Designing an FE Car from the ground up.

[The Toecutter]

The Tatra screams to be converted to electric. Just look at it!

Imagine copying that design, slightly raising the ride height so you can have a huge lead acid battery pack sunk into the floor. With a few aerodynamic improvements, perhaps a .18 Cd or so can be achieved.

This would get an electric that could do 200 miles per charge on lead acid batteries at highway speeds, if you have a car weighing 4,500 pounds with 2,000-2,500 of that in batteries. With a Zilla 2k controller, twin netgain 9" motors coupled to a Ford 9-inch differential and configured to allow a series/parallel shift, you could have a car that needed no transmission, and did 0-60 mph in around 5 seconds. Not one drop of gas needed. The conversion really wouldn't be that expensive either. Even if all the components like the Zilla controller and PFC charger remained hand-built, the electric components wouldn't cost any more than ~$17k, including the huge *** amount of AGM batteries. With mass production of car and parts, we'd have the possibility of a $20-25k luxury car that was pure electric, accelerated like a Ferrari, could seat 6 overweight adults, go 200 miles per charge, and have operating costs lower than even today's hybrids.

Or you could use a V8 diesel platform, and have a 50 mpg luxury/muscle car of sorts, also sold for around $18-20k.

A small inline 4 cylinder turbodiesel of about 150 horsepower would provide more sedate acceleration like a normal car, but easily allow 100+ mpg highway. Would be pretty damned good for a full size car! Could probably be done for around $12k.


Mind you, if such cars were ever built, they could fetch more money than that given what the demand for them would be, but the entire point would be to keep them affordable to begin with.

[Mighty Mira]

Originally Posted by The Toecutter

The Tatra screams to be converted to electric. Just look at it!

I'm seeing a lot of chassis that scream to be converted to electric (with an appropriate shell of course). Especially now that you have clued me in to the necessity of being able to cart a large load of golf cart batteries. One of which is the subaru Brumby, which can carry a payload of 550kg.