My EV conversion after 10 years and 90k miles

this is my volkswagen passat I converted it ten years ago to make it electric and after 90 thousand miles I wanted to give you a quick tour and show you all the modifications I made to make that happen I bought this Passat on Craigslist in 2008 it had a seized cam so I got it for a cheap price and I bought it with the intention of converting it to electric it was an automatic transmission and in the process of converting it to electric I converted it to a manual transmission it's a little tattered these days it hasn't received much TLC but I haven't had to do anything to it really I haven't had to change any brake pads I haven't had to do any oil changes or spark plugs or tune ups I change the transmission fluid maybe every twenty thousand miles I'm just because I'm running such high revs on it and I can show you how I charged the car I have a 240 volt circuit here going through a spot disconnect and I have a timer installed so that the car will only charge after midnight when electricity is cheaper I also have a 1772 converter so I can use the public charging stations I just have a simple twist lock plug here and when I plug it in I have a dome light so that people know if it's charging or not and I can show you inside the trunk so this is the inverter that I built these are the two battery cables and I'm running 330 volts at 300 amps so about 90 kilowatts these are the three-phase leads going to the motor and there's some current transducers for feedback and I've also used an encoder feedback with the the VFD appear I have some contactors that's the main contactor and a contactor for the heater and I have a pre charged contactor on the back side that you can't see and that's my pre charge resistor these circuit boards are used for the battery management system to basically make sure all the cells are within a safe of voltage range and all these fuses are used to connect the cells to the BMS defusing theirs for safety in case the wire gets shorted by accident it also allows me to disconnect a battery from the BMS and charge it manually if I need to top off one cell this is my charger that's batteries are fully charged right now so it's not plenty much current but I can pull I think 23 amps at 240 volts and this is a power supply that connects to the AC input of the car and that's used to run the coin fan so the 24 volt fans will run whether the car is plugged into 110 or 240 under here is my DC DC converter that converts the pack voltage which is 330 volts down to 12 volts to charge the LED essence 12 volt battery it normally puts out 12 volts and with the ignition on it outputs 13 and a half so it behaves like my alternator this is a cooling fan I haven't unplugged just for the video this is drawing cold air from the dead-body vent at the bottom and this is a that's the inverter that runs the air conditioner and this fan blows cold air to the back of the charger the hot air comes out of the charger here and when this temperature switch clicks on these fans will exhaust the hot air from the trunk out behind the license plate and because the trunk is sealed if I didn't have any ssin the battery charger would quickly overheat and kind of throttle back charging so especially here in California underneath here I have more cells and I also have more cells under the where the gas tank used to be I had custom Springs wound to support the extra 500 pounds of weight that the batteries added to the rear behind this rear seat or more cells this is kind of the brains of the BMS system if the BMS detects any problem with any of the cell battery voltages the buzzer will sound if I'm driving or the charger will disconnect using that solid state relay and this is a current sensing switch when my charging current drops below 1 amp then it'll turn that light from orange to green to let people know that it's ok to unplug my car here's a look under the hood it's a little bit grungy er than it was 10 years ago these are more battery management boards these are individual boards on each cell as opposed to what I had in the rear which was one circuit board that connected too many cells the circuits the same it's just a different package you can see the series healthy signal so if one battery is out of range this serious circuit will open and shut the charger off or sound the buzzer that's my air conditioning compressor which is a DC brushless motor you can kind of see the end of the motor down there with the cooling lines going to it and this is my 12-volt power steering pump it's a hydraulic pump and this is a shunt that makes the ammeter work under here is the original 12-volt acid battery I kept the 12-volt battery just in case the ABS pump kicked on or the airbags might need a lot of current to operate so this is just there to handle some of the inrush current especially with power steering under this panel is my vacuum pump a reservoir I have a pressure switch that runs the pump and I have a delay off timer relay so that the pump will continue to run even after the pressure switch has met its pressure this just prevents short cycling of the pump and that is a circuit breaker that connects the DC DC converter to the light acid battery just lets me disconnect it if I need to and on this side I have the contactor that runs my power steering pump and the way back there is where the fresh air intake filter used to be and I've capped that off and that's where I've placed my electric heater core the car still starts like a normal car just turn the key wait for the pre-charge resistor to charge the inverter and then I clicked the drive in the start and you can see on the bottom left where I've changed the clock into a digital voltmeter and when I'm driving it shows the current voltage and V low is the lowest voltage recorded over the last 30 seconds so that gives me an idea of how low the state of charges on the battery if the voltage sags a lot under load I'm using an Arduino to run the two line LCD and sweep the tachometer needle which is run by a stepper motor I have an ammeter that shows when I'm driving how much current I'm pulling or generating when I'm braking this is my battery meter right now it's showing them pulling about 0.8 amps and I've consumed 2.7 amp hours and my batteries are 100 amp hours and I get about one amp hour per mile so this gives me a good indication of how much range I have left and over here is the switch for my heater so on low it pulls about three amps and underneath that is that just a temperature controller that clicks the heater on and off at a preset temperature so that I've normally have to mess with it and this is for the seat cushion that I'm on it's a heated and cooled seat cushion and I also have an air conditioner go here click on here in a second the air conditioner runs at low speed just to get the refrigerant circulating and then I can run it at a faster speed using the keypad on my controller you'll hear it click into high gear here in a second and I can adjust the speed so if I want more or less cooling I can control the compressor speed well that wraps it up for all the modifications that I've made to the car since the last video I showed of the car running I've made so many modifications you know minor incremental improvements to the way it drives and I've never made another video showing how well it rides so today I'll give you a quick test drive around the block to kind of show off the the hardest part was getting smooth torque from zero speed and I don't if you can tell now but it's really smooth [Laughter] [Music] and still quite peppy I'm always impressed driving this car how much torque it has off the line even compared to the sports cars that I own all that torque is right there as soon as you hit the pedal the brakes are really responsive as well because the regen assists the regular brakes so it has kind of super stopping power like it had a big brake kit it pulls about 30 kilowatts of regen braking one of the tests I always did in in trying to tune the motor at low speeds was going up my driveway you can see here even if I'm rolling back I can give it a little throttle and it'll climb back up the driveway that's something I could never do without the encoder installed I'll show you how I shift I'm in second gear now I'll put it in neutral on this plate will turn on when it's time to shift and that tells me that the motors rpm is matched for the next year [Music] [Music] if you're interested in more technical details I'll have another video posted showing how I built the drive inverter and how I adapted the motor to the transmission we can check that out on my webpage I'll post a link at the end of the video and thanks for watching

Channel: etischer

Views: 2,952,197

Keywords: EV, Electric Vehicle, EV Conversion, Siemens, AC Induction, Motor, VW, Passat, Inverter, VFD, Drive inverter, Eric Tischer, etischer, EV conversion kit, Tesla, Powertrain, batteries, Lithium, Home built, DIY, DIY Electric car, electric car, Ford Siemens, BMS, DC DC Converter, Manzanita Micro, EV Charger, J1772, Doug Demuro, Hoovies Garage, How to, Convert, swap, engine, ICE, Engineering, design, Volt, Bolt, Home conversion, AC conversion, air conditioner, Electric, thundersky, 2170, 18650, Jetta, golf

Id: IKR8Or6Im6w

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Shovelware_]

I wonder if a casual hobbyist could convert a car with repurposed parts and lead acid batteries.

watches as guy opens trunk

Nope.

[u/sangerpb]

This is no normal DIY guy, this person worked at Tesla.

http://etischer.com/resume/Eric_Tischer_Resume_2019.pdf

[u/Alan_Smithee_]

Unless he has the batteries in the front rigged to drop in a frontal crash, those are going to be lethal.

[u/anyonemous]

This model Passat (B5) was only produced from 1996 up to 2005. He bought the car in 2008 but the car is older than that, which makes what he did all the more impressive.

[u/MotorsportsatPurdue]

Damn that’s awesome. I’m on a university team that builds and races electric go karts, so it was nice to sort of comprehend a complex topic for a change. And knowing how ridiculously big and heavy our batteries are for our 400 lb karts, as soon as I saw the thumbnail with the engine compartment full of batteries I was like “no way, there’s gotta be more than that.”

[u/iamanomynous]

"And behind here I have... more cells".

Also, I'm surprised how clean the components and circuit boards are.

[u/Enjineer1]

Hang on. Why is Electricity cheaper after Midnight? Is this a US thing?

[u/Count_Cash]

I'm more impressed with this man's hands than anything, you can tell he gets the job done with total disregard for his own comfort. Those mitts are fried, boy

[u/Ekiph]

10 years, 90,000 miles.

My daily drive car I put in 75,000 in two years.