EVLN: DIY: How to build your own EV, hacker style

The cost for no longer being the “bitch” of OPEC and Exxon: priceless

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http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/29/do-it-yourself-how-to-build-your-own-electric-car/
[image] Do-it-yourself: How to build your own electric car, hacker style
by Dean Takahashi  Jul 29 2012

By day, David Brown is a security consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. But in
his spare time, he’s one of a growing number of do-it-yourself electric
vehicle creators. In the past couple of years, Brown retrofitted a 1974
Volkswagen Beetle into an electric car, and he talked about his “Voltswagon”
project at the Defcon hacker conference on Saturday in Las Vegas.

Electric cars can save you a lot of money when it comes to skipping gas
purchases, and they’ve been getting more popular since Tesla launched its
first electric car in 2008. But the sticker price of new electric vehicles
is a big barrier to adoption still, so hobbyist mechanics like Brown of
Friendswood, Texas, are retrofitting their own cars for a relatively small
price tag. Brown (pictured below) did it for about $6,000, not counting the
cost of his car, tools, and about 100 hours of labor.

The whole point of designing an electric vehicle is to save energy. So it
pays to keep that in mind when you’re adding a bunch of new things to an
older car. When you are retrofitting a car, you need to install electric
vehicle components such as a motor, controller, batteries, a charger, and
accessories.

“If you are doing this to save the environment, you probably don’t want to
convert a high-performance race car,” he said. “You want to maximize the