How to Build an Electric Car

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and learn how to build a electric car. The good news is that it’s not as hard as you think. I’ve personally done my own electric car conversion and have helped four of my friends build a electric car. It took us roughly two weekends to do each conversion.

To start out with we needed a car. I decided to use an old toyota corrolla to start out with. You should be able to find the motor needed on eBay, so I signed up for an account. I found the motor I needed within 10 minutes of searching! It cost me roughly $65 (including shipping and handling). Afterwards I was supposed to go out and find 12 deep cycle 12 volt batteries. If I was to buy them brand new they would have cost me in excess of $1000, but there are two ways to find free batteries. Let me tell you… free batteries for your electric car really do exist and they’re not that hard to find either! Go to your local golf course and ask them if they have any old batteries from their golf carts. After getting the batteries and the motor for the electric car all we had to do was pick up some assorted nuts and bolts as well as some electronics.

After we got the motor out (not as hard as you think) we had to hook up the electric motor to the drive shaft and mount the motor.This part was really cool, because it was starting to look like an electric car. After the motor was mounted it was time to put the batteries in the car. I managed to fit all 12 batteries under the hood so I still had trunk space left.

Hooking up the electronics wasn’t that hard either. All that I really needed to do was hook up a potentiometer (this controls how much electricity flows to your motor) to the gas pedal. You can also hook up an amp meter on the dashboard of your car so you can see how much of a charge you have left.

I love my electric car and so do my friends. Instead of costing us $150 a month on gas it costs us less than $20 per month to drive our electric cars… and they don’t make a sound! You can’t get much better than that.

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