submitted: Nov 3rd 2008 | by: andrew1056 | Total views: 12 | Word Count: 494 | |

I find it quite funny that the price of oil is almost near the price it was over 4 years ago. If I remember correctly we were paying quite a bit less for gasoline as well. What they are telling us is that it now takes quite a bit more money to produce gasoline so we won't be paying lower prices ever again.

That's why I did a gas to electric car conversion. I was a little bit scared at first because I didn't really understand how easy it really is. It really is as simple as taking the engine and transmission out and dropping the electric motor and batteries in. There are a couple more steps, but they are easy as well.

To begin with I was going to use my car which was a 1998 Nissan Altima for the conversion. It's a fairly big car and there is lots of space underneath the hood to put the battery bank. I got my friend to help me one day to hoist the engine and transmission out of the car. I recommend getting a friend to help with this step as it makes the whole process a lot simpler.

After the car was ready for the conversion I went out and bought all of the parts that I needed. The motor was purchased on eBay for around $65 (including shipping and handling). I was also able to obtain 14 deep cycle 12 volt batteries for free. It's quite a simple trick really. I'm sure you don't live to far away from a golf course. Golf courses usually have electric powered golf carts and they swap the batteries out every two years or so as part of their maintenance practices. The good thing about this is that the batteries still have several years of life left in them. All you need to do is go ask at a couple golf courses and you should be able to find enough batteries to power your car.

In addition to the batteries you will also need a charge controller, a potentiometer, and some assorted nuts and bolts from your local hardware store. It is vital that you have a charge controller and potentiometer because one makes sure your batteries don't overcharge and explode and the other enables you to control the speed of the car by controlling the amount of electricity that flows to the motor.

After you have those parts it's simply a matter of mounting the motor to the driveshaft and mounting the batteries under the hood. If all of the batteries don't fit you may need to squeeze some of them into the trunk. Next, it's a matter of hooking the charge controller up to the batteries and hooking the batteries up to the potentiometer and then to the motor. The potentiometer is mounted to your gas pedal so that it functions in the same way a regular car does.

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If you're interested in building your own electric car visit this website: Gas To Electric Car Conversion

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