[CRWsound]

This is maybe a bit off-topic, but it's directly for Paul and the issue of registering the car as an EV for insurance reasons.

It's true: if you have an accident and the insurance is for an ICE car, they could shut you down right then - it's not the car you're driving. But there's good news!

I live in Seattle also, so this info applies. I've pondered doing an EV mod to a car and wondered about registering it...figured it would be hideously expensive or annoyingly difficult. Not so. We recently bought a salvage car in Oregon, and in registering it up here found that it had to be re-certified as street worthy - same as when you've modified a vehicle to be an EV. And I mean EXACTLY the same, the process you go through is identical whenever you've done any kind of heavy modification to a car that changes its status (or if the car was salvage like ours).

You have to take any vehicle you want to be certified to the Washington State Patrol office, and you'll have to call ahead and make an appointment - we had to wait about a week. What they wanted to see was that the car ran, and the lights worked, and they want to see the receipts for major component parts that you've bought to make the car run. In our case, we had to buy a MAS airflow sensor for the engine, that was it (we were leaving it as an ICE car). For some reason they won't accept receipts for parts bought over the internet, including e-bay, so I guess just don't show those receipts.

My wife took the car in, and it's a little banged up of course, but she just showed the guy our single receipt, he walked around the car once, and started filling out paperwork. She was done in 10 minutes. And here's the best part - it was free! It costs literally no money to get your car's status changed to reflect what it ACTUALLY is. Now I can't vouch for if your insurance rates will change, that part I don't know. But getting it street legal as an EV is pretty much a non-issue in Washington state. We just had to pay to get the car licensed in our state, just like we would have had to do with a new car, once it had been cleared as street legal by WSP.

Thought you might want to know. BTW, here's WSPs web page describing the process:

(shoot, since this is my first post here I can't post a link in the message, so I'll have to post it incognito)

www dot wsp dot wa dot gov / traveler / vinspect dot htm

Sorry this info is coming to you so late in your process, I just stumbled across your thread...and read all 51 pages of it in one go. Well done dude.

Chris