Hmmm...
 

What kind of work would it take to add an electric motor to the trunk of this car? Effectively making it a hybrid.

Go Home, You're Drunk

The only other way to get more power and better fuel economy would be to turn it into a turbo diesel.

Go Home, You're Drunk.

^ This

I get what you are trying to do, increase torque ect., but trying to put in a whole electric engine will cost a shit ton. Not only do you have to get the engine, but you need to reconfigure the engine bay along with just about everything else.

I know next to nothing about swapping engines, but I do know that undertaking something like this would be so cost intensive that you would be better off building an engine for more power.

My .02

Purely from an engineering standpoint, people make lawn mowers do 130 and V8 barstools. It's not about being cost efficent. It's about whether it's feasible or not. There's many a time I find myself thinking wild and crazy ideas just because I can. Sure it would cost probably 2-3 times what the car is worth, but it would be the first of it's kind and one hell of a project.

I could have reiterated all your comments 2 years ago about turbocharging a stock motor with 12.5:1 CR. Think outside the box people.

It would add a LOT of weight to the rear end of the car. Large electric motors and their storage cells are heavy as shit. You would need to do a lot of suspension work to make the car handle well again.

What you could do is put a turbine on the driveshaft at the middle joint, use the normal driveshaft rotation to pressurize a hydraulic accumulator, and then when you want launch assist you could dump pressure back through the turbine to spin the driveshaft. You would need something to disengage the clutch when this happened so you don't spin the engine.

Ford did this with their F-350 Tonka concept truck.

I wouldn't go fiddling with the Scion.

Get a Fiat X1-9 if you want to build an electric. :-)

(-_-)

Sure it can be done. It would att a lot of weight, it would be terribly expensive, it would require a machine shop, an automotive mechanical engineer, and an electrical engineer at minimum.

But why?

I guess it could be done for shits and giggles, but... So could a lot of things. Like covering the car with shag carpet and giving it cat ears and an exhaust that meows.

Gotcha, I'll give you the blueprints for free:

Get two electric motors, associated battery packs and some chain, weld gears to the driveshafts and attach the electric motors with chains (dat S500 sounds). Place 2 buttons on the steering wheel: 1-Discharge, 2-Charge. When you want the go put the car in neutral and hit discharge woop torque, then if you have time before you hit the tree on the outside of the next corner hit charge flipping the motor to a generator which will provide all your engine braking and then-some while charging the battery for corner out powaaah.

Step 2: Go race a 918

:burnrubber:

It's like communism on this forum, you get smacked and/or verbally reprimanded for not thinking like everyone else, good lord.

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