is a huge amount of value worldwide in collectible/exotic/classic cars - values have soared since the '08 financial troubles, to the point of some cars becoming pure investments, rather than something to drive.
As we move towards a world where the ICE will become extinct, what will happen to all of this automotive history? A few options:
* huge devaluation
* exemptions (to the ICE ban) for such cars... but at an increasing cost, as presumably petrol would become increasingly expensive and difficult to source
* widespread drive-train conversions, allowing such cars to be enjoyed in perpetuity
For high value collectables "reversable conversion" is likely to become common.
Aston Martin offers a service to replace the ICE with a electric power unit with equivalent power. The ICE gets packed into a flight case in case you want to swap back in the future.
Or synthetically generated fuels (eg audi e-diesel, which is a diesel, but I think a petrol equivalent can be generated), which can be done today, but are very costly for general use. I don't think the cost of fuel for a classic car will be a huge issue even if it is very high (10x of todays cost).
> I don't think the cost of fuel for a classic car will be a huge issue even if it is very high (10x of todays cost).
Not sure about that.
Let's consider a generic classic car that delivers 25 miles per (UK Imperial) gallon, which is 5.5 miles per liter of petrol. At the moment, petrol is ~1.3-1.5 EUR/liter in central Europe.
Taking a mean of 1.4 EUR/L, that's ~25 cents/mile, or 4 miles/EUR. A 200 mile trip (say, a weekend away) would cost ~51 EUR - not too bad. 3000 miles in a year would cost ~764 EUR.
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Now, consider 10x the cost. 510 EUR in fuel, just for a weekend away? 7640 EUR for a year's occasional cruising around? Accepted that's no problem for the super-rich, but it starts to be punitive for a hobbyist owner. What about if you're into American classics that deliver 10 MPG?
Further, with that cost for fuel, the economics of a conversion make a lot more sense, before you even consider other possible incentives.
As a point of comparison I have a Renault Twingo, the previous model as the one shown in the article, bought it second or third hand in 2004, the entire car for less than 5000€, so less than the modification here, and it's still working well.
Autonomy is about 500 Km (very small tank) but you never use this for long journeys, so the 100 Km after electrification would not be an issue.
The issue on my car is that there are points of rust in some places and there is a new law that may disqualify my working car from being road worthy the next time I go to the mandatory check. (gotta encourage car turn over for the economy).
If this modification could fix my rust issue (I think it's on the underside of the exhaust pipe so not needed anymore) I could be interested.
As a geek I find this really cool, but as a realist I doubt the impact it can have. To replace ICE cars, the replacement has to be significantly better in some if not most dimensions.
Outside of hobbyist tinkerers / enthusiasts, it’s going to be very difficult for a retrofit to compete with any electric-first design. Just weight distribution alone will be tough, and range is very low, to name a couple of issues.
Yes there is the perceived cost savings here, but I would argue that is a mirage, because over time the consumer will realize that they have made a mistake, and they will have to consider the price they paid as just an expense of learning a lesson. But hey it will surely provide some cool fun and conversation value in the meantime.
When I researched electric cars in the 80s, before lithium batteries were around, a company was selling kits that transformed a VW Beetle into a lead-acid electric car. The ICE engine could be removed and the electric engine simply bolted into place on the drive plate. The main concern back then was the difficulty of regulating the flow of electricity so that acceleration was smooth, much easier to do nowadays. The big question has to be the safety of batteries stored in spaces not designed for batteries. (Who else thought of Back to the Future and Doc's retrofit on the Delorean?)
There's also possibility for "soft"-electric conversion - add a few kwh lithium battery, remove alternator etc., which might bring reduction in fuel consumption.
This kind of project would be really helpful in developing countries like India. People don't want to spend a lot of money just to save the environment. They will, however, use something like which does not cost much and will return quickly in fuel cost savings. But one has to figure out how to do that on a massive scale, keeping costs down, with thin margins and a lot of capital investment.
Seems like a lot of the viability of this may depend on the amount of engine and transmission connection standardization. If a manufacturer uses the same engine mount and powertrain connections across several models then an electric motor with compatible connections could fit a variety of cars.
So for those who know, is engine standardization still a thing and has it been over the past 10 years?
It could still be viable even if it's only for a small subset of models, because the target market is quite specific. It is for city cars of the previous generation.
> Don’t expect traditional manufacturers to enter the retrofitting market though
I don't know, you might see it happen down the track. Currently the large manufacturers like Chevrolet, Ford, etc offer 'crate engine' products for retrofitting into older/other vehicles. No reason you may not see them offer an electric crate package in the same way you can get a LSA crate package.
Granted, it's not like a 'plug and play' proposition - some DIY is required - but still, I don't think it's too big of a stretch to imagine it.
> Funny to see the stock quotes at the end of the article: all mentioned manufacturers are in the +/- 1%, while Tesla is up +6.5%.
Tesla is a speculative stock. Tesla almost all quarters generates losses while the other makers are "regular business" with varying profits.
> Don’t expect traditional manufacturers to enter the retrofitting market though : not interesting at all for them.
No car brand is selling kits for retrofitting. Regarding car parts Tesla is worse than most car makers. Most Tesla parts are salvaged instead of sold.
> They will just prefer to sell new units, still against the « reuse, recycle » more ecological principle, to ensure shareholders’ happiness.
All USA public traded business are mandate as such. Companies which seek to prioritize ecology over profits need to stay of the public traded stock market.
I expect them to do it when they feel it will hit harder the competitors, for example if one year they expect to lose market share, better reduce the profit of the others until they are ready to beat them up. It is like when a software giant gives away some technology as open source so the competitors cannot make profit on the previous market segment they occupied, and keep closed source the biggest ROI segment.
A really obvious alternative to this at a similar cost would be a used Nissan Leaf.
Used non-Tesla EVs depreciate like crazy at extremely low miles. The Chevy Volt is another excellent used value (is this available in Europe?) and you still have a gasoline engine to bail you out on long trips.
You're also going to get way better serviceability with a stock OEM solution.
There was a project in Finland to make an open source kit / conversion as a service. Active around 2007 or so, they made some prototypes. I think the default conversion target was a 2003 Toyota Yaris.
I would love to do this on a more modern-ish car, but watching a Rich Rebuilds video on retrofits, this probably is only feasible on older cars because you don't have to interface with any of the electronics in the car, or have HVAC.
“an electric makeover—and offer a cut-price way to avoid driving bans across European cities.”
Lower middle class and low emission zones. People don't have the budget to upgrade their cars and risk losing car mobility. Ask my hippie uncle in his old van. Meanwhile, there's air travel without externalities priced-in, electric vehicle subsidies, home battery subsidies, and more disproportionally benefiting us upper middle class and rich people.
This social problem is all over Western Europe. To those who don't care about social exclusion or global warming, it's free votes, free political capital. So no political consensus forthcoming on how to deal with it...
Since building a car (even an electric one) generates a lot of pollution, this looks like a great solution to modernize the car park at an minimal environmental cost.
Well, it's widely added (in small percentages) to regular diesels, mostly due to its cleaning properties. Even if you run 100% bio it still produces large amounts of PM2.5 pollution (less NOX than regular diesels, but that isn't none). And there's plenty of evidence that unless it was produced from non-food crops it's more less using food that should go to people to run your engine. I am happy to have switched from a TDI running 100% to a PHEV.
This is great news. To reach climate goals almost all cars need to be electric in under twenty years. That seems quite unrealistic if you want to do it only by replacing them with new cars.
Hmmm, I think you might actually be right, in terms of how long it takes to replace all existing cars.
In the US, it looks like the average passenger car is 11.6 years old. Since that's the average, even optimistically, there are probably a LOT of 15+ year old cars on the road.
So you probably need to have all new cars sold in the US be electric within 5 years to have a more-or-less complete turnover within 20 years.
(The figures for non-pickup trucks are even worse, with 17 years being the AVERAGE.)
Or the fuel used by ECU engines gets created from the CO2 in the air and carbon neutral energy. Seems easier to achieve than replacing all cars with low range models that need a charging spot at home. And the EV also only make a difference, if they use carbon free energy. It's more efficient to power your car with oil directly than to burn the oil for electricity and then power your car with that.
Imho EV's are a much overstated solution to a much deeper problem. EV's make little difference, if we are still running coal, gas and oil power plants to generate the electricity. It's just that our cars are a more visible problem in every day life.
If we had an abundance of carbon neutral energy and make fossil oil more expensive (e.g. through taxes) than renewable burnables, ICU engines would be our smallest problem.
Ignoring climate change for a second and looking at things from a public health perspective, electric vehicles give you much cleaner air, even if you don't generate the electricity with carbon neutral tech. We should be converting vehicles to electric anyway, as vehicle fumes kill a hell of a lot of people. Large utility generation is far more efficient than small combustion engines and it is much easier to scrub the exhaust.
While it's possible to create fuel from thin air and electricity, the energy efficiency is abysmal compared to electric cars. We likely don't have enough room for wind turbines and solar panels to do it at scale.
This startup is in France with a 44gCO2eq/kWh electricity using 6gCO2eq/kWh nuclear electricity. Here EV emit 80% less than desiel car when you consider their whole life cycle.
My understanding could definitely be off here, but according to the official EU energy report (2018 report, 2016 numbers) [1] France is still consuming about 45% of fossil fuels, while whole Europe is around 70%. Further the energy network is connected throughout Europe and nuclear is great at providing base capacity, but not easy to scale up quickly and at least Germany is completely exiting nuclear fission. That's why we're using coal/gas/oil power plants for that.
So, when we are adding additional energy consumption to the network in the form of (many) EV, it will not charge with nuclear power, but more likely that we need to burn fossil fuel to keep the network up.
I was actually surprised by most sources I found online. But all top hits on Google start off at the charger and ignore any efficiency losses for generating the electricity in the first place. Some even acknowledge that fact in text, but still avoid calculations.
If we go from 46.4 MJ/kg energy in 1 liter of gasoline and apply the usual density of about 0.75kg/l, that's 34.8MJ/kg. At 3.6 MJ per kwH that's ~9.7kwH/l. A modern car uses about 6l gasoline per 100km, so 60kwH per 100km.
A Tesla Model S uses about 20kwH per 100km. So a modern ICE car is about 1/3 as efficient as a Tesla Model S.
But if we go from my argument, that we currently still burn oil to provide more electricity and adding more energy consumers to the network only delays the reduction of burning fossil fuels for electricity, we need to take into account the efficiency of fossil power plants. An oil power plant runs at about 45% efficiency. Lets ignore transport and charging losses, as transporting gasoline isn't exactly free either.
That takes the Tesla up to 45 kwH/100km. So that's actually still a 25% efficiency gain towards the ICE car, which I didn't expect. To get the full picture however, we would have to add the 65.000kwH of energy used to build a 100kwH battery pack (upscaled based on [1]). A (estimated) 10kg steel gasoline tank takes maybe 200kwH of energy to manufacture (based on 50GJ/1000kg of steel and some adds for other stuff that needs to be done). Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude on the steel tank, that's still an energy difference worth north of 100.000km (i.e. more than most cars travel in their lifetime or another at least 50% effiency loss for the EV).
I still wonder if the 25% efficiency gain outweights the cost of the battery production and the cost of adding a large scale charging network to support the broad adoption of electricle vehicles. Or, to rephrase my original argument, if we are better off taking the additional ~50% efficiency loss in converting energy to fuels and focus on expanding our carbon neutral energy production, shutting of fossil power plants and investing more in fusion energy so that might become a reality and we can create an abundance of energy to work with.
See this [1] for discussion of gasoline production - even more unexpected and complicated to tally.
We are already getting EV emitting less CO2 each year, see here [2]. With wind/solar (+batteries) getting even more wins over coal due to price drops, this process will only accelerate — no need to wait for fusion.
The good part is that electric cars automatically "produce" less CO2 as we replace fossil fuels on the grid. Most cars are around for more than ten years, but to reach climate goals we need to cut fossil fuel use quickly quickly. At least 50% reduction in all fossil fuels till 2030. Electricity is much easier to replace than, e.g., heating so hopefully the electric grid will lead the change.
I've been saying for about 5 years now that this is potentially a billion dollar market waiting to happen. Even more so now with many large economies looking at aggressive forced electric car purchases. Congratulations to those guys for getting the business off the ground.
Another potentially massive market will be in making "legacy" cars become autonomous, but that's still unknown as to when that market will really hit off as the technology still isn't there (or approved of by law makers). Still, moving first on that could really be big.
In general I think there is a massive market in old vehicles that isn't been capitalized on. Of course you have scrap, part selling, fixing, etc - but some of these working vehicles (with little wrong) get scrapped for no reason. From a green carbon footprint stand point, a lot of the car's carbon footprint is in making the vehicle itself. When you buy a 10+ year old car I think you're doing more to save the planet, regardless of whether the emissions are higher.
They lost most of their businesses around 2012 when Italy passed a bill making all these converted cars not roadworthy without an explicit permit from the original manufacturer, permits that very rarely where granted. (That law got partially overturned in 2017, but the FUD and the chilling effect remain today.)
Source: a friend of mine being laid off by that firm in 2012 + http://mondoelettrico.blogspot.com/search?q=retrofit