Another EV in the garage!

[LostCause]

That's a really beautiful area.

Are those panels on solar trackers, or are they fixed?

- LostCause

[dremd]

Have you tried somebody like Hagerty for insurance? I don't know how the price would be . . . . .

Jealous of the car, Jealous of the Alt power, Jealous of the scenery Nice work!

[Ryland]

I spoke both to Hagerty and Progressive today, bypassing the insurance agent, and got different answers, one person at progressive said they only insure electric cars that have a top speed of 50mph or more, another said as long as they go over 25mph they are fine, $236 per year for liability, just over $1,000 per year for full coverage.
Hagerty said they found my file that the agent started and said that it was not turned down, but that the agent didn't fill out all the forms and that it had a note of "incomplete", and that the photos I included made my comuti-car make it appear to be in much better shape then the other comuti-car that they insure, and the guy I talked to sounded really excited that I was getting it out where the public could see it.


The panels are on a semi fixed mount, it can be adjusted for the season.

[MetroMPG]

$236 sounds good. The Forkenswift is 500 bucks a year just for 3rd party liability.

[WisJim]

My 2 cars that are insured with Hagerty (a 1971 Honda N600 and a 1965 VW double cab pickup) cost less than $300 a year for full coverage declared value with towing for BOTH of them. I realize it is a good deal, only restrictions are no drivers under 25, no business use or regular driving to work, and then the collector car restrictions that come with the licensing as collector cars. I can even take them on trips, etc., just don't use them as my daily "drive to work" car.

[WaxyChicken]

Just curious - since you have two, are you going to keep one fairly original and aeromod the other one?
(wheel covers, smoot headlights, belly pan, boat tail or trailing lip, etc?)

[Ryland]

I'm planing to keep the green one as close to stock as possible, and I don't have a set plan for the other one yet, it's frame is not long enough to make it very streamlined, but I do plan to make it go as far as possible on a charge, and I don't want to add more batteries then needed, I also plan to convert the one without a body to 72v to give it a higher top speed, using 6 12v batteries, that would cut my range down to maybe 15-20 miles but I only need a 10 mile range for going to work, or in to town and back.
my current idea for the body is to build it up out of bass wood, and thin birch ply wood, with a layer of fiberglass/epoxy over top of it, this will give me the freedom to make it any shape that the roll cage will allow, if anyone wants to give some ideas on what shape to make it, I'm open to suggestions.

[WaxyChicken]

Can you / have you posted a pic of the one w/o a body?

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by WaxyChicken

Can you / have you posted a pic of the one w/o a body?

http://community.nbtsc.org/~ryland/Citicar/ has photos, I'll add more as I have time, I don't yet have any good ones with the full body removed, but you can get a basic idea of what shape it is based off the shape of the body.

I installed the PakTrakr gauge, and it's amazing! two lines of info on a gauge that is just slightly larger then the original volt meter "fuel gauge", the top line is mostly graphs, like a bar graph "fuel gauge" with an "E" and an "F" if you want to keep it simple, or a more complex bar graph that shows the state of charge of every battery that it's monitoring, or have it cycle thru telling you the state of charge of each battery, one at a time, it can also give you this same information with numbers instead of graphics, it does this by having a hub near each bank of batteries with wires that connect to all the batteries, so when it gives you pack voltage it's giving you the total of each battery as a single battery, then adding it all together, you can also view the state of charge of each of the single batteries in the pack, so for example it's been telling me that that the last battery in the string in the front of my car is about .4 volts lower then the rest of them in that string, this seems like a very helpful tool in making the battery pack last longer, I have been keeping one line set total pack voltage, and the other line set to state of charge, I realize these are similar, but the state of charge is averaged over some amount of time, so while going up a hill I can see my voltage drop and still be able to tell if I can get home.