Wilderness EV kits for converting your car

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

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. 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.