Anyone electrifying?

[Blmpkn]

I'm just gonna go all Gandalf and ride some giant eagles

 

[Chapap]

Obviously, you just read my post above.

I suppose in the end is the same thing isn’t it.

 

[don4331]

How much efficiency loss comes from the transmission. Range is an issue already, why exacerbate it? If an elec motor can be practicable from 0 to 2000 (or whatever) rpm, why complicate it with a transmission? They definitely could use less computerization tho.

Manual transmission is 94-98% efficient; modern lockup automatic is 85-95%.

 

[Chapap]

I'm just gonna go all Gandalf and ride some giant eagles

Not allowed. Is the journey that counts.

 

[don4331]

@Blmpkn can have his eagle

 

[Blmpkn]

@Blmpkn can have his eagle
View attachment 83041View attachment 83041

Wanted one ever since I was a kid. I saw a couple of whatever the 2 door ones are called over the summer.. so jelous.

 

[1990RangerinSK]

Wanted one ever since I was a kid. I saw a couple of whatever the 2 door ones are called over the summer.. so jelous.

That would be a Gremlin, I believe. Or it could be a Pacer. But, the Eagle also had a two door sedan.

 

[rusty ol ranger]

That would be a Gremlin, I believe. Or it could be a Pacer. But, the Eagle also had a two door sedan.

Gremlin and pacers were before the eagles and were 2wd and just came in two doors

 

[stmitch]

Except making a hybrid wouldn't be anywhere near that easy. The packaging alone would make it so much more difficult and impractical than a full EV conversion. Sure, go ahead and attach electric motors to the undriven axle. Wait how are you going to do that? It's going go take a complete redesign of the suspension. Even if you did that your going to need the space occupied by the ICE drivetrain and it's supporting equipment to locate the controllers and batteries. Even if you limit the range to 40-50.miles, it's still going to take a lot of space. By the time you put that much effort into building a hybrid, you're nearly at the work required for a full EV conversion.

Contrary to what someone posted previously, you do not have to start from the frame up, that's how Ford (or who ever built that truck) opted to do it. Generally you would reconfigure battery packs to fit into the existing frame and structure of the recieving vehicle. Actually on a full frame vehicle like a truck, once you remove the original drivetrain and associated equipment, you'll have a whole lot of space for batteries and controllers. The challenge would be figuring out how you were going to do motors. The most practical being an electric motor driving original axle, or swap in a Tesla style motor and axle assembly.

Hybrid, or full EV retrofits would be much easier with something like the Magna EBeam:

You can't just split an EV battery easily to fit into an older chassis without giving up a lot of benefits and doing tons of work. That's why lots of these EV conversions that we see use unmodified battery packs from existing EVs. OEMs spend tens of thousands of man hours on controlling temps within EV batteries. The batteries have to be cooled/warmed at different times, under different conditions. Temps during charging and discharging are massively impactful to overall battery life. If you split a battery up to make it easier to package, then you have to set up all of that cooling/heating from scratch. Not just the hardware to do it (battery cases, coolant pumps/lines, etc), but the software as well (charging ramp rates, temperature management, throttling performance back over time, etc).

 

[stmitch]

So, Ford did the "Eluminator" concept truck I posted earlier in the thread which was more or less unmodified Mach E hardware. GM did something similar with their "E-10" Sema truck using Bolt bits. It's a bit more customized, with 2 electric motors ($4100 each) in the front driving power through a traditional auto trans to the rear wheels only. And it uses two Bolt battery packs ($12k each).

If you look at a Bolt battery pack, you can see that they simply stacked two packs 180 degrees apart

 

[stmitch]

If you're interested in seeing a swap come together, you can watch a Squarebody C10 get turned into an EV using a bunch of Tesla parts here:

Again, the strategy is to keep the factory battery pack intact, and then have a custom frame to integrate the battery pack, motors, suspension and body:

 

[stmitch]

ICON are the only ones that I've seen who tackled splitting the battery up in their Tesla powered Mercury. They started with an 85kwh battery pack. Not sure if they still have the same capacity or not after splitting it up, but they estimate a 150-200 mile range which would be much lower than the ~260 mile range the Tesla would have with this battery pack. Some of that is worse aero, some of it comes from drivetrain inefficiency (driveshaft and ring/pinion differential) but I'm guessing a chunk of it also comes from splitting the battery up.

ICON4x4 • PAST PROJECTS

Icon4x4 PAST PROJECTS

www.icon4x4.com

Again, they used a full custom chassis to make it all work together:

But they chose to split the battery, with some in the "engine" bay, and some in the trunk/passenger compartment:

 

[don4331]

ICON are the only ones that I've seen who tackled splitting the battery up in their Tesla powered Mercury. They started with an 85kwh battery pack. Not sure if they still have the same capacity or not after splitting it up, but they estimate a 150-200 mile range which would be much lower than the ~260 mile range the Tesla would have with this battery pack. Some of that is worse aero, some of it comes from drivetrain inefficiency (driveshaft and ring/pinion differential) but I'm guessing a chunk of it also comes from splitting the battery up.

ICON4x4 • PAST PROJECTS

Icon4x4 PAST PROJECTS

www.icon4x4.com

Given Tesla cars have the best Cd of any cars out there (0.23), and even Chev Bolt is ~0.31, I'd put the majority of the difference down to aero - the Merc has Cd greater than 0.4. Telsa's class 8 truck suffers same - the aero of 18 wheeler is 0.65 and they magically reduce frontal area.

But we don't need 200hp electric engines @ $4k and 60 kWh battery backs @ $12k for a PHEV conversion. 65 hp (Ford Escape Hybrid motor) and 14.4 kWh battery back (haven't found cost for Ford parts, but the weight is ~250lbs). My $10 gets you the parts...

 

[Roert42]

I like how those battery packs are made up to look like an engine.

 

[stmitch]

Given Tesla cars have the best Cd of any cars out there (0.23), and even Chev Bolt is ~0.31, I'd put the majority of the difference down to aero - the Merc has Cd greater than 0.4. Telsa's class 8 truck suffers same - the aero of 18 wheeler is 0.65 and they magically reduce frontal area.

Aero is a big deal for sure, but from what I can see in teardown videos a Tesla 85kwh battery pack has 14 separate "modules" within. I only count 12 modules in this ICON Merc. (5 in the rear and 7 up front). It's possible that they're hiding the other 2 somewhere that I haven't seen in pics, but I'm speculating that they may not have fit them into the car, or they used a smaller battery to start and the literature that I read was incorrect. That would be about 14% reduced capacity right off the top.

The larger point was that splitting up modern BEV battery packs isn't easy, and probably has drawbacks to performance, range, longevity, etc...

But we don't need 200hp electric engines @ $4k and 60 kWh battery backs @ $12k for a PHEV conversion. 65 hp (Ford Escape Hybrid motor) and 14.4 kWh battery back (haven't found cost for Ford parts, but the weight is ~250lbs). My $10 gets you the parts...

I'm a big proponent of PHEVs. I really like my Fusion Energi, and if Ford sees fit to offer a Maverick PHEV I'd be very, very tempted to give them lots of dollars. PHEV conversions could be pretty cool. I imagine the software side of things could get pretty complex though. Making the transition between ICE and EV seamless would be really tricky if they were two totally separate systems and the ICE wasn't intended for a hybrid or PHEV setup from the start. A bunch of the gains from hybrids come from the ICE being off completely at idle and low speed acceleration. In a PHEV retrofit you'd have to have an automated way to control when the ICE comes on/shuts off and the same for the EV components. And of course the hardware has to be appropriate for that type of cycling as well.