Jon "Sheer" Pullen wrote: > QM is 3100 lbs - does anyone have any suggestions for > 'testing 0-60 with equipment you can find in your own home'?
A stopwatch and a clear section of flat road? ;^> > But one can safely assume that if a automaker were to mass > produce a car, they would use components rated for much > higher weight stress and thusly the vehicle would not be over > it's GVWR. Ummm... I'm not sure I'm following you here; are you saying that an automaker would build the car with a higher GVWR in the first place, or that surely the automaker overbuilt the car you choose for conversion such that actually loading it to or beyond the GVWR really isn't over taxing it? If the latter, I can only state with conviction: GVWR is GVWR if you are at or over it, there you are. ;^> We can be reasonably certain that the automaker does overbuild the vehicle, but we have little or no way of knowing what is the limiting factor that will bite us first, especially when most EV conversions require some modification of the vehicle structure for battery boxes, and/or introduce weight loads where the manufacturer may not have anticipated them. For some vehicles, such as pickups, you may be able to compare components between your vehicle and a model with a higher GVRW and identify with some certainty which components need to be transferred to your model to have a high probability of endowing it with a similar effective GVWR. > I suppose if I were selling my car [which at one point I > wanted to do, before I learned about what happened to > everybody else who tried ;-)] the GVWR issue would be a > show-stopper, since I couldn't honestly claim it was a > 4-passenger car. 'Um, it's a 3-passenger, it just looks like > a 4-passenger'. However, I'm not selling my car, and I feel > no pangs at ignoring GVWR. I suspect most prospective buyers wouldn't be that sensitive to the GVWR issue, unfortunately. If you think your "3-passenger, looks like a 4-passenger" situation is difficult to explain, just think of the poor fellow who tries to sell a pickup conversion (batteries under the bed) that is at GVWR without the driver onboard! ;^> (Umm, no, actually, it is *not* a pickup truck, the bed is empty, but the truck is *fully* loaded; oh, and about that bench seat up front... ;^) > That's a interesting point and one that I will definately > consider. However, I have already put improvements in place > to compensate for the additional weight (thicker sway bars, > stiffer shocks, regen, etc) so I don't think the handling is > severely compromised. Ah yes, but what about where all these various bits attach to the frame of the car, or where the unibody 'frame' attaches to the sheet metal, etc.; do you know what effect overloading might have on them in terms of accelerated wear, and fatique failure? (These are especially important considerations when one gets into aluminum construction vehicles, by the way, since aluminum has some rather unforgiving behaviours relative to steel.) > The batteries are good to -15.. Like I said... most (or at least much) of the [North] American mid-west. > Once more, because I don't think people have noticed this: > _the batteries do not warm up when they charge_. So, while > achiving plugging in in the middle of the day would require a > temp corrected charger, that's all it would require. But they do warm up somewhat on discharge, and if they start off in a 90-100F+ ambient, you could very well require some cooling before you could safely plug them in to charge immediately upon reaching your destination. > > Perhaps, but not necessarily by much. I WAGged 250Wh/mi for the > > NaNiCl Sprint to get >60mi range, but I notice you report > > 160-200Wh/mi for QM > > Um, no. 200-230. Really? Back on March 6, 2002 you wrote: > QM [with 4AWG interconnects, remember!] gets 160 - 200 > wh/mile on the streets (average over ten days of driving) - > the wh goes up dramatically with hills (hence the large > variation), proof that regen isn't a perfect cure just yet.. > throw another person in the car, and the wh goes up to about > 230 with hills. So, you are now reporting that QM is getting less efficient as it is used? > I wouldn't be getting the range I am except > that Evercel overspec'd their batteries. (i.e. I can get more > than 84 AH out of them) I'm told that as they age, I will > lose some of this 'excess' capacity, so probably by the end > of it's life QM will be a 80 mile range car. I can live with that. You reported previously having been informed that the Evercels would deliver ~89Ah for the first 50 cycles, then drop to the rated 83Ah after that; surely you are into the 83Ah portion of their life by now?. It is not so much that Evercel over-spec'ced their batteries you know: even Bob Brandt's book illustrates similar behaviour from the much maligned lead-acid battery; the flooded PbA starts off at less than rated capacity, cycles up to >100% of rated, stays there a while, then starts dropping off at an increasing rate until plummeting shortly after hitting the 80% of rated capacity end-of-life point. It just happens that you don't appear to have to cycle the Evercels up to their max capacity point; they do it 'out of the box'. Cheers, Roger.
