Thanks for the advice, Doax. I agree with you on all things except the 70% of ICE torque one. There's no way the 1.5 had 100 ft/lbs! Probably more like 70-80. Therefore, your advice holds even more truth.
However, I have a bunch of ATF laying around, so I am using it temporarily for low speed testing and whatnot. Simply put, I was in a massive hurry to test this thing out and didn't feel like running to the store to buy gear oil! Here's a video:
I have also completed the rear battery rack:
That's right, no more back seat. My choices were to keep the useful trunk and use the useless back seat for batteries or keep the useless back seat and use the useful truck for batteries. It was an easy decision.
Next the control system and battery cables. Test drives by next week?