Small electric car company in Jackson Michigan
 

http://blog.mlive.com/citpat/2008/05...ke_charge.html

Mr. Nicholls stopped buy my place of work and showed us the saturn that the recently converted to electric. They used the stock manual trans with a 19 hp electric motor and 18 lead acid batteries (1200 lbs). It's a brush motor with a Curtis controller (I think, it was upside down). They haven't pushed it to check the range yet, but he said they have taken several highway trips from Jackson to Leslie and back (about 30 mile round trip). It can supposedly reach highway speeds, but accelerates slowly. They have a vacuum pump system for the brakes and such in the trunk. There's a lawn mower battery for the 12v devices that is charged off a conventional alternator that is belt driven of the shaft between the motor and trans.

I think it's great that they are doing this here in Jackson! They are currently converting 5 other cars, A Ford tempo, other Saturns and Vw jetta.

They are there to give help if your doing your own conversion; like machining parts, to selling full conversion kits, you can bring in your car and they will convert it, or you can buy a car that they already converted for you.

I rode my electric scooter over to the shop where they do the conversions the other day. They had a couple saturn SL(s) and Sc(s) in the works. A friend of the owner was there helping out. He has a completed saturn SC that he drove in.

It has inspired me into thinking about building an electric car :thumbup:. The saturns aren't a half-bad choice. They are much easier to find than metro type cars around here, and they have the plastic rust proof dent resistant body panels (steel parts still need checked out underneath though). Did they only come with power steering? I forgot to see how they did the steering on thier electric cars.

I've been looking for a project car :).

Seems a little crude to be converting electric cars the same way people were converting them in the 1990's, after all you can get modern DC-DC converters that will do a much better job of keeping the 12v battery topped off and use less energy in doing so and they don't add any drag to the drive train.