Switch fossil combustion motor to Forklift electric motor

[ecoshailo]

Thank you Piotrsko, after the previous comments I was ready to gave up about convert the car. I saw a guy near to here in Ingersol, Ontario who has a Jeep. He converted the Jeep to electric by him self and can drive it at 120km for more than an hour. I saw the Jeep in video and doesn't seems complicated.
I never drove an electric car, but I know a bit about electricity.

vskid3, about reach highway speeds......The aveo has manual transmission 5 speeds, of course the forklift motor can't have enough RPM to reach 120km, but I was thinking that using the 4th or 5th gear I can get that speed.

I need information about witch forklift motor it's the more appropriate to reach the distance and speed. I will keep the manual transmission......that's means that I don't need a motor with 15.000 RPM

[Daox]

A 9" dc forklift motor will be fine to propel the car at freeway speeds. Your main hurdle will be a battery pack large enough to go 200km. This is a very large battery pack. Here is a little math to show what you're going to need.

Lets estimate 350 watt hours per mile (217wh/km) which is not a super conservative number, especially if you need heat or any other power consuming accessory like A/C. Take this as a best case ball park calculation as there are other factors to account for.

At 217wh/km you're going to need 200 * 217 = 43400wh. This is a 43.4 kWh pack. That is almost double the size of the Nissan Leaf pack. So, probably one of the easiest things to do would be to find yourself two junked out Nissan Leafs and use the batteries out of them. An alternative is to use Volt battery packs. Those are ~16kWh each so you'd need three of them.

Then you have to reconfigure the pack, get a battery management system, a controller, and a charger. Then make it all fit in your Aveo. That is no small task, but it is doable.

I'm going to have go agree with what vskid said about it not being worth it monetarily. I think you're looking at at least putting $10,000 - 15,000 US dollars into this build before you're done.

[ecoshailo]

Thank you Daox for your help, my budget can't be more than CAN$ 10.000...that's all I have to spend in this project, otherwise I will convert it in a down payment of a Telsa.....I got the idea because a friend of mine told me about DIY.

[Daox]

If you can get some good deals on salvage yard battery packs its doable, but its a stretch goal IMO.

[vskid3]

Originally Posted by ecoshailo

vskid3, about reach highway speeds......The aveo has manual transmission 5 speeds, of course the forklift motor can't have enough RPM to reach 120km, but I was thinking that using the 4th or 5th gear I can get that speed.

I need information about witch forklift motor it's the more appropriate to reach the distance and speed. I will keep the manual transmission......that's means that I don't need a motor with 15.000 RPM

I wasn't referring to the max RPM of the motor, I meant the HP or Kw output. Cruising at 100km/h requires much more power than at 50km/h. No number of gears will make a 5HP motor push your car at 100km/h if your car requires 10 or 15HP to maintain that speed. That's not even considering the power you would need to accelerate at a reasonable pace.

Looks like I underestimated forklift motor's power output, anyway.

Would you be doing all the work? That budget would be lucky to cover parts alone.

[puddleglum]

Power isn't the problem with using a forklift motor, it's efficiency. They are going to use more wh/km than a AC motor like all the production cars use. I agree with what has been said already the range requirement is the elephant in the room. Even if you could get a big enough pack to have a 200km range, with four people in the car, your Aveo is going to be severly overloaded. This conversion ( Electric Porsche conversion ) managed the range you want with two Volt packs, but using an AC motor and driving at less than normal highway speeds. Like Doax said, you would probably need three with a DC motor. That is 1200 lbs of batteries. Even if you could stuff them in, what hasn't been mentioned is charging them a the half way point. Unless you could get a high current charger and could leave it sit all day at a high output charging station, you wouldn't have enough charge to get home. You would never do it with a 120v charger. I'm all for forklift motor conversions, I want to do one myself. But in your case, I think you would be much better selling the Aveo and using that $10000 to get a good used Prius or some other economical car.

[oil pan 4]

0.35KwH per mile at highway speed seems very optimistic.

Electric vehicles just don't typically get used for long distance (more than 40 miles between charges).