Build your own homemade electric car
Conversion instructions help you turn a standard car into an electric car
Homemade electric cars have been around longer than you might think. Some of the very first cars were electric, and were one-off cars made by enterprising inventors.
But electric cars - both homemade and factory built - suffer from low range - because cheap batteries are so heavy, and light batteries are so expensive, you often can't go more than 100 or 200 miles on a charge.
For this reason perhaps, auto manufacturers have avoided making electric cars in spite of growing demand from consumers for an alternative to gas powered cars.
Many people have tackled this problem by building their own homemade electric car. They take a car they already own - or one that can be bought cheap - and remove the motor. They then follow a standard set of tasks to remove other unnecessary components of the car, add in a DC motor, a bank of deep cycle lead acid batteries (because these are the cheapest type, and can often be obtained practically for free), and the additional wiring. Two people working at this can typically convert an existing compact car to all-electric in about two weeks.
Not including the cost of the car you start off with (which can often be had for a steal, if the motor is busted but the rest of the car is working well), you can build your homemade electric car for as little as a few hundred dollars. And the range and speed are great. Acceleration is on par with, or better than, gasoline powered cars; top speed is about 80 km/h (50 MPH), enough to travel in the city, suburbs, or on all but the busiest highways; and range is enough to do short trips about town or even visit friends or family an hour or two away (as long as they let you charge up before going home!).
You can also buy an electric car conversion kit, but why pay the extra markup when you can buy most or all of the required components for a song, or get them for free by looking around carefully?
You can wait for the major car companies to come up with an all electric car. But they have been promising to do so for over twenty years, have gotten loads of government funding to do so, and most of their projects get scrapped. Or you can spend a few hundred dollars of your own money to build a homemade electric car that works just as you want it. Seems like a simple choice!
To find out more about how to build a homemade electric car, I suggest you buy the online book pictured here. The book costs only $19.97, and is available for instant download. The book comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee: if you decide the book isn't worth what you paid for it, the publisher will refund your money, no questions asked.
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