The Donor Vehicle (pic)

The new Toyota! A 1990 bought from a student in Bozeman, Montana. Seems a bit of a waste to dissemble a properly working Toyota pickup. As one can see, there is a little body work that can be done, but that can wait until after we see if the project will be a success.

Flickr slideshow

Inital Project Planning (pic)

The call for an EV was simple. Some friends, Julie and John, already had a wind turbine that produced surplus electrical power and Julie had a round trip daily commute of about 90 miles. Consequently, they wanted an EV that would reliably do 90 highway miles in Montana, in all but the coldest of days.

There are none that are available. A RAV4 was sold on ebay awhile ago, that is a vehicle that can go 100+, but you can't get them. The Tesla would work too, and be quite stylish, but it is $100,000 and could not be had for over a year. The Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEV) cannot do the highway speeds required. The only viable option was a home conversion. After many conversations, it was decided there was a good chance we could do it, hence the EV conversion project.

The EV conversion project was planned over the summer of 2007. I was to do the planning, most of the legwork, and John and I would do the build. Julie and John were going to put up the funds, and own and use the vehicle in the end. It was decided to convert a Toyota Xtracab pickup into a long range EV by removing the internal combustion engine (ICE) components and adding a technologically advanced 3-phase AC motor and 40 lead-acid golf cart batteries. I was in the Peace Corps in Kenya a few years ago, where I gained great respect for the structural strength of Toyota pickups! Twenty people (me being one, at times) are regularly stuffed in the back of the already loaded Matau just like the one pictured below... our batteries will weigh less!



A 1990 Toyota was found and bought, and all major parts and batteries were purchased in the summer. The parts were scheduled to arrive in September, and the installation and conversion was to take place in Montana over the month of September.

Introduction

I decided to make a little blog to describe my Toyota Electric Vehicle (EV) conversion project. This blog is not yet complete, but it gives some amount of information about the project.

An initial disclaimer, though...

I am creating this blog 7 weeks into the project, in November 2007, as we are presently waiting for parts. Consequently, the dates of the posts are not accurate. I will simply backdate the posts to make them correspond to the event depicted and described.

Also, for now, I will just hyperlink most of the build pictures, as I have already uploaded them onto flickr. Just click on the "Flickr slideshow" on each post. After you open a linked slideshow, you can select "options" on the bottom right, then select "always show title and descriptions". I labeled most of the pictures, so if you select this, you will get a little information about each photo.

Anyway, enjoy, and here it goes...