Why and how to joyfully move our butts around town, without mucking the place up.

Wilderness EV kits for converting your car

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Tags: EV Conversions

One way to get an electric vehicle is through converting an existing gasoline vehicle. That's the route taken by most EV owners today.

(www.e-volks.com) Wilderness EV offers a series of kits, and will also sell pre-converted cars using their kits.

What their kits offer are instructions, an electric motor, wiring, and a controller. It's up to you to find a suitable donor car, remove the gasoline related equipment, and install the parts. And once you install the parts you must find a set of batteries.

Their kit design uses a "shunt motor" which they claim to be superior to the "series motors" that are widely used in EV conversions today. I don't know enough about the differences to say which is best.

The company may have moved to a different website, and has moved on from shunt motors. I cannot in good consciousness recommend their conversion kits. I bought a car that had been converted using one of their kits, and the car itself was a gorgeous Karmann Ghia restoration but it performed really badly. It barely had a 10 mile range and would barely get to 50 miles/hr. The car has since been reconverted to a modern lithium pack, with a far more powerful motor and controller, and easily goes on the highway for a fifty mile range -- see (ekarmann.com) ekarmann.com. The Wilderness EV conversion of this car was kind of dangerous, because other drivers would expect it to behave like a car and have a 60-70+ miles/hr top speed and have difficulty with the slow acceleration and low top speed.

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