OEVA: [ Home ] Oregon Electric Vehicle Association is the Portland Oregon Electric Vehicle Association.
It does take a bit of a budget to put an electric drive train in a vehicle that was designed for a gasoline drive train, but it can be done,
300mpg.org is Ben Nelson's web site where he sells his DVD on building your own electric car, cheap and I'm sure he would love it if you bought one and helped him support his family, otherwise he has most of his video clips on Youtube for free.
But buying a new electric motor for $1,200 to $3,500 is out of budget for some people, that is why I suggested buying a used forklift motor or buying a motor from someone who gave up on their project, both of them are going to be much cheaper then a new motor.
You can also look at the Open Revolt motor speed controller
Welcome to PaulandSabrinasEVstuff.com Electric Motor Controllers instead of spending, again, $1,500 to $4,000 for a motor speed controller, that will also help keep your costs down.
Batteries... a few people are lucky enough to find good used batteries, but you often have to work for them, you have to know the right people and then sort out the good from the bad and at that point you are still running on used batteries, but if you are unsure of what you are doing then that might be a good way to go because you can always replace them later with new or better batteries.
But the links to other peoples cars can give you an idea of range, motor size, speed, part layout, battery pack voltage, battery type and sometimes give you an idea of issues that others have had, like Kelly Controllers tend to be a bad investment, they tend to be cheap to buy then destroy expensive parts when they malfunction.
If you look at other peoples EV's and find one that performs about like you need your car to perform you can get an idea of what you might need to do to make your project work for you.