Electric Vehicle Conversion Shopping List and an Expensive Lesson in Business
A few years ago, I dreamt up an idea — If electric cars are a trend, and many governments are banning the sales of internal combustion engines in their countries by 2025–2040 as part of the phase out of fossil fuel, wouldn’t it be a waste to eventually destroy all cars on the road?
With a strong fire of passion to make the world a better place while succeeding in business, I talked to a close friend about it — and we immediately thought it would be a great idea to convert cars to electric! So we set off to try one.
Who would have thought? A couple of guys converting a car to electric in the most isolated city in the world that no one has ever heard of — Perth, the capital of Western Australia? Well, it turns out, we weren’t the first: there were 15 (maybe more now) other converted cars on the road by a previously-at-BMW German professor at the local university.
Side note: Perth, a hidden gem, is the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited or lived in, with pristine beaches, daily sightings of dolphins in the river, and daytime temperatures around 20–28 degrees C year round.
The next few paragraphs are more technical, so feel free to skip to the last section on the business lessons.
Electric car conversion basics
My friend had an old 1977 Toyota Stout — you may know its successor, the Hilux truck. It was a 40-year-old rusty piece of junk, which my friend best described as “you wouldn’t even pick it up from the side of the road if it had a “FREE” sign on it”. There was fuel leaking from the tank, rust holes everywhere, and a seat that released 30-something years accumulation of dust when you sat on it *cough*cough*
LESSON 1: Choose a car in better condition. Restoring a classic vehicle is a LOT of work.
My friend’s wife hated the car because of how the whole garage smelled like gasoline (remember the leaky fuel tank?) so we started off by removing the leaky fuel tank, rendering the car immovable at the start of the project. Then the car engine and transmission, and eventually all the fuel related parts (fuel carburettor, fuel lines, gas pedal…) The car was getting a lot cleaner without those fossil fuel burning engines. Here is a photo of the result.
While I make it sound simple, do not underestimate the number of special tools you need to perform this job. My friend had an engine crane lying around from a prior business (this guy had tools to start a construction company and a little electric car conversion garage — perfect partner for this project). At some stage, some of the older nuts were so tight and rounded (specifically the transmission one), we had to weld a metal bar to them to untighten them. Other bolts had to be ground off. Not for the faint hearted.
LESSON 2: Refer to lesson 1. Oh and, you need an engine crane, a welding machine, an angle grinder, and lots of protective equipment.
Techy Electric car design stuff
The funniest thing I’ve heard is people comparing electric cars to an electric toothbrush. While it is true that at a very simplistic level, both are made of a battery, a bunch of copper cables, and an electric motor. But being in car manufacturing, I can tell you — cars are one of the most complex machines ever made by humans (to put it into perspective, the smart phone, with all its glory, is only a small subset of a car — namely, the infotainment system, that touchscreen that provides you navigation and audio). Electric cars are a LOT simpler and a LOT more energy efficient to drive than your best internal combustion engine car — but they are not a simple electric toothbrush (and definitely not a Dyson vacuum machine either).
Side notes:
If a company does not know their “why”, the company would struggle to achieve its goals, as per Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”. Highly recommended read (audiobook is even better).
The worst electric car is usually about 77% percent efficient (battery to wheels). The best internal combustion car is at about 40% efficient (the rest is lost as heat). Your best happy medium is the hybrid.
Even though I’m an electrical engineer with a master’s degree in mechatronics, one of the very early lessons I learnt in my career is “you don’t know what you don’t know” so it’s important to go through the learning phase. Two great intros to electric and hybrid car design (and their safety procedures) are in this book by Seth Leitman and Bob Brant, as well as this course by the Motor Trade Association of South Australia (at the time, it was the only course of its kind in South East Asia and Australia/New Zealand). I drove 2650 km across the Nullarbor to Adelaide to attend this course.
Side lessons:
Do not stop at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
Make sure you stop at Esperance, though, and Balladonia, where the NASA’s Skylab “met its demise” in 1979, after which NASA got fined $400 for littering by the Shire of Esperance
My 2006 Lexus IS 250 at 110 km/hr on highways could do close to 1000 kms on only one full tank of fuel (ironic, the presence of this note is.. in an article advocating for electric cars)
If you are converting an electric car, here is your (condensed) shopping list that’ll set you back some A$ 20k to A$ 35k (lead acid to lithium batteries)*:
*Hint: don’t go to Woolies, Coles, or — if you’re in North America — Walmart
**You could do it for a lot cheaper using poor quality components
***Does not include many special tools
- An electric motor (preferably a 3-phase AC induction motor)
We used a Solectria AC-55 we found at someone’s garage, pulled out from an old Ford EV
- An inverter (often called motor controller)
We used an Azure Dynamics DMOC 445, compatible with the AC-55
Big lesson here: this inverter was made by a Canadian company that had closed down years ago. Its second hand products are of good quality and still available on the market but they are no longer supported so you are on your own (these are very complex pieces of equipment, so without manuals, electrical drawings, software to connect to them, it is a nightmare to get to work — so they are cheap for a reason)
- Batteries (Ohhh mama…! The prices are insane)
We used 12V lead acid (feeding about 336V to the inverter)
- A battery management system (BMS)
Preferrably used for Lithium batteries
- High power rated (orange) cables and crimps (and a special hydraulic crimper)
We got some from the local electrician shops
- Grounding cables
- A new driveshaft to fit your motor
This depends on the dimensions and design — we decided to modify our existing driveshaft, at a local heavy machines mechanic
- Circuit breakers, fuses, and switches
- DC-DC converter (to charge your 12V battery from your HV battery)
Doesn’t matter which one you use, as long as it’s compatible with your voltage level at your HV and LV (336V to 14V in our case)
- A multimeter (to measure voltages, etc.)
- A 3-phase electrical AC compressor and inverter
Normal car air compressors don’t work in electric cars — you need one that feeds from the battery — we skipped this
- Lots of jigs to fit things around
- A charger board (to charge your HV battery from your 240V supply)
- Ground fault detection boards
Grounding is very important in electric cars, and is a very serious safety measure
- An accelerator pedal with a potentiometer
- Lots of switches, wiring for electronics, etc….
All of the above must be compatible with each other, and provide the right amount of torque to keep the car moving, so there is — as you would imagine — an intense design exercise, trying to match puzzle pieces together, without causing a short circuit that will burn the house down (I’m rather sure the insurance company wouldn’t cover electric car conversions as an acceptable cause).
LESSON 3: Do NOT perform an electric car conversion in Western Australia. There are just no parts lying around for electric car conversions — we had to order most things from the US, China, East Coast of Australia, … a very expensive feat with massively long delays.
Fast forward through a very long and painful journey, we eventually got the classic car restored — it looked fabulous. All those days sanding off rusted metal and repairing rust holes were worth it. Most things got assembled and tested. And guess what? It didn’t work. We had saved lots of money buying second-hand equipment that required further troubleshooting to get to work, which made the learning experience even better (you don’t learn anything when you pay for it). This required advanced knowledge of electrical and electronics (power electronics at times), as well as serial communication to troubleshoot. So be sure to understand those before attempting your conversion.
Some business lessons
We learnt a great deal while still having a lot of fun on the weekends. The one big lesson in business that this project gave me is that converting cars to electric is the worst business idea (at least for me), for the following reasons:
- High labor component in business idea
Labor is expensive in most countries. Even in countries where labor is cheaper, you cannot easily import/export second hand cars through customs, and the transportation costs are not insignificant
- Hardware costs are prohibitively high at small scale (at least back then)
- People are not willing to pay that price tag for a conversion, when the alternative is a new car for the same price
- The margins are very low (non-existent at small scale)
- A first business experience which involves low margin is a bad one (doesn’t allow for failures)
So the question that I set off to answer: what is the best kind of business to grow in the current day and age? After carefully studying many startups that made it (and others that didn’t), here are some of the lessons that I learnt:
- Businesses with no “Why” are lost (refer you back to Simon Sinek’s book — Start with Why)
- Think about the size of industry that you are targeting, consumer behaviour in that industry, and just basic economics
- Businesses with a product that has a high software component have the highest ability to scale (it’s literally copy-paste and sell to the whole world)
- Businesses that have a hardware product are much costlier, slower, have a high labor component, and therefore need larger capital
I’m not against hardware businesses — but to be realistic, you need what I call an “adequate funding mechanism” commensurate to idea — it’s basic physics — software is relatively just thin air, easy to scale. Hardware is physically heavy, requires work, higher labor, transport, logistics, etc.
This coincides with something I read a while back about billionaire businesses having a very low chance of failing (I can’t find the source to quote it…). Obviously, billionaires can fund business ideas adequately, often coupling it with a strong media hype to create demand (most billionaires also own/have strong influence in some form of media), therefore leading it to success!
As a final thought — note how Elon Musk only opened up his hardware businesses (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink) after his software business success (Paypal). Also, note that Paypal’s competitor Stripe — its founders never exited; Patrick and John Collison, now 32 and 30 years old, respectively, are two of the youngest self-made billionaires.
