We Put a 42Kw Motor in a Tiny Electric Car

This is a crashed electric car we found on marketplace from 2013. No batteries, but it already had a QS8000 motor installed and we got a 4-driver to control it. With this setup, we are going to peak at over 40 kW pushing 600 amps. Before that though, if one is good, two must be better. We got both cars for 800 bucks. Now in hindsight, that was such a win as we ended up using it as a donor for parts to make the orange car 100%. The condition of these two cars were nothing short of broken beyond repair in some sense. The front subframe was completely bent out of shape, but before we got around fixing that, we gave the cars a well-deserved wash. This was our desperate attempt to bend the frame back into place. Two geniuses at work. The second genius there is Pontus, you're gonna see him in some of the future videos here. We quickly gave that up and moved to say a more primitive approach. It worked though, bending it and welding it all into place. We made sure to reinforce this bottom space, there will be a battery going in the front and it's quite a lot weight. We superglued the pieces of body panel the previous owner had just thrown back in the car, but quite a few pieces were still missing, which we considered 3D printing, but the shape was just too complex to justify the time spent on just modeling. We simply decided to fill it in with epoxy filler and sanded it, and when the paint came on, we were both pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out. I 3D printed this hatch because, well, there was none. It locks into place just like the real thing, but something of the smoothness just looks off. I don't know, we decided not to do anything about it. There were some major problems with this car, I'm skipping a lot of things here to keep the video shorter, but we did a lot of short drives, finding weird sounds, changing the driver settings to find the optimal one, so this here was the first time we got it going at all. The first burnout. We had to adjust, well, not just the tie rods, but bleed the brakes, we found out one of the discs were heavily warped, we salvaged a slightly less warped disc brake from the other car, and I mean, just having that on site was a huge win. The wiring in the car was missing completely, having me rewire every light, ignition, reverse, windshield wiper, to switches, which now in hindsight worked out pretty well. I never got around grabbing an automatic blinker relay, so the way you would do it is simply switch it on and off, and that's your blinker. Well, what if you're in an accident and you need to put your hazards on, well, then you grab this little 3D printed device and you simply stick it on both and you switch that up and down. Sometimes my genius frightens me, but the rear lights, the half beam, the high beam, the windshield wiper, everything works. Okay, first real ride with the electric tiny car. And that's still with the drone batteries, that's not even the batteries we ordered, which should come in any day now. These are 72 volt 105 amp hour batteries meant for golf carts, one of them has been sponsored by BSL bet, thank you very much for that, and one I paid with money out of my own pocket. But why two you may ask, they're awfully heavy and surely one would be enough, well, very simply put, discharged. The maximum discharge is only 400 amps, and one battery then just wouldn't be able to output the power the motor is asking for. To say this was going to be a tight fit is an understatement, we ended up cutting structural metal just to get the front battery in. The rear battery however was much easier, but still wouldn't be able to be much larger, so I think we have the size just right. Okay, locked and loaded boys, we're fully charged, at least I think so, it says 80.3 volts, it did go up all the way to 84. We did all the switches now, this is wake up, which means just the ignition basically, we have the reverse, blinker right, blinker left, you know, everything else I think is pretty self-explanatory. Now, I'm ready to go, we're only using one battery, seems to have some technical difficulties unfortunately with the other battery, with the charging system, it doesn't kick on. I mean, I hope this battery is ready for some solo tanking, I mean, we peaked at 42 kilowatts, I think that's about 600 amps, so what I'm going to do is go into the far driver rack and half the maximum amperage, which means we're only going to be pushing about 20 kilowatts, but it doesn't really matter, this is a range test, I want to do the range thing to see how far we can actually go on 7.5 kilowatt hours, so keep that in mind, we had 15, I removed the one battery, now we have 7.5 kilowatt hours, so I'll go ahead and change the line current down to maybe 300 for this, and then the boost line current all the way down to 300 as well. Okay, starting the tracker, nice. My genius plan, if you can at all hear me through this tin can of a car, my genius plan is to go through here and hopefully make it to an asphalt road, completely flat, beautiful scenery, I hope we can go there, but then we have to go through this. I don't think we can manage this, honestly. Not alone at least, reinforcements were called and we headed back to the impossible entrance, but I forgot we were in a freaking tank and it wasn't even bothered. All to get into this place, paved, perfectly flat road, 10 kilometers long, completely abandoned. We're at kilometer 50, something like that, at 35% battery left, and it looks like we're gonna manage to go maybe 65, 70 kilometers, but now Punto's in just a second here, we'll come with the car, full speed, and I want to get it on video. Here we go. I wonder how fast that was, it wasn't, it didn't look too fast. 85. What did you look like? 85. How did you feel? I'm somewhat divided if I find the range impressive, considering if we had two batteries, 15 kilowatt hours, we would have a range of maybe 140 kilometers, 150, something like that. And now with just one battery, it's about 70 kilometers. Now, I'm not sure for an electric car in general, that's really poor, but for a small electric, you know, hobby car like this inside a city, I would be completely fine. So actually that was what it was designed to do, was to be in the city, not outside driving far and fast, but just taking people inside the city from A to B. We're at 15 percent battery left, we have a little ways home, and we have to take that jump over there. I'm gonna film Punto's doing it. The car just stopped. Okay, I got it rolling again. I think we found our answer, it shuts off at 69 volts. We did on the dot 80 kilometers on this 7.5 kilowatt hour battery. That's not too bad. At this point, why not just try it? What if we could hit that 42 kilowatt figure with about 140 kilograms less in the car? I've put some more polymer into the mix, and we should be able to hit that figure, well, again, with 140 kilograms less weight once we take the batteries out. Let's have some fun. Yes! It was surprisingly bad off-road. The low ground clearance didn't help. We estimate the car weight to be maybe four tons or eight thousand pounds, so you know, don't mess with this guy, that's for sure. Jumping proved to be quite the challenge, and I don't think it would be easier in this one, but it sure would be a fun project to take the electronics out of this car and put it into a cross cart, something even lighter, and getting some proper 72 volt batteries that could supply all the power this thing needs. And yeah, that's it for today's video. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments if that's something you would like to see, and what you thought about this video. All right, talk to you later. Bye guys!