Electric Vehicle Conversion - 96 Toyota Tercel to 144v Plug-in Electric Car

General Goals

We wanted to convert a car into a plug-in electric vehicle for a few simple reasons:

• It could be good for the environment
• It could save on some gas money
• It keeps us from becoming hoodlums

But the most important part

• It would be really cool to actually do it

Understanding that battery technology needs time to develop, we would try to start with a standard lead-acid battery stack to try to get highway speeds for a hopeful range of 50 miles round trip so we could occassionally use it as a commuter vehicle during optimal conditions.
The problem is the general performance of batteries. Being that we are in Colorado and are subject to somewhat cold weather, we know that during the winter months our range will probably be halved.
But sometimes half-a-loaf is better than a poke in the eye.

The starter vehicle

2-Door 1996 Toyota Tercel

• Light weight
• Reasonably new for replacment body parts
• What could be more of a 'babe magnet' then a late-model sub-compact with minor cosmetic body damage?

The interior was in reasonably good shape with some minor upholstery damaged and that fresh "used-car" smell. But what we loved was that the dash had a roomy console coupled with a large instrument cluster and not a ton of integrated electronics. The center console provides hope that we could put the main cabin circuit-breaker within arms reach of the driver.

And the innards of the beast. In my years I've been around a lot of artists, engineers, business people and environmentalists and this is the double-edged sword of our time. Sure fossil fuels and oil may be the biggest cause of pollution, world-unrest, class-warfare and other ills, but pound-for-pound, gasoline still just has that cheap energy that we need to figure out how to replace. One of the great things was just walking through the checklist of things we wouldn't need. Engine, air-filter and intake, most of the manifolds, radiator, pumps, air conditioner (I actually miss that part), hoses, values, tail-pipes etc. and pulling them out one by one.
I wanted to see if we could put some batteries in the space where the fuel tank originally was, but the rear seats were a lot closer to the bottom chassis of the car than I expected. Tom had a plan to cut out the spare tire well in the back and to try to put the batteries we couldn't fit in the front in a casement in the trunk. Goal wise, we were trying to get at least a 40/60 weight split from the front and back battery stacks so we wouldn't mess up the handling and distribution of the car. We found out after some work that we could get 6 batteries in the front and 6 in the back comfortably so that kept it mostly balanced.

Now the raw engine. We've already removed the battery and air-intakes and filter. One of our primary concerns was that we are trying to get an accurate measurement of the engine housing and measure the distance from the transmission housing to the passenger side motor mount. We wanted to make sure we got an engine that would fit the compartment properly so we could get the most power but not have to start modifying the innards of the motor mounts too much.
We had roughly 19 inches to work with but had to review the various motor specifications to see what the difference in shaft length was. It turns out that the shaft length sticking out of the motor was very short and was roughly 1/2 and inch from the seal of the transmission bell. The motor we were looking at has a 2 1/2" shaft. This required an adapter that was nearly 2" thick to make sure that the motor and transmission lined up close enough to work.

Tom is a wealth of knowledge and 99% of the time we could just rely on his experiences with vehicles. Thankfully I had some experience in college working on the Colorado School of Mines hybrid car and it's control assemblies, abiet that knowledge was a tad rusty. Sometimes we'd have to fall back and do the old fashioned 'reading the instructions'. It is like Googling something but involves a book with paper. When it came to the CV joints, it appears that the people making the manual werent too sure themselves. After a lot of staring at diagrams and trying to find any reference to how to properly remove the mount snap rings we came with the ancient engineering principle of "pull really darn hard and hope you don't hear a breaking sound".
The divine spirit of Gore, the inventor of the environment was with us that day, and they popped right out. We remembered to lay an offering of twinkies before the giant beard shrine of the One in thanks.

Tom had engine-lift for removing the old engine as well as mounting the new engine. Even with the help we had a couple of near-misses with fingers and if you are doing this yourself, It would be good thing to have this on your 'really should have' list. Even if you have a nice smooth pull and mount of the new motor, not having to wrest it out after not seeing one or two harnesses is really worth the time.

Once on the lift, the engine was easy to move around, we were more paranoid about dropping it than anything else. You can see in the image where we put the jack under the engine while we were removing the motor mounts. That was again, a very wise use of experience because it made it a lot safer than to have the engine hoist slip the engine while trying to simulatenously raise the engine and pull the mounts out. Thankfully Tom power-sprayed the engine compartment for all it was worth because removing the engine without it would have just been insane trying to slosh through all of the grease and grime.
The lines in the camera are due to a corruption issue with some of the images where someone tried to insert a virus. I was able to salvage the images and scrub them clean of viruses but still have some latent lines.

And here we are, sans engine, radiator, transmission (used for later) and about 99% of the things that go wrong in an average car. We still have the exhaust pipe sticking up but that was removed with some pretty short work with the Milwake reciprocating saw. As tools go, a good metal saw can really solve (and sometimes create) a lot of problems quickly. The tires and hubs are off because Tom wants to make sure the brakes are working in tip-top form.