EV Rabbit Back On The Road

What with $5.00 a gallon diesel, I've been working towards getting my electric car back on the road so that I can save some moolah on my weekly trip to town.

Last time I took the EV into town, which was shortly after I moved here, I barely made it the 15 miles to the radio station where I work. The car was crawling by the time I made it to town. I then had to wait six hours while the car charged up from an exterior electrical outlet on the side of the studio building because I didn't want to turn up the charge current and risk blowing a circuit breaker that might be feeding something else important inside the building ("Aaaargh!, We're off the air!!!!")

Since sitting is not particularly good for lead acid batteries, even ones that are kept charged up, I decided to exercise the car and batteries on the back roads around home until I felt that it had recovered enough range to make the trip into town reliably. I started with a short trip out to the intersection at Minerva. The car was dead as a doornail after about a mile. After recharging, I tried again the next day and got three miles. Subsequent trips allowed further and further excursions until I had it up to about six miles before I had to baby it home, with a round trip of about eight miles total. Hmmm, not good, not enough to go to town.

After one eight mile trip, I pulled the cover off the batteries before charging them, and with the motor running to provide a 20 ampere load, I checked each of the Trojan T-105 golf car batteries for voltage. Most were at 5.90 to 6.02, but one was sitting at 2.13 volts! All it takes is one bad cell in a series string of eighteen batteries to throw the whole pack off range.

I had a couple of spare used-but-good T-105's that I use to run the inverter when I saw firewood, so I pulled the dud battery, and the next lowest in the pack, and replaced them with the two spares, hoping for better results.

Next trip out I better than doubled the range to 13 miles. A couple of test trips and recharging sessions showed that the new limit stayed around 13 miles. Still not good enough for a trip to town.

In conjunction with using the spare batteries, I took one of the batteries out of my electric tractor, along with the "spares" from the car into a battery shop to have the terminal posts recast. That tale is in another thread, but the battery shop ended up ruining the tractor battery. My only recourse was to put the next weakest battery I had taken out of the EV into the tractor (they use the same batteries) so that I could at least mow the yard. The range of the tractor was limited by the weak battery, so now I had a tractor with five good batteries, and one semi-dud.

More battery swapping ensued. I reasoned that since the tractor was limited by the weak battery from the car, then it wouldn't be any worse if I pulled the next five weakest batteries out of the car and switched them with the good batteries out of the trac.

It all worked out, the tractor is no worse off than it had been with the one weak batt, and now the car has a range of at least a solid 16 miles.

Yesterday, I took it on a test run up Upper North Fork road to PAWN, the site of an old-time settlement and now a hiking trailhead.

Here's a pic of my car, and s friend's similar Rabbit. He had followed me to make sure the car had enough range to get home, and also to heat up his engine so he could change his oil before heading back to Portland later in the day:

My EV is the white Rabbit in the background. The friend has taken a couple of years of part-time work to completely restore his Rabbit from a $500 beater that I found for him. New engine, bodywork, paint, headliner, and lots of scavenged wrecking yard parts to get it into the condition you see here.

Anyhow, to wrap this blather up, today I took the car into town to buy food and stop by the radio station to check up on stuff (and recharge!). I kept the car to no more than 35 MPH in third gear all the way, with no traffic following. Made it into town, ran a couple of errands, paid a bill or two, and got to the station at about 15.9 miles with the car beginning to get a little bit tired, but by no means dying.

Since I didn't have six hours worth of stuff to do while charging, I took along the supplies I needed to tack in a high current charging outlet on the electrical sub-panel that feeds the heat pump behind the studio. Took three hours to replenish the electrons, then I was back on my way home.

I now had some confidence that the car would perform adequately, so I allowed my speed to increase to 40 and sometimes 45 MPH in fourth gear, staying well ahead of a few cars following before they turned off. 14.5 miles at 27.8 ampere-hours consumption for the trip.

Guess I won't be purchasing nearly as much liquid motor fuel in the near future, and best of all, my radio station client doesn't mind paying for the juice for my trip into town.

Now if I could get the town government or some of the businesses around Old Town to install charging outlets....