Finding problems in an electric VW Beetle, converted using our bolt-in kit.

hi everybody Richard again here from Electric classic cars I'm on this week's episode you're going to be joining me test driving this beauty now before we get started let's talk a little bit about the car it's a 1957 VW Beetle with the oval window at the rear and to those in the know in VW World you'll notice the bullet indicators here and they're kind of a new only deal it's 1956-57 they were on uh these cars although I'm pretty sure they were the same ones that were on split screen campers uh up until mid 60s I think correct me if I'm wrong VW people um color wise it's metal blow which sounds quite you know exotic but it's just German for metallic blue but it's such a stunning car stunning color let's have a look at the rear window because that's the iconic bit now this is the angle I love about the oval window Beetle because I mean just look at it though all the curves just sloping down here and then swooping back up here and the oval window in the roof of the car with the slats here it's just oh beautiful small little rear lights and everything it's about as good as car design gets if you ask me but but here to talk about that you want to know about what's inside here so let's open that up now in a previous episode click on the link you link above and uh we'll get that linked in there we were covering the bolting kit that we used to convert our VW Beetles but in this episode you can see it all in the car so what have we got in here we've got a small rear Tesla Drive Unit buried down there we've got the seven kilowatt charger there we've got a header tank here which is nice and warm because we've been driving to get here radiator and fan system down there and Chad sucker over there because there's no external fuel filler flap on a 1957 Beetle so charge socket is there um so there you go looks pretty OEM and it's all bolt in as well so that's all you can see in the rear let's have a look in the front so here we are in the front there's a front battery pack in here obviously there's a 35 kilowatt hour battery pack total and this front pack bolts onto the existing mounting points if you like of the original petrol tank you do lose some luggage spaces no getting away from that but you still got some luggage space because don't forget the curvature of the Bonnet goes up here so uh but one benefit of that uh weight in the front is it improves the handling if you like by having a little bit more weight over that front axle which is no bad thing in a beetle and the rest of the battery pack is behind the back seat and on top we have a coolant header tank for the battery system because there's two coolant systems on this vehicle one is for the motor and inverter in the back and the other is for the battery pack to keep the batteries at that Goldilocks zone if you like of not too hot not too cold so again lost some luggage space behind there but I can live that for the additional amount of power and reliability that comes with electric right that's enough about this we've got work to do so Tim get in the car mate you've got some test driving to do right now before we even get started I know there's one that needs to go on the list straight away and it's a problem that Tim's had with his body over the years it's age-related sagging isn't it Tim that's right definitely this is a 1957 Beetle and what's happened is the front suspension is sagging on the driver's side and um how the suspension works on the front it's torsion bar leave so imagine some uh Leafs um basically some flat bits of metal going across uh like that from Wheel to wheel and there's a number of them stacked on top of each other like that in a square and the twisting motion of those gives you the car spring and over the years they've just you know they've sagged a little bit essentially so on this side I don't know if you can pick it up on the camera so I'm going to do a a pokey finger demonstration so on this side from the top of the wing I'm hitting the tire and if I go over the other side this is the British standard test finger it is a British standard test finger I have to use the same finger not my left finger right finger again and now I'm not even touching the tie in fact I can probably get two fingers in there or just about so it's about that much difference at least left to right so we definitely need to address that because going around uh going around right Corners yep I'm feeling more sort of like you know lean as I'm going around right Corners compared to going around left Corners so the way to fix that is essentially we take the leaves out and we replace them and they're readily available parts so that's going on the list straight away before we even start this test so one of the first things we do once we convert the car is we go out and test drive it obviously but what is test driving what am I trying to achieve here today well we're looking for a number of things if you like him first of all does the electric conversion work well it should work this is probably our or getting close to our 70th converted classic car now so it's not our first rodeo so everything in that respect should work however there will be some fine tuning that we might need to do second thing we're looking for is well quite frankly this is a 65 plus year old car there may well be some quirks and some remedial work that needs to be done to sure it's 100 if you like and then the third thing is are there any enhancements that we can do to try to improve the overall experience of this car such as putting disc brakes on the front because the original drum brakes which we've already done so Tim's sitting in the passenger seat with a notepad and Pen ready to take some notes let's get into it now first thing I've noticed I'm a straight here and the steering wheel is not straight so number one Tim steering wheel needs to be uh straightened up on a beetle there's hopefully an easy way to do this which is if we're lucky take steering wheel off turn it around one spline put it back on but if not that doesn't nail it you may need to do some tweaking on the steering rods themselves now second thing which you can probably hear in the background which you probably wouldn't have heard if it was a petrol engine in the back is there's a squeaky suspension Bush on the back which is driving me nuts today so that definitely needs to get sorted out it's one to put on the enhancement list is anti-roll bar on the front now from the factory 1957 vwb will never have an anti-roll bar on the front but going around these corners I think it definitely needs one and that will improve The Experience if you like for the client and you know these seats are probably the opposite of bucket seats I'd say Tim what do you reckon yeah they're not they're not like bucket seats at all though so you know having less body roll if you like will improve them somewhat so enhancement front anti-roll Bar Needs to Go on right another thing I've just noticed is the regen is too high on this so every time I come off the throttle it's like oh let's really slow this down and you need to be very careful with regen on a rear motor car because if too much to be like pulling up a handbrake so I'm going to pull over now and just do a little bit of tweaking with the app right I've pulled over now and I've connected to the motor control app as you can see so the motor is at 30 degrees Celsius for instance but one of the benefits of electric vehicles if you like is the fact that you can tune them so easily and readily to the application so what I'm going to do now is go into the settings and a peak horsepower at that motor in the back is 300 horsepower you don't want that in a 1957 Beetle so I'm going to reduce that way down to about there I reckon now the other parameter I want to change is the regentive braking because as I noticed when I was driving it regener was a little bit too Fierce and you've got to be careful with the rear engine car with too much regen so if I reduce the regen as well down in fact I'm going to bring it way down to single numbers and let's write the settings and try that that's how simple and easy it is to imp increase or decrease the power of the motor and increase or decrease the power of the ridge into braking it's as simple as that so let's go and try it right let's test this regen set in so on this straight I'm going to come off the pedal that's better that's better and as we're going to stop it's increasing uh yeah perfect so I've nailed that straight away yeah so this is a lot better doesn't it be interesting to see how the power now because you've reduced it going up the hill if we're still going to have enough torque to get us up the hill well there's a big hill here so let's give it a go as we're waiting for this van to do a three-point turn in the middle of nowhere in front of us we're on quite a steep hill here and I'm holding it on the accelerator notice that there's no clutch controls no break that's just me holding it on the accelerator and this is quite a steep hill now so if you steam put your foot down and put my foot down I'm gonna go up the rear of this Vauxhall mocha which is really struggling to go up the hill probably looking in his rear view mirror wondering what nurse going on with the 1957 Beetle right at this chuff oh that's plenty of Power are you doing any more than that oh 57 Beetle here all right suppose we better check some here they're uh things working in here uh let's try the heater so I've got two speed fan from Max and put the heater on you can feel it coming out there oh yeah straight away Heat that's a lot more heat than you'd normally have coming out of the uh petrol version of this car and it doesn't smell everything so it's fumes oh right DJ hit some Jews see if that works does it play 1950s music I hope it doesn't play any music does it not work no it doesn't work it's one for the list all right and that's the list then fix seal was it Motorola volumatic fast looking stereo there yeah it's cool right it's the stereo so we got some uh snagging to do we've got a little list for the boys to be cracking on with so steering needs to be sorted out it's not on straight uh what else do we have stereo stereo and we've adjusted some of the parameters on the motor so that's pretty much done uh but I think top of the list the squeaky Bush the squeaky Bush it's been driving us nuts for the whole day so that's definitely got to get sorted out [Music] books are my job I think getting to drive these cars and test drive and once they're finished but uh there's a short list of jobs that the guys are going to do once uh we get this back to the workshop but I think I'm happy with that so hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you on the next one foreign foreign

Channel: Electric Classic Cars

Views: 128,856

Keywords: Tesla, electric car, volkswagen, beetle

Id: H-5I4oRDVHA

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023