EV West Electric Crate Motor, Thoughts?

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by alex87f

Great idea, but they went bankrupt last March.

The economics of retrofitting are hard to make work: lots of highly local ($$$) production, small batches of different cars, hard to transform an ICEV into a BEV without reengineering the whole chassis or putting massive limits on range, no "shine factor" of a new car, old safety tech, etc.

You'd have to focus on a very small amount of models that are :
-widely available
-old enough to be a cheap basis
-recent enough not to warrant extensive refurbishing
-light / aerodynamic enough to make due with a small battery
-ideally available unchanged over a long enough time that you don't have to engineer several versions of it.

5 grand after subsidy would have made those a very interesting proposal, even with the limited range. I'm curious to see whether another company take the idea any further.

I'm not surprised. The pandemic has been hard on many startups. Plus, the competition of new EVs and other aftermarket options has grown. Like the LS and 2JZ swap, EV swaps will become more common. The second someone makes a saddlebag gas tank, rear seat and spare tire shaped battery packs that efficiently make use of the space or do some other plug and play conversions then the market will grow.

[alex87f]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

I'm not surprised. The pandemic has been hard on many startups. Plus, the competition of new EVs and other aftermarket options has grown. Like the LS and 2JZ swap, EV swaps will become more common. The second someone makes a saddlebag gas tank, rear seat and spare tire shaped battery packs that efficiently make use of the space or do some other plug and play conversions then the market will grow.

We're coming back to needing higher pack density. But by the time that happens, I doubt there'll be enough good ICE cars to warrant industrializing retrofits (beyond a few niche swaps like what Lunaz does). Especially considering how complicated recent ICEs are, putting an EV crate motor in a modern car isn't like swapping in into a carburetted Nova.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by alex87f

We're coming back to needing higher pack density. But by the time that happens, I doubt there'll be enough good ICE cars to warrant industrializing retrofits (beyond a few niche swaps like what Lunaz does). Especially considering how complicated recent ICEs are, putting an EV crate motor in a modern car isn't like swapping in into a carburetted Nova.

As you can see from the battery picture previously in the short range RWD Model 3, the battery isn’t huge. The area I described has more than enough space for a drop in battery pack if the space can be efficiently utilized. The problem is trying to fit a square battery in a round hole. There are solutions already for this. It would just be a matter of designing something custom with a supplier. This undoubtedly will happen someday for hot rodding and resto mods, and it could happen for conversions with a subsidy/tax break.

[Irace86.2.0]

This is cool. Same idea I had to shorten the battery pack