Electric Speedsters

We just completed conversion of a Beck 356 Speedster to electric drive. And I just recently discovered and joined this forum.

The car gets a LOT of attention, and from reading the forum, I know you all are accustomed to that. We have no external clues that is powered by electric motor and lithium ion batteries.

Are there others here who have eSpeedsters with electric drive?

Jack Rickard
Cape Girardeau Missouri

http://web.me.com/mjrickard

Looks nice, Jack. One tip, though. You have the rear end up a bit high, resulting in some negative (or is it positive, I always forget which is which) camber in the rear wheels. They lean outward at the top. For better and safer handling, you want just a bit of camber in the other direction. You can easily get that by lowering the rear a bit with the adjustable spring plates. Check the owner's manual for how to do it, or ask Carey at Special Edition. It's a trivial thing to change.

A bit of historical correction - The original 356s were unibody cars, and did not use a VW pan. However, most replicas (until recently, at least) were VW pan-based as stated in your video.

Now, tell us about range, charging time, performance, etc. You might want to hook up with Jack Crosby down in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He's the closest other Speedster owner to you that I know of.

I'll take a closer look. I noticed the "cartoon" look of the rear camber but assumed it was the nature of the car, not knowing a great deal about speedsters. We may have exacerbated it adding coil over shocks to handle the weight of the batteries.

The range is about 75 miles with a good mix of freeway and urban driving. All freeway would be some less - 65 miles or so. All city would be substantially more 85-90. We have driven it 100 miles on a charge in testing - but by driving conservatively. And that's not what Porsche's are for. If you drive it like it wants to be driven, it can do a solid 75 miles.

It's not a Tesla, but it will do 85 miles per hour without any heavy breathing - about as fast as I car to go in a light convertible. I would say 0-60 in about 8 seconds. It's good even acceleration.

From the exterior, there is no clue it is an electric power plant, other than it just doesn't make any noise when accelerating.

The guys at Special Editions alluded to some other electric projects going on. Do any of them post here?

Jack Rickard

Oh, the charge time. 4.8 hours at 240 vac. About 10 hours at 120vac.

Jack

Sweet. Sounds like you have a good compromise of range and performance. You should consider bringing it up to Carlisle. I'm sure that you'd get a lot of interest. Check out the various Carlisle threads in the "Events" section.

Re. the rear height: Yeah, if you added coil-overs that's probably what has it so high. The spring plate adjustment might help, or you might want to go to a weaker coil-over. That much height and camber is likely to make the the rear end want to come around on you - even worse with the extra weight. If you remove the spare tire you could probably get 3 or 4 batteries up front. Are you already doing that? If not, consider it as a way to add range and help balance out the car.

Ha, I always say my Speedie is Volkswagen based - do you say yours is Volts-wagen based?

BWAH HAH HAAAAaaa...

Jps Motorsports is playing with the electric car stuff.
He tried to sell an electric speedster on Ebay but it didn't see much action. Maybe because you have to have a looooooong extension cord...;)
He has an electric coupe as well.

I just watched the whole video....may I shake your hand. Well done!

You must be aware of ZENN cars? They are just north of Montreal. They make low speed cars that are getting quite popular for city, communities etc.. they have a new project using a capacitor EEstor technology that claims 5 minute recharge and 300 Miles at 120MPH max speed coming. This new capacitor technology is from a company in Houston or Dallas that Zenn has invested heavily in.

From their site: He has now bet the farm on a unique energy storage device from a company in Texas. The company is EEStor and the device is an ultra capacitor that, on a five-minute charge, can supposedly hold 52 kilowatt-hours in a 136-kg unit. That would be enough power to drive an
electric car about 400 kilometres.

Funny vid...

The one thing I don't understand it the move towards electric cars.

Our current electrical network is overtaxed as it is and electric companies are always asking customers to conserve energy, many generating stations burn coal, oil, natural gas etc to produce electricity so, where is the advantage???

Would you rather have electricity to run your air conditioner during 90+ degree days or use that power to re-charge batteries in an electric car? Some of which will only travel roughly 50 miles before they go stone cold dead... And, if your car is solely electric, does auto club carry around a generator to recharge your ride???

Mike, way funny video to be a classic!
Where can I get the link for it ? ~Alan

Hi Alan. You can click on the Video on this page while it's running and you will open another YouTube window.

Well, a bit to cover here.

First, yes, we do have batteries in the front. In fact, despite a rather rubics cube like puzzle fitting in batteries, we achieved an almost perfect 50/50 weight balance.

As to handling, the car handles MUCH better than it did with the CB Performance engine. The batteries are located primarily at the two extreme ends of the car, and down very low. The spare tire area right behind the front bumper and some installed aluminum battery boxes in the back. This effectively lowers the center of gravity quite a bit.

Previously, the car was very twitchy in the rear at low speeds and the front floated on the highway at high speeds. Now it rides on a rail even around quite sharp curves at 45-55.

Ok, range. We have 203 million licensed drivers burning 375 million gallons of gas a day and driving about 8 billion mmiles daily at a national average fleet 21.3 mpg. The bottom line is that we average 39.4 miles per day, with OVER HALF of U.S. drivers driving less than 20 miles daily.

Electricity and power production. Utilities are not quite like cars. You don't just shut em down at night. In fact, they typically take 3-7 days to shut down and about that to turn up. And electricity has very strong peaks and valleys in demand. Most utilities will actually let you have a much lower rate if you will let them charge based on time of day. Peak hours are 10 AM to 10PM and off peak hours are 10 PM to 10 AM. THE peak hour is 3 PM.

Electric cars almost universally charge at night. They place NO load on the electric distribution system. Quite the contrary. They provide utilities a bit of revenue for power they basically have to dump at night.

CO2. A gallon of gas produces 19.5 lbs of CO2 for each gallon burned. Across our mix of coal, natural gas, hydro, solar, wind, and nuclear, electricity produces about 1.35 lbs per kWhr. To travel the 21.3 miles we average to a gallon, you are looking at 6.5-7.0 pounds of CO2 with an electric car. And that assumes that the kilowatt hours consumed by the electric car were NOT off peak electricity that was being produced anyway.

The Lithium ion iron phosphate batteries are the key to a viable electric car. This same speedster, with the same number of "batteries" of lead acid type would have required 1350 pounds of batteries. The LiFEPo4's weigh about 475 pounds, and provide more power than the same number of lead acids.

So it drives very well thank you. And it gets at least 75 miles per charge. It's not so much that I drive nearly that much per day, but rather that it is still important that I be able to go drive for a couple of hours on the winding hilly blacktop country roads offered here in Southeast Missouri. That's what Porsche's are for.

I really haven't "run out of electric" in the Porsche. BUt I have a couple of times in a GEM that I used for battery testing before the Speedster project. You just stop at somebody's house. I tell them my problem and they always offer to let me charge it long enough to get home. I wind up talking to them and showing them the car, and we talk about stuff, and the next thing you know you have a new friend.

But I think it would be a challenge to drive it to Carlisle.

Jack Rickard

http://web.me.com/mjrickard

Most electric cars consume between 200 and 300 wH per mile. Roughly 4 miles per kWhr.

If I had 52 kwHr storage from an eestore, that would be a little over 200 miles or 300 km.

I don't quite understand the eestor, but I think it is mostly vaporware. I'll believe it when I see it. You probably WILL do better with the peanut butter sandwich. And yes, CREAMY is pretty much mandatory.

I have done some work with capacitors and I'm very much enamored of them. They buffer the batteries, extending their life, and provide very much improved acceleration. That said, their weight and volume are such that if I had that kind of space and weight to play with, I'd probably be better off with more batteries. Actually some combination of ultracapacitor and LiFePo4 battery is most probably in our future.

However, the vague explanations provided by Eestor's principal do not sound plausible to me. Perhaps he does have some sort of "secret sauce" but it sounds too much like the con games to raise investor money that plague the industry. In any event, no product yet.

Jack Rickard

http://web.me.com/mjrickard

Hi Jack.... I know little about electric cars (as much as most of us), I do understand DC motors (I design fitness machines including treadmills that use DC with PWM). I agree that the capacitor technology is quite amazing and yet to be proven although supposedly Eestor has signed some military contracts to offer small power units to troops and military sites.

I guess the proof will be in the pudding.

I hope ZENN cars doesn't end up scammed to oblivion!

"I guess the proof will be in the pudding." Didn't you mean "peanut butter"? ;-)

Jack, I wasn't thinking you'd drive to Carlisle, for obvious reasons. I DO think it would be worthwhile trailering it there. This year is probably too close for you to make, but you might think about next year. I'd love a ride in it. If nothing else, you'll have a lot of fun with us gearheads.

On elecetric conversions - do you shift gears or just leave it in one gear?

Jack, I'm seriously impressed. I can't view the video, and would like to. If there's an alternative link or a different format, please let me know where to look -- or e-mail it to me if it's smaller than 4MB.
james.drake AT hoa.usafricom.mil

Jack: Just watched the video! Very nice informative piece.
Except for winter, I could drive to work nearly every day in that or a similar set up car. Kudos to you. I'll have to stash this thread in my favorites for sure.
I've been fascinated with the EV's for some time now and have been lurking on various EV forums trying to get a grasp on the workings and different hardware involved.

Cory: you've got to watch this. It is a long download though. Maybe Teresa can put it on a disc or something and send it to you.

Again, Good work, Jack!

BTW: It would be great if you could trailer that baby to Carlisle for our big meet. You could easily use the car for all the functions we have. The cruise from Carlisle to Hershey and back is probably not more than 50 miles or so.

~WB

Cory the file is 1Gig in MP4 format (so you can see it on an iPod). I may be able to shrink it into a smaller mpeg. If that's OK Jack???

Bet u by the time you factor in all the "frills" that (most) drivers consider necessities today :
HEAT in winter
AC in summer
Bitchen amp/sound sys you'll need now that you cant listen to yr engine

you're about even with gaz

well, 2 outa 3 aint bad.

Greg, on the website in the slideshow, it says he uses 3rd, 4th, and reverse.

VERY interesting build, and nice work. Would be interested in sources for some of the components. No, no, not for the Spyder, but maybe something else in the future.

I wonder if there would be a way to fit a small gas engine/generator combination in place of a couple of batteries to make it a series hybrid. I'm fascinated with those as exhibited by my obsession with the (eventual) Aptera hybrid.

Well, the video is 90 minutes of mostly talking head. But it does cover most of the common questions.

As to shifting, you just never know how something like this is going to feel. You can do the math until you go blind, but as you all know probably better than most, a car has a "feel" to it and gear ratio equations don't quite cover it.

So we kept the Prostreet Racer transmission and mated the motor to it with a lightened flywheel - retaining all the gears.

But an electric motor is quite different than an internal combustion engine. Your engines develop peak horsepower at fairly high RPM ranges - 4500-4600.

Electric motors are different. The HP rating is the amount of power they can use over a one hour period without burning the windings - NOT peak. You can easily turn 5-6 times peak for a minute or so.

But the power is available from stall (0 rpm) up. I can make 160 HP at 1 rpm.

So I almost always take off in 3rd gear. It will accelerate to about 80 km/h in between 5 and 6 seconds. I usually shift there to 4th gear. And that gives me another "acceleration band" up to about 130 km/h.

I could easily reverse the motor electrically. But there are some rather mundane issues. For one, the transmission has the switch to turn on the backup light. Second, as you all must well know, with the top up on a speedster, rear visibility is less than panoramic. So I installed one of those rear view video camera license plate holders. When I put the gear shift in reverse, a foldout screen pops out of my stereo and displays this video so I can back out of the driveway around the trashcans without killing the dog.

The car does have heat. I took two of the little ceramic heaters you get at Walmart in the little $15 space heaters. They are 1500 watts each, and they have a very interesting characteristic. As they heat, their resistane increases. This decreases the amount of current. In this way, they kind of self regulate and just really can't overheat.

So I have a switch on the panel, where the starter button was, that actuates a relay, applying pack voltage to the heating elements. A dayton blower blows air through the heating elements into flexible ductwork that blows into the cockpit. It's fairly effective on a chilly evening. Though sub zero temperatures in February.... well... it IS a convertible after all....

No AC. Good stereo though. I plug in my iPhone and hear about what I want to hear. And the phone bluetooths to the stereo, so if someone calls I can talk hands free and hear them through the stereo speakers.

The video is actually pretty full length, some 90 minutes. And it is shot in 1920x1080 HD so the original is actually too big to put on even a double layer DVD. I ran off a reduction to iPhone stats. It's supposed to be streaming, but some computers do have to actually download it to view it for some reason.

Generators. Listen guys. This hybrid thing is a ruse. Most people fixate on range. I took a leisurely drive this afternoon, about 25 miles through winding black top country roads - very scenic today to a winery in Commerce Missouri with the wife - mother's day you know. We had a couple of bottles of wine there with some cheese and bread and fruit and listened to the jazz quartet they had. Drove home. No problems.

It is true that your car will go several hundred miles and mine won't. And you COULD drive yours to Carlisle across country, and I probably can't. But to tell you the truth, I would never make a long cross country in the Speedster anyway. More like an Escalade EXT.

If you will log what you really drive every day for a week, for 90% of you this will be a real eye opener. National average is 39.4 miles per day. OVER HALF the drivers in the U.S. drive less than 20 miles per day.




By all means translaate the video if you are so ambitioned.

Jack Rickard
http://web.me.com/mjrickard
http://www.ev-video.com

I don't think I would convert a real Speedster to electric. Mine is a Beck reproduction. It's actually better for conversion purposes because the fiberglass is lighter than a real Porsche, and I do like the tubular steel frame. Aside from not wanting to murder a genuine collectible car...

You CAN have all the frills. Our next project is a 2009 Mini Cooper Clubman and that's mostly to illustrate precisely how to retain the air conditioning, the existing hot water heater, power brakes, stereo, heated seats, etc. We plan on doing 13 one-hour videos in more of a how to format. We've just finished shooting one on installing Brembo large diameter drilled disk brakes on the front, and putting on some different wheels, and suspension issues that you generally do before the conversion.

The video taping is rather slowing the conversion process. But we think it will be worthwhile. This should wind up being some better than the E-mini, and you get to keep it.

Jack Rickard
http://web.me.com/mjrickard

>>The one thing I don't understand it the move towards electric cars.

Our current electrical network is overtaxed as it is and electric companies are always asking customers to conserve energy, many generating stations burn coal, oil, natural gas etc to produce electricity so, where is the advantage???

Would you rather have electricity to run your air conditioner during 90+ degree days or use that power to re-charge batteries in an electric car? Some of which will only travel roughly 50 miles before they go stone cold dead... And, if your car is solely electric, does auto club carry around a generator to recharge your ride???<<

Well, a lot going on here. First, our electric network has a bit of a problem, but electric cars won't matter to it much. An electric power system has to be able to provide the "peak" amount of electricity demanded by the customers to avoid interruptions. The peak is broadly 10 am to 10 pm, and more specifically 3:00 in the afternoon. More specifically yet, 3:00 in the afternoon in July.

Once they meet peak, they have another problem. Electric power plants don't have an ignition key switch. You don't just shut them off at night. In fact, they can take a week to shut down, and another one to fire up. So what do they do with the electricity at night? If you check, you'll find you can buy it cheaper then because they actually suffer from excess capacity then. And electric cars almost uniformly are charged at NIGHT, during the lowest periods of electric use.

Yes, they do burn coal, natural gas, wind, solar etc. to make electricity. On a national average, this produces 1.35 pounds of CO2 per killowat hour. It takes about 4 kwh to travel as far in an electric car as a car can go on a gallon of gas. So we have 6.5 lbs of CO2 from electric, or 19.5 lbs from burning the gallon of gas. And of course the gasoline has to be REFINED and delivered to the gas station. So it's a huge advantage there.

But the real "advantage" is just about efficiency. The gallon of gasoline has an energy equivalent of 32.77 kwH of electricity and produces an average 21.3 miles of forward motion. An electric car uses about 5 kwH of energy to go the same distance - about 1/7th the total energy. That's where most of the "advantages" derive from.

Electric motors are just more efficient than Otto cycle internal combustion engines.

I'm not denigrating the roar of the engine and the smell of the oil. But electric drive IS an alternative and for some, attractive.

Jack Rickard
http://web.me.com/mjrickard

Jack, I do find electric cars attractive in many ways, but I guess I am "fixated on range". My recent trip to the Smokies is a case in point. Even if I trailored the car to the B&B I stayed at, the main cruise day easily exceeded 100 miles, much of it hilly. Having a sports car that couldn't do that doesn't make much sense. Of course that point is moot if you limit the use to pure commuter cars. Then it may make sense for many people.

Yes, I agree. If you use your speedster for long trips through the mountains and cross country driving, much as the motorcycle enthusiasts do, an electric version makes no sense at all. Until the entire country is riddled with quick charge stations, it just won't.

For me, I just don't like the creature comforts sufficiently to do a long drive in a speedster. I drive it around town, and maybe once a week go for a "cruise" in the country on winding hilly blacktop roads- usually for an hour or 90 minutes. It works fine for that.

And Porsche purists are just never going to warm up to electric cars. It not only doesn't have the Porsche noise, it doesn't have ANY appreciable noise. You don't do much shifting. So it's really a different, and for some I would think, a lesser experience.

For me, the Speedster was just an ideal first conversion because it is light, strong, and attractive. Our next conversion is actually a Mini Cooper. And I have a 1960 MGA slotted for after that.

But I do love the Speedster. So I thought I would share what we were doing, and perhaps locate other Speedster guys who were doing EV conversions. So far, not apparently.

I checked JPS website and saw nothing about an electric version.

Jack RIckard

How about making the motor noise through a speaker system and still running electric....and....a few drops of oil drips through a special dripper system...and....a oil smoke burner system to belch out some smoke....and....

We all appreciate your sharing of this project, and I would certainly like you to keep us posted as things progress. I sometimes wonder if the government will restrict our hobby so much at some point that cars like yours are the better choice. I'll still want some sort of series hybrid (extended-range electric) so that I can do an all day cruise, but I could learn to do it silently :-) I look forward to hearing about the MINI and MGA projects.

Mike - Or baseball cards rubbing agains 5 spoke Fuchs.

Yeah.... I'm sure that's where my Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris cards ended up !

Jack,

Contact Mike or Todd at Green Rides in Campbell, CA. www.greenridesca.com
They have had several ev conversions done to my speedsters and spyders for customers and could possibly share some contacts.

Jack is love the video. I agree on going green and this was really cool.

Is you Beck Merlot? I never saw that color before but looks great.

Thanks again