Ev e21

[amarino]

Just saw this posted. https://jalopnik.com/two-bmw-electri...con-1846648544

[okieflats]

Most of those homebuilt EV conversions aren't any good.

What does an I3 cost by the way? Say like the one in the article 2014 I3 used?

$12 to $16k it seems. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/ctd...303371311.html

[autox320]

I honestly can't wait for better "kits" to do old school car swaps to EV. It's coming as we all discussed in another thread somewhere.

IMO we seriously looked at an i3. Only thing cool about it is carbon fiber frame chassis. Otherwise none of it makes sense and a terrible car. A prius would be a better choice. Still want a tesla model 3 performance. With eibach and KW making suspension kits, along with aftermarket better wheels to put actual tires on it, it's still the clear winner to me. It's "almost" there for me. Replacement parts available and service still need catching up quite a ways after the car is sorted. Tesla sucks for that.

[allan633]

Hey okieflats, I paid $7k for my 107k mile, loaded i3. It's probably worth $9-10k. It's the second one I've bought under $9k, both out of the SF bay area. Seem to be a lot of low priced ones there. They really dropped in price last year, maybe because gas was so cheap.
I agree with you about many ev conversions' quality, they can be pretty crude. And cheap! With the modern batteries now available though, there's such a tailwind. My ev21 is quicker, lighter and even better balanced than my m42 powered e21. It's pretty fun!

[autox320]

Hey okieflats, I paid $7k for my 107k mile, loaded i3. It's probably worth $9-10k. It's the second one I've bought under $9k, both out of the SF bay area. Seem to be a lot of low priced ones there. They really dropped in price last year, maybe because gas was so cheap.
I agree with you about many ev conversions' quality, they can be pretty crude. And cheap! With the modern batteries now available though, there's such a tailwind. My ev21 is quicker, lighter and even better balanced than my m42 powered e21. It's pretty fun!

I'd totally pimp a EV e21. My work commute is 20min each way.

Allan maybe share more pics/info of your EV conversion here? There's only so much to see or wrote about in the article. For those of us not EV diy inclined.

[amarino]

+1 Would love to see more pics / info on the conversion process, how you mated it to the 5 speed in the E21? Where you put the batteries (trunk / gas tank location)?

I think EV converting my E21 is on my bucket list of items. Probably won't get around to it for 5 or more years though.

[allan633]

Will do if I can figure out how to post pictures. It seems to have changed since the last time I was on here.
For now, batteries are mostly where gas tanks were so they're as low as I could get them. About 400 lb all in all, biased toward the right side of the car as much as possible to counter my weight.
The adapter came from a 2002 conversion that was done in Santa Cruz about 30 years ago. It's really crude but it works perfectly. I've always spent a lot of money on custom adapters but never again. This thing is made of flat aluminum plate. Could easily be made at home.
The car is running on 185/70/13s, stock s suspension with very cut springs because of the much lighter weight up front, antique Bilstein's all around. It definitely corners as well as my m42 car which has 205/50/15s on it. It's about a 100 lb lighter in front than it is in the back so it feels like it has power steering. The m42 car is about 100 lb heavier in front.
I'll work on learning how to do the pictures. Any advice on that would be great!

[autox320]

Will do if I can figure out how to post pictures. It seems to have changed since the last time I was on here.
For now, batteries are mostly where gas tanks were so they're as low as I could get them. About 400 lb all in all, biased toward the right side of the car as much as possible to counter my weight.
The adapter came from a 2002 conversion that was done in Santa Cruz about 30 years ago. It's really crude but it works perfectly. I've always spent a lot of money on custom adapters but never again. This thing is made of flat aluminum plate. Could easily be made at home.
The car is running on 185/70/13s, stock s suspension with very cut springs because of the much lighter weight up front, antique Bilstein's all around. It definitely corners as well as my m42 car which has 205/50/15s on it. It's about a 100 lb lighter in front than it is in the back so it feels like it has power steering. The m42 car is about 100 lb heavier in front.
I'll work on learning how to do the pictures. Any advice on that would be great!

Sweet. The BF server should allow uploads of your photos. There's always outside hosting as well. Not sure on others but I use google photos to host my pics (free till June this year btw guys).
I then hotlink with them. I'm sure they don't like it but it works old school.

[okieflats]

I took an EV conversion class at the local JC, project was converting a Ford Focus, with some of the funding coming from the Triple-A (AAA). This fire resulted.



https://www.pressdemocrat.com/articl...-destroys-car/

96 lithium cells at about 3.12 volts each wired in series.

[okieflats]

Class was taught by this fellow, Peter Oliver, of "Make Mine Electric"

http://www.makemineelectric.com/vehicles.html

Screenshot (320).png

[autox320]

Damn that doesn't inspire confidence. Even Tesla isn't without a fiery past though.

Was it a charging issue? I assume since was going to test drive it was maybe being charged up before the big day. Had a quick chuckle about the mention of no sprinkler system cause wouldn't make a difference. Hence hours of funny videos of chinese ebike fires and people trying to use water to put them out.

Sidebar but another cool entry is converting your bicycle with a bafang chinese power kit. They are technically illegal in some areas having a additional thumb throttle control and speeds over 20mph easily (up to 40's actually).

Thoughts of dabbling with it anyways gets crushed when realize nobody pays attention to motorcycles here more less bikes and probably get killed too fast

[okieflats]

No the vehicle was not even completed, not being charged. I believe it was just a short circuit. Happened in the middle of the night, just sitting there. The "design" if you can call it that was screwed up.

The plan was, Ford Focus, FWD, the electric motor, under the hood attached to the FWD transmission. A metal rack of Lithium cells on top of the motor. Another rack of Lithium cells, all cells laying sideways this time put under the car in the "rear axle area" where the gas tank had been. Another batch of cells was to be mounted in the trunk.

I think it was the ones mounted sideways in a rack made of angle iron installed under the car that shorted. This was not my idea or design. Every semester a new group of students would do some more work on this, both design (with instructor taking the lead on that) and assembly. I mainly enjoyed the motor installation, the adapter plate so the motor could bolt to the bell housing, and the motor shaft adapter, so you could use the original flywheel and clutch.

Then my semester was over, new classes came, and battery cell racks welded up, they figured how to run wires so they all get hooked up in series to get power to the controller. I figure some of the cells layuing on their side were close to shorting on the metal rack, or the wires connecting them up.

The cause of the fire was not determined. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Peter Oliver fiberglass Porsche speedster has some cells up front in the trunk, more cells behind the seats. That's what I do not like about EV conversions, the haphazard way of locating the cells.

Using the floor as a big, flat, low center of gravity battery location is what makes sense.

[okieflats]

I see a lot of those bikes with the Chinese motors on them. Yes they go on the streets, and also the dedicated bike trails where no motor vehicles are allowed.

[allan633]

When I was shopping for scrap vehicles for this project, the story I heard over and over again was something like "yeah the controller and motor are just fine because the battery fire was in the other end of the vehicle" or "yeah the adapter is still okay but my garage isn't so good..."
All of those stories had something to do with using take-out lithium-ion batteries, not lithium iron phosphate, and no battery management system. Scary.
Okieflats, your experience seems to be related to a short but still involved a thermal runaway. Still scary.
The statistics I read about though say there are about 10 times the gasoline car fires per capita compared to electric car fires. They just don't make the news in the same way. I don't know how true that is but it all seems to come down to due caution, gas or electric.
Still working on those pictures....

[allan633]

Ev21 pictures finally. Let's see how this works out!
These are the batteries in the back seat, 30 on each side where the gas tanks were, another group of 30 behind them leaning forward to get their weight as low and forward as possible. They are CALB 72 amp, 2 parallel, 45 series arrangement for 144 amp hour 144 volt array. This isn't the optimum setup but I got a hell of a deal on the batteries. The silver box is the Orion BMS2 battery management system. It automatically balances the batteries every time they're charged and monitors dozens of parameters and functions. It has CAN programming and output and can set a DTC or even shut off the car if something is going wrong with the batteries during either charge or discharge.
You can see the adapter between the motor and transmission.
This is the hot water heater system which uses a 1500 watt AC thermo-pump (block heater for a large IC engine) running on 144 DC to send instant hot water through the stock heater core. It's regulated by an adjustable snap disc so it turns on and off as heat is demanded.
Charger is in the trunk and the j1772 standard charging plug is of course in the gas filler.

[autox320]

Thanks for sharing more pics. Looks great to me. Simplicity of the adapter is a win, I'd definitely make that. I think only thing I'd do different is make a permeant mount rack for the batts so didn't have to use seatbelts Since not afraid of the grinder would recess them in the rear seat pans where the tanks actually were for even better weight placement.

With torque of electric do you start out in second gear?

This is going on my bucket list; convert daily e21/e30 for electric.

[allan633]

Thanks autox320! I pretty much start out in third or fourth gear, maybe fifth, second only if I'm hot-dogging, never first. Third is good to 60 but there's not much power up there, no torque. You upshift to get back into higher torque output of the dc motor. I use a clutch, some conversions don't. It makes for a much quicker, more normal feeling shift BUT, I can easily overpower and make it slip. It's a new f&s 215 with an extra 1mm step down at the flange for a little more clamping force. I either need to skip the clutch or go to 228 in the future to fix this slipping, but no hurry, that's what 2nd is good for.
The grinder and I are pretty good friends by now :-). The bottoms of the steel battery frames go to the same level as the former bottom of the tanks.
The seat belts actually do a good job. They anchor to the steel frame, are made to support way more than what the batteries weigh and are engineered to do it in an impact or rollover. Nice price too and no metal fasteners in the boxes for hinges or latches.
These batteries need mechanical support on their sides so that they don't balloon over time so they have steel support all around. The boxes are glued abs with polycarbonate lids, 6 computer fans (controlled by the bms) in the lids, vent holes in the sides. Strong, light weight and built from the huge boxes from one of the scrap cars. Those boxes had carried lead acids at 4 times the weight of these batteries since 2008 with no problems. Plenty good enough and very (key design word here) cheap!
There are so many old conversions that need new batteries on evfinder.com, all over the country, great place to start.

[allan633]

Another neat trick that the BMS does, it'll also turn the battery box fans on if the cabin air is warmer than the batteries in order to help heat them up in winter. The hot water heat starts blowing at full temperature within 2 minutes of startup so this happens fairly often when it's cold.

[meatballbandit]

autox320 did you ever move forward on this? Allan and I are communicating now about an E21 I'm looking to convert similar to his. I inherited the E21 from my late cousin and am planning to take a wrench to it this year.

[autox320]

autox320 did you ever move forward on this? Allan and I are communicating now about an E21 I'm looking to convert similar to his. I inherited the E21 from my late cousin and am planning to take a wrench to it this year.

No just have my lead race gas burning high comp race car.

I've the 77' though planning to put up for sale this spring. https://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/s...i-84-059-miles

My buddy just found a nice 82'is he may want work on but will keep it IC. The EV conversion is still intriguing for local commuting. Right now I just daily a 91' 318is as my go to car. Just can't seem to get out of the "poor mans m3". Just like it too much even compared to newer vehicles. The suv sits. If the ride to work wasn't so dangerous I've thought about bafang ebiking in summer but would probably be killed by traffic.

If make progress do share/make a thread. The days of forum posting and sharing like book reading/archiving is dwindling.

[sonomaGTLN2]

The days of forum posting and sharing like book reading/archiving is dwindling.

Sadly I agree, but maybe it's just on older model BMW's...an E90 forum I use at (another site) seems to be pretty active.

As automotive enthusiasts we have to help the Reddit folks who constantly post "is my car broke", "what mods should I do to my mom's corolla" see the light with taking on long term projects...something I am trying to do with my YT videos.