ev

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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Sydney 2009 AEVA Field Day

November 2, 2009

Like last year, a good turn up and assortment of EV eye-candy was to be had for one and all and the Thunderskys are holding out well as expected with few reports of any issues with them in performance, range or charging. Some guys from my R&D group turned up, some friends from the ham [...]

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Safety Last?

July 23, 2009

When it comes to EVs, some back-yarders may well be up there with the Harold Lloyd types, dangling on a high voltage precipice. What am I on about? You’ll recall my expensive BMS master controller I griped on about some time ago – it handles the high current charging brought into the car via a [...]

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Peak Lithium 2015?

June 18, 2009

Mitsubishi knows full-well that it may be a possibility, as they themselves have stated recently that lithium demand will outstrip supply as early as 2015. While we all expect and hope that prices will fall as production and popularity of EVs increase, prices could possibly rise instead, forcing us to other automobile alternatives (air-compression technology [...]

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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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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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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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My Breaker Broke :-(

April 11, 2009

My Airpax breaker, the main breaker switch, now has a busted switch-arm (I’ll save you the painful images). Just a few test throws under tension, the supposedly strong Bakelite switch arm shattered. The Airpax breaker is expensive, and we’ll have to see if it’s still under warranty as I paid for this some time ago. [...]

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Echo and the Funny Men

February 5, 2009

While my car waits for some final parts, the Echo conversion is progressing well and we hope to have it drivable very soon. There’s an EV show coming up and the Echo will be perfect for it, taking pride of place amongst the smaller vehicles and some funny guys riding funny go-carts etc – yet [...]

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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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