Building my first Electric Car Help plz

I agree with the others who say this is a bad idea. If you were financially comfortable (meaning, among other things, that you buy your cars outright instead of financing them) and if you wanted to do this as a project car for a second car, then that would be a different story.

“By you own admission you don’t have the money, the ability, or the automotive knowledge.”

+1

Lacking just one of those things would be enough to lead to incredible frustration in trying to complete the OP’s electric car project.

Lacking all three of those necessities would lead to a disaster Trifecta .

$25 million seems like an awful lot of bail money unless her boyfriend is Hannibal Lecter…

If I had won the lottery (sorry, didn’t happen, I know you were all pulling for me) I still wouldn’t have invested in this project. I’d pay off the house, install solar on the roof, and get a P85D. Tesla has already spent the research money and time to make a viable electric car. Might as well take advantage of it.

the same mountainbike: I saw an electric MGA many years ago. It used several automotive batteries and had no transmission. As I recall reverse was accomplished by reversing polarity/rotation of the motor.

Electric cars go back to the 1800s. And many people over the years have modified regular cars to electric platforms. The first Tesla was a sports car built on a modified Lotus chassis. But it takes knowledge and money to build one, especially if one hopes to make it road worthy.

Most electric motors can be reversed simply by reversing the polarity of the supply. That’s all reversible drills do. Those that cannot are specifically designed to not accommodate reverse rotation. In other words, inability to reverse has to be specifically designed into a DC motor.

If you’re really serious I would start by buying an electric golf cart and taking it apart, then put it back together. As you do this you can learn a lot and look for donor parts, ideas and so forth. Hopefully you’ll have lots of time, patience, money and not be afraid to ask questions of experts in separate areas . . . . brakes, steering, engine, transmission, bodywork. It sounds interesting but I like stuff lie this. Good luck! Rocketman

Yeah, this is not a serious discussion.

I actually did get two number correct which is better than ever before. If you win though, you do three things; get a lawyer, get a CPA, and dump the boy friend.

"Most electric motors can be reversed simply by reversing the polarity of the supply. That’s all reversible drills do. Those that cannot are specifically designed to not accommodate reverse rotation. In other words, inability to reverse has to be specifically designed into a DC motor. "

No, that’s really not true. In most cases if you reverse the polarity of the supply you reverse the polarity of both the armature and the field currents, so the motor rotates in the same direction. To reverse direction you have to reverse the polarity of either the armature OR the field, not both. Cheap permanent magnet DC motors will reverse if you reverse polarity, but they’re about the only ones that will.

My 1950’s era Lionel toy electric train motor works like that @JayWB . It’s called a “universal motor”. It runs equally well on DC or AC. AC doesn’t cause it to change directions on the negative phase of the AC b/c of what you say. It goes forward no matter the polarity. Like you say, there’s a switch you can set which reverses the polarity of one of the windings to make the train go backward.

Whether all that applies to electric cars, don’t know. There’s dozens or more different kinds of electric motor designs. The OP says the one he’s interested in is a “DC Inductive” motor. That’s sort of intriguing b/c for induction to work for a motor there has to be some kind of a changing magnetic field. Maybe it is like those motors used in disc drives, brushless DC motors. Those work with permanent magnets I think, and while they are powered with a DC power supply, they have electronics which switches the polarity of the coils in a time sequence to make the rotating part of the motor rotate. So it’s not really a DC motor exactly.

I agree with the guys above… Start small Grasshopper…start small. If you can pull off a go cart you can try bigger.

You can convert any vehicle you wish…theres lots of info on it pretty much everywhere. The motor…is basically just a matter of selection there are so many…and you may be looking at an AC motor…not DC. Since DC converts to AC fairly easily…and controllers are again a matter of load and selection.

Then the Vee Hickle…needs to be small and light…well sort of…depends on your goals… Hell you can make an electric tank if you wanted to…mpg might not be “optimum” but it can be done. I see a lot of Porsche 914’s get converted… Miata’s too… Even 3 Series BMW’s…One did Pikes Peak not too long ago…look it up on U tubey… Not a light car…but it climbed Pikes Peak with Bravado I can tell you.

This is a serious undertaking… Not many vehicles can kill you if you drop a wrench in the wrong place…but these can…and will. So tread lightly at first. Hell buy an RC model first…same concept with DC to AC current to motor and speed controller… even suspension is life like…its all life like actually…go look at some RC models if you are lacking this much info at first

Blackbird