What It’s Like to Drive My Homemade Electric Car
The world has asked me, this old jalapy, creator of the Franken Wagon, creator of the Dream E, to come up with the world’s most affordable EV conversion project. And I’ve tried to do just that by converting my 1962 Mercury Comet to electric. I built a totally custom rear axle. I installed the motor, inverter, and charger, all from the affordable Nissan Leaf, and I wired everything together using the Resolve controller and harness. In the last video, I assembled the Nissan Leaf battery pack and I made it fit under the hood. I was all ready to go for my first test drive. Everything was going great until the vehicle suddenly turned off while I was driving it and the video had to come to an abrupt end. Sorry about that. So, let’s pick up now where that video left off and we’ll join the action already in progress. Well, it’s broken. It’s like the Resolve doesn’t have any power. the it’s like the VCU turned off and it won’t turn back on. Got nothing here and it won’t turn on. Brake lights are on this. So, this means the brakes are locked up, which it felt like the brakes were locked up. So, I’m going to uh just pull this here cuz it’s a pressure activated switch, not a not a foot switch on the pedal. See what that does. and nothing. Okay, so I have multiple problems. Went home and grabbed some tools and going to try and reset it. Wait a few seconds. Connect it. Reset it. All right. Cross your fingers. All right. Cross your fingers. Okay. Uh huh. We got a blown fuse. Totally blown. All right. That’s definitely the problem. And lucky for me, there is an Auto Zone just across the street and an Advanced Auto Parts just over there. Thankfully though, there is an Auto Zone right across the street. So, all you have to do is jump on the Qut EC150 and uh ride on over there. This thing’s a lifesaver. Check out the video description for a discount code on buying one of these. Okay, I lucked out. I got some fuses and maybe I can get home. All right, let’s see what happened. Oh, that just came on, didn’t it? Oh my god. Thank God. Let’s get home. And the bike fits in the back of the car. Qut EC150. Get yours today. Proof that the bike fits into the back of a station wagon. I’ve been working on this conversion project for about a year now, but I was hoping to get it done much sooner. I thought I could have it done back in June so I could participate in a local art car parade. Well, I missed that deadline by a long shot. But after that, I was invited to present the car at Oman the Rangers event state of charge in August. But if you’ve been watching my videos, you’ll know I had a pretty major setback and I didn’t even want to look at the car for several months after that. But I needed another artificial deadline to get my ass back into the garage and start wrenching again. So, I signed up for the electric vehicle showcase taking place in October. And this time, I’m actually going to make it. I got the car working on Wednesday, and the car show is on Sunday. So, I have a few days to clean it up, solve the rear brake problem, and put the hood back on. All right, here we go. There is no seat belt. Feels so weird. It um made it to the show. It was only 3 miles, but it was uneventful. As best I best as I could have hoped for. First time riding it out of the neighborhood because I just got it running on Wednesday and the show is really great. It’s a lot of fun and I’m not the only conversion here. There’s several conversions actually. Another thing is I have in the park right next to a guy named Mike and he was telling me that he started the website evalb.com. He was saying he needs a little bit of work on that website. Well, I’m a web developer so maybe we’ll come up with a partnership. So, um, in other words, a lot of good things happening here at this car show. Mr. Beat, if you’re watching this video, then you’re watching YouTube. Check him out. Mr. Beat. What year is this thing? 62. So, I have this crazy idea. Might as well tell you. Um, I was wondering, so next year is the 100th anniversary of Route 66. Yeah. Which one? One thing I haven’t explained yet is why did the fuse break and what’s wrong with the rear brakes? What was the fuse that was giving continuous 12volt power to the resolve controller? My theory is this. Because the disc brakes were receiving too much residual pressure from the master cylinder, which was designed for drum brakes, they were dragging, which caused them to heat up and expand the brake fluid and cause even more pressure and more dragging until there was enough pressure to trigger the brake light switch. This switch is also connected to the resolve controller so that it knows when you’re braking and if it’s okay to switch between forward, neutral, and reverse. But when I was giving it throttle input, I was also annoyingly giving it brake input. And I think that may have caused it to go a bit haywire and blow a fuse. My solution was to temporarily disconnect the rear brake line from the master cylinder. I still have the parking brake lever connected to the rear disc brakes. So, I have emergency brakes, but I also have regen braking, which is really good stuff, and it can almost be a substitute for the mechanical brakes. More on that in a bit. All right, we’re going to go for a little drive. And I have a list of talking points to go over because some of you in the last video said you’d you’d like to actually see the driving experience rather than just hear loud classical music. Um, first thing I need to swap the forward and reverse switches. I always This feels more like it should be drive and this should be reverse. But here we go. I found some smooth roads. These roads should hopefully be a little bit smooth. Um, it’s rattly in here. Oh, see I doing that just now. I accidentally took it out of re regen mode. I like to put it in full regen mode cuz it gives you really good braking. When I lift my foot off the throttle, it’s like slamming on the brakes. It’s basically, as far as I know, it’s one pedal driving. So, here we go. We’re cruising. And the first thing everyone wants to know, of course, is the range, uh, the top speed, the horsepower. Well, it’s a 2013 Nissan and Leaf drivetrain. So, uh, 107 horsepower. Not going to knock your socks off, but it feels good. When I need to pick up, get in the traffic, there’s no problem at all. See, no braking right there. All regen. Um, and then of course the range. So I’ve let’s see, I’ve driven about eight maybe nine miles and it’s gone from 85 to 74%. But I don’t know how the resolve calculates the state of charge and if it’s just a linear thing or if it’s a on a curve because as the voltage drops it’s an S curve or it’s an inverted S-curve. It’s kind it kind of drops quickly and then levels out as the state of charge goes down and then drops quickly again around 30% of state of charge. But likely though, this is coming from the Nissan BMS, which will be able to calculate that pretty well, I imagine. Now, the handling though, I haven’t really had to I haven’t really been able to test out the handling cuz this is still on trailer tires. The front two tires are trailer tires. The previous owner couldn’t find tires in the right size in the 13-in rims. Put on trailer tires. Well, what I’ve learned is that they have very soft walls. That doesn’t feel good in the turns. They feel very squishy and soft. The tires do. There’s a good hum actually coming from the rear of the car where the motor is. So, it’s not perfectly silent, which I prefer. [Music] All right, braking is my next topic. Like I said, I have regen on. I’m still on the old brakes. Whoa. Okay. Almost died there, buddy. Got to watch out for these students. They’ll come out of nowhere. So, I’m on the old brakes now. I have disc brakes in the rear, but I actually had to disconnect those temporarily until I can get disc brakes on all fours and put in a master cylinder that’s correct for disc brakes. As I learned, um, master cylinder for drum brakes will cause disc brakes to drag until they heat up, causing even more dragging, and it just gets worse from there. The steering feels great. I love this steering wheel. It’s manual steering. Now, when I put on the new tires, maybe that’ll change. But for right now, I love the manual steering. It feels awesome. There’s not a lot. There’s a little bit of play, but not too much. I think it’s totally acceptable. It’s better than my 66 Ford F100 pickup, but that’s not surprising. By the way, I do have an emergency brake and that’s still connected to the rear brakes. I just put my turn signal on. And I fixed that yesterday. It’s one of the few things that works. There’s no speedometer. I have turn signals, brake lights, and that’s about it. No horn, no speedometer, no radio, no heater, no seat belts. All right, let’s see. What do we got? Let’s talk about. So, I’ll point it out um here in a minute, but sometimes I hear a thump coming from the rear end. And what that is is that’s uh one of the bushings for the motor. I was wondering if that would be a problem, but um there’s just a little bit of play between the large bolt and the inner diameter of the sleeve. So, I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem or not. I’ll have to take a look at it when I’m replacing the rear shocks. But otherwise, you know, it’s holding together. The wheels haven’t fallen off of it. You know, I built the rear axle myself using a $100 stick welder from Amazon. and got a lot of comments saying I did it wrong, especially on the axle shafts, but they haven’t broken yet now. I’ve only been driving it around for about a week. So, I think by the end of this drive, we’ll have a little better idea of the range because, let’s see, it’s 7 miles to work and back, and I’ve done that twice on one charge. And then I’ll do a little bit of math and tell you an estimate for the range. cuz now it’s at 69% state of charge. I can’t be certain if the state of charge is calculated on a curve like I was describing or if it’s purely just looking at the voltage and saying, you know, that’s X percentage of what? Okay. Well, uh, my phone stopped recording in the middle of that video because I ran out of storage. But what I was saying was that was that all I have to do is finish the 12volt wiring, finish the brakes, and then I’ll be ready to be a daily driver. And then let’s say middle of winter, I’m going to take the battery out of the hood and kind of redo that. Put it in a real metal enclosure. And I’ve been thinking about ways to rearrange the cells to get them to fit a lot better. And it’s a very small hood. If I was to do this project on my forward F100 out there, that would have been a much easier hood to fit all the batteries under. So, that video will come out in a couple of months. There won’t be a video for this project, but I’ll have other videos on this channel. So, stay tuned. Subscribe if you haven’t already. And thanks for watching, guys, and I’ll see you in the next video. Peace out.
For 10% your QNUT EC150 e-bike purchse use this referral link – https://qnutbike.com/?ref=DANNYMANTYLATHISOLDJALOPY – or for $50 off use the coupon code ThisOldJalopy
For the range of the vehicle, it’s discussed towards the end of the video, but I used about 19% of the battery go about 15 miles. Assuming the state-of-charge is calculated correctly, that adds up to give me a maximum of 79 miles. BUT that was all at low speeds, stop and go, with full regen on. Highway driving would be much much less efficient. I’ll get on the highway in the next video! First though I’ll have to add disc brakes and a new master cylinder, replace the trailer tires with real car tires, and install seatbelts.
Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mannydantyla/
0:00 Intro
0:42 Blown Fuse
3:33 Cleaning it up
5:02 EV Car Show
7:12 Level 2 Charging
7:40 Driving and talking
10:06 Handling and braking
12:12 More driving & talking
13:47 Range estimating
14:23 What’s next?
