Electric Car

Revenge of the Electric Car

October 31, 2011

In 2009 I created a PowerPoint presentation titled, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” where I discussed the technology involved, the politics, the cowboys, promising enterprises that merely leech the money from the fatter end of town to no end, and a bit of history; but mostly it was tech stuff to prove how easily and [...]

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Battery Management Tripped? Check Your Connections!

May 31, 2011

For my electric vehicle I currently use a battery management system where each module uses an Atmel Tiny13 chip to manage the charge and shunt (the chip looks like a triple5 and has a simple C program for managing the voltages). If you have a similar system, you may experience charging issues, i.e., plugging your [...]

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Mitsubishi MiEV Takes Charge

November 12, 2010

That Massive Dynamic of EV makers, Mitsubishi, are aggressively promoting their MiEV electric vehicles, with sales in Australia expected to climb steadily, which in turn will eventually reduce the price of the vehicle considerably. After nine months or so of sales gestation in Australia, so far no bugs, no battery issues and no unhappy buyers [...]

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Decals on your Electric Car?

April 1, 2010

A good friend, Ash Brown from Ash Stripes detailing, popped over to see the car. He made some suggestions and as I had used his services in the past for my other Starion GSR, I thought it’d be good to add some kind of signage. I initially ordered the plastic chrome-look lettering for the rear, [...]

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Ya Gotta Love Panel Beaters

June 18, 2009

The guard on my car needs a fix after a bump – oops – a simple job one would expect, but shopping around for a good panel beater is difficult as most don’t want to guarantee their workmanship on anything that could bring on the slightest hint of rust. I have a spare guard but [...]

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Zilla Back in Production?

June 5, 2009

News in from Otmar – the high-powered motor-controller maker has found new manufacturing feet for his famed Zilla controller. Double the top current-handling of my Curtis, the Zilla fills a much-needed hole in the EV market in the high-performance end. With water cooling built into some models, these things when fitted into a sports EV [...]

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Nissan Gearing up for Competition

May 22, 2009

The Nissan Nuvu (aka ‘new view’) announced some time ago may finally be arriving in Australia next year to compete against the Mitsubishi MiEV (and possibly Toyota iQ if they sort their red tape with the government) in what is gearing up to be a new spark of electric auto competition. An alternative to the [...]

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Mitsubishi ‘MiEV’ in Town

April 2, 2009

On display at Sydney’s Darling Harbor is the new all-electric MiEV ‘production’ display vehicle. Although I haven’t had a chance to see it yet, a colleague from the office did and here is what he had to say… The Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car is on display today in Darling Harbor, I stopped in to take [...]

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Time to Look at Curtis Cooling

December 9, 2008

Although mentioned previously, we’ve had to put it aside while working out where everything else is going to fit. As you know, the Curtis has a bunch of MOSFETS inside, ‘sinked’ to the base of the housing. Although efficiency can be improved in a controller design, simple immediate solutions can involve better cooling. Some folks [...]

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Hard Pressed to Get the Message Across

December 5, 2008

That being the press this time, but you have to hand it to them for making the effort to grasp the latest technologies without adding pre-conceived cynicism in a minefield of broken promises and dead-end projects that seem to litter the EV horizon. The better end of town, namely the professional technology arena as well [...]

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Power Steering & Air Con Drive Test

December 2, 2008

After painting everything nicely, Nathan finalizes the positioning of the support posts and tightens all the nuts and supporting spacers on our retro-fitted belt-driven power steering/air con ‘module’, as we like to call it.

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Finalizing the Engine Bay Ready for Permanent Wiring

November 26, 2008

With this engine bay, space has been an issue all the way. Having set a component to sit in one place only to move it later because it fits better elsewhere when in context with other components has been a head-scratcher a lot of the time. This was compounded by the fact we had to [...]

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