Electric Land Rover Defender conversion kit
hi I’m Richard from Electric Classic Cars and on this week’s episode sponsored by Mouser Electronics TE Connectivity and Microchip it’s all about the Land Rover Defender and more specifically our latest generation drop-in electric conversion kit for them so let’s get into it [Applause] so we’ve been converting Land Rover Defenders like this to electric since 2016 which is a long time ago how many years
9 years
9 years quick on the math there Tim well done so 9 years of experience converting Land Rover Defenders like this and our go-to kit for many many years is pretty much what’s in this Land Rover here which is a Tesla pack so we got most of the pack in the front and the rest in the back but I was never quite happy with the rear side of things because the front was fine but the rear because of the size of the Tesla batteries never really fitted where I wanted to to put them if you like and I’ll explain more at the at the back here so here in the rear of the Land Rover Defender on the 90 you’ve only got about that much space between the rear crossmember and where the axle is and if you think about it that much space available a Tesla battery is that long ain’t going to fit so we had to put the batteries on our first generation kits here so on a 90 you’ve got your forward facing seats uh sitting on top of it and a Defender 110 quite often there’s a a draw that people put in here anyway so it’s not the end of the world in a 110 but battery technology moves on energy density and you know the form factor of batteries moves on and now from our Gen One kit we now have our Gen 3 kit i I know we’ve skipped over Gen two but you know we can’t put everything in this video gen 3 kit is where we’re at now so what’s different now it’s fair to say that wiring systems have got a lot more complicated than what was originally in this old Land Rover Defender here for instance you’ve got in modern cars driver assist infotainment systems and with EV and hybrid you’ve got a lot more wiring going on with sensors and other things like that so the requirements for an automotive wiring architecture has completely changed and that’s where our sponsors so when we’re looking to develop the latest generation of our Land Rover kit the front battery box is a given you’ve got to put a load of batteries in here that’s similar weight to the original engine and take up that much space that’s the easy bit the more difficult bit is where you’re going to put the rest of the batteries now we did consider an obvious place which was here because underneath the seat is where we put batteries before on cars and I thought there’s a big box here um the bit here which normally has the transmission and um uh transfer box in is kind of gone so we end up with a flat floor so we could have put a battery box across there now I discounted that very early on for a number of reasons number one is there’s a load of 12vt stuff this is where all your fuses relays your 12vt battery is underneath the other side so there’s a load of stuff in there which is the main brains and wiring if you like of the car would have to be moved the other thing was to get the batteries that we’d need in we would have had to have come underneath here probably to around about this level here which isn’t ideal in off-roading especially with my experience of off-roading this area here is where would get hit as you’re going over undulations and rocks and stuff which is why this customer’s got rock sliders on here for instance which protect the sill but the main reason which I didn’t do it is because of weight balance so if I shut the door here you’ll see what I mean so if you imagine all the weight in the front there and here on a 110 that means you’ve got all the weight kind of like around about here on the front axle which in a car that’s not renowned for its handling is not a good idea so we then started concentrating on the rear where the petrol tank used to be and try to see if we can get that battery box underneath there because don’t forget on a Defender 90 or 110 yeah 110 can carry a ton of weight it’s designed to carry that weight here so we needed weight on the rear to balance out the weight on the front so that’s why we started looking in detail as to that rear fuel tank area to try and fit a battery box in there now over those nine years that we’ve been converting Defenders like this to electric we’ve learned a lot specifically how many different versions there are of Defenders now they all look the same but production wise they were in production from around about 1990 to 2016 and over that time you had all sorts of different engines in the frontier you had uh 200 TDIs 300 TDIs TD5s um petrol V8s i probably missed out one or two so number of different engines in the front engine mounts etc you had early Defenders late Defenders Pummer ones different dashboards uh even like 110s you had 110 like this with four doors you had two door pickups you had Yeah 90s 130s 130 high caps loads of different variations and versions of Landro Defenders so when we design a kit they have to be universal and work with all iterations and that’s what we’ve done with Gen 3 so in front of me here is the guts of our Gen 3 Defender kit and here it is our Gen 3 Landro Defender bolt-in electric conversion kit it looks really simple okay there’s a couple of things missing mainly the motor but this has had a lot of development work to get to this point so what have we got well two battery boxes we got a main front battery box here which has the lion share of the batteries in and then you’ve got your rear battery box which used to be the problem area for those Tesla modules and this comes in two sizes this one’s for a 110 and the one uh the one the 90 is a little bit shorter to be able to fit in that tight space where the old fuel tank used to go so rear battery box fits right up underneath where the petrol tank used to be in fact I think it’s a little bit higher and then front one over here and then this is your motor cradle so two versions of the motor cradle this one here for the Tesla large drive unit for those that want crazy amounts of power and then there’s another version of this for the Tesla Model 3 motor which gives a good punchy amount of power that’s still enough for 90% of cases if you like is the Tesla Model 3 motor which is a very good motor so two versions of this one version of that and two versions of that depending if it’s a 110 or a 90 as far as battery capacity is concerned your 110 funny enough gets 110 kwatt hours and the 90 unfortunately we couldn’t fit 90 kW hours in but we got 82 kW hours in so that’s the size of the battery different motor options but there’s a lot of other things going on just apart from these three main items here now it’s fair to say the devil is in the detail whenever we do a bolt-in conversion kit and this gives you somewhat of an idea as to what I’m talking about cuz it’s not just about those two big battery boxes and a motor cradle it’s you know all about stuff like this that makes the conversion easy so you got things like a cable tray for instance here you got a high voltage cable traveling through that um all sorts of bracketry um this is part of the battery box mount and then this here if I You’re probably wondering what it is if I put this on here and uh put that on there like that turn it round that there essentially sits underneath the passenger seat or driver’s seat uh if it’s leftand drive and this has all the ECUs in it so you’ve got your your VCU your um uh um air conditioning controller there’s about five different controllers in this area including your 12vt fuses uh relays and your 12vt battery box so this is our version of what normally sits underneath the seat and obviously it’s in three bits just so we can actually fit it in like that and bolt it all up i’ll show you what I mean in a minute when we show you one of the finished vehicles now that last panel I picked up lives in here so if you come in close to him you can see why that’s so busy uh a panel because in here is most of your loom your 12vt loom coming in you got your 12vt battery you’ve got controllers in various different places you’ve got your relays and fuses in here and then as I said before you’ve got your ECU your uh motor controller and there’s one more to go in as well which is looks like the air conditioning controller so that’s why that panel was so complicated because this is pretty much the brains of the whole vehicle um and talking about looms we haven’t spoken or shown you yet the 12vt loom and the high voltage loom so let’s have a look at that so all of our kits come with pre-done low voltage and high voltage looms with all the uh bulkhead um grommets connectors that you’ll need and even different versions uh this is for an early Defender so there’s different options um that’s not um made for this loom so this is a Defender 90 loom so this is a low voltage Defender 90 loom uh another loom getting made up here and then your high voltage over there as well so all of the looms in our kits are all pre-done and this is what it all looks like in the car or at least in the front of the car so you got your main battery pack there you’ve got your charger there as far as charging is concerned 6 kW singlephase 11 kW 3-phase it’s also the DC toDC converter so it’s actually acting if you like like an alternator charging up the 12vt battery it’s also has VTO L vehicle to load as well so if you wanted to run 240 volts off say the charge socket or have some three pin plugs inside it allows you to do that as well and also talking about charging got CCS as well so rapid charging uh DC fast charging on it as well uh you’ve got your radiator up front you’ve got your main radiator for your um motor and inverter and another radiator for the battery system two header tanks because of that cuz we’re uh running two separate systems so you got one header tank there for the battery one there for the motor and inverter and your electric power steering pump there so that’s what it all looks like in the vehicle this one’s not running yet should be running next week I think we’re just doing some uh pre-startup checks on it but um yeah that’s what the front of it looks like so underneath here on this 90 we’ve got the Model 3 motor in as I said you can have two motor options you’ve got either your Tesla large drive unit which gives you what 450 to 600 horsepower which is nuts that’s what’s in my Land Rover Defender um you got to have a couple of screws with loose to have one of those um or the Model 3 motor which is plenty punchy enough so model 3 motor in this one uh we’ve got our own prop shaft here uh you’ll notice this is uh a custom prop shaft not just because of the length but also we got rid of the U.JS J’s which create vibration cuz they’re not uh rotating uniformly as far as speed is concerned that’s why they’re not called constant velocity these are so that’s our custom prop shaft um cuz obviously when a when you get rid of the engine in Defender you realize how much other vibrations and noises there are and uh that’s a development we did a few years ago and then obviously all your cables high voltage and low voltage coming up here as well so there’s your motor uh we got to put the the rear battery box um tomorrow and then this should be running in a few days so on an off-roader wherever you’ve got exposed high voltage or low voltage cables you want to kind of protect them from any road dirt or gravel getting thrown at them and that’s what these metal boxes are here so you’ve got your high voltage your orange and your black your low voltage coming in and then it’s gone behind this steel uh cable tray if you like that’s getting that’s basically protecting it and there’s a number of these on the vehicle either here for instance or underneath so there you go 9 years of experience has gone into developing our latest version of the kit you know starting with a a vehicle like this uh this one’s halfway through uh right the way to this one behind me which is pretty much finished now it’ll be going and driving this week probably but yeah 9 years of experience in developing these kits they are bolt-in conversion kits available not to the DIY market unfortunately but they are available to workshops and other EV conversion workshops around the world and we ship these globally uh as far as pricing is concerned um it’s not worth going into pricing here contact us through our website if you’re interested because there’s so many different variations and options from 82 kwatt hours to 110 kw hours we even do 165 kW hours for the Defender 130 there’s AC or no AC there’s um model 3 motors large drive units etc there’s a load of variations if you are interested contact us through our website and on that note I think it just remains for me to thank our sponsors for today’s episode microchip and TE Connectivity and Mouser Electronics go to mouser.com for all your electronics component needs and on that note hope you enjoyed this episode and we’ll see you on the next one [Music]
We’ve been converting Land Rovers to electric now since 2015. Everything we’ve learnt in those 10 years is now in our latest version of our Land Rover Defender conversion kit. Available for Defender 90, 110 and 130, left hand drive, right hand drive, with CCS rapid charging as standard and options like V2L and AC.
If you’re a conversion shop or a Land Rover specialist that’s interested in offering an electric version with a very well developed bolt in conversion kit from the leaders in electric conversions please feel free to contact us directly via our website:
www.electricclassiccars.com
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