electric vehicle

Let’s Hope The Nissan Leaf Never Falls

November 24, 2011

My boss decided to send me up to our San Francisco head office to work for a while and I am glad of the opportunity, since a few of the other engineers working here own Nissan Leafs. Having heard about my own electric car conversion, they were eager to show me their Leafs, three of [...]

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Yet Another Flow Battery, Flo

June 7, 2011

An easy flow battery for the energy dense Yes the game of thrones in the battery kingdom continues with a new beast, this time a kind of flow battery that has a much greater energy density. With all the new batteries looming on the never-ending horizon, will this be yet another glimpse of high-energy hope [...]

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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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Driving around Deutschland in an Electric Vehicle

May 19, 2011

This electric vehicle uses lithium polymer batteries; don’t forget that these have a shorter life cycle than lithium ion phosphates (unless the technology has improved). Mind you lighter polymers and more compact cell footprint means more batteries and volts packed under the hood with greater C delivery. Some local electric vehicle builders have been using [...]

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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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Swapped the Instrument Cluster

January 7, 2010

I know many of you liked the Nut Rider 80s retro electronic instrument cluster. All those LEDs looked cool and would have gone nicely with my retro 80s ham gear. But there was simply no decent geography to put in a decent visible-easy battery gauge. Having run out of money and deciding not to get [...]

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A Charge is in the Air

June 2, 2009

Reports have been coming in of a new type of air-charged battery which could provide up to ten times the energy storage of a conventional lithium cobalt battery. Called the STAIR (‘St Andrews Air,’ where it was developed at Scotland’s University of St Andrews), it provides improved capacity via a porous carbon exchange cell lattice [...]

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Delays, Delays, Delays

March 12, 2009

I must apologize for all these delays! Being a small outfit, the Echo has taken up considerable time but it looks very good now and will be delivered to the client soon. The BMS has been upgraded and looks pretty neat with the cosmic blue charge active LEDs added. My health has been a bit [...]

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More talk? More action please!

January 14, 2009

While Ford are thinking of releasing a fully-electric work van in 2010, Mercedes has got in on the EV action with a proposal for a new EV in a B-class range, namely the BlueZERO. Blue is not so Green? While the BlueZero has a concept proposal for a 100% electric ‘E-cell’ vehicle, we wonder if [...]

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[Video] Electric Starion EV Part 7

January 5, 2009

Here’s the latest video. It’s got stuff about water boilers, IGBTs (which I talk about further in this post), a brakes test and revs testing. I’m guessing there’s probably only a couple more videos to go as finish time approaches. Most of the scenes in all the videos have been shot on a Nokia N93 [...]

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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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[Video] Electric Starion Part 6

November 14, 2008

After successfully testing the drivability, it’s back to the workshop to get stuff removed to paint the battery racks and sort the best place for the charger. I did a mock-up Zivan so I could squeeze it into a place in the pillar where Nathan cut a piece out for access. The test proved that [...]

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