Electric Vehicles - design and build your own.

Electric Vehicles - design and build your own.

By the Author - Michael Hackleman 

Designing and building an EV is akin to writing a book. Even this book. It’s a process of integrating what you know and have, finding out what you don’t know, trying to put it all into a proper sequence. The order of importance idea doesn’t work here, though. There is no part of an EV, or most anything else, that’s not important. If it wasn’t part of the whole, it wouldn’t be there. You might be killed in an automobile because of its poor design or because a cotter-pin fell out of a steering knuckle.

So, it becomes a process of talking about things, describing their association with other things, without having it all become too complicated to comprehend, much less to make decisions from. The design changes as you go through the process. This is not so much a matter of compromising, but of simply coming to understand yourself and what you want or need, and what you know, and don’t know. You should understand that I am an advocate of smaller vehicles on the road --- electric or not. When you boil down all the controversy about big vs. small cars, you’re left with one nasty bit of residue: big cars are preferredbe- cause they give the driver a good chance of surviving a crash with a smaller car. I don’t like that attitude. One, it automatically means that you’re deciding against the other guy --- you don’t get creamed, but he sure does. Second,it makes you careless if you don’t worry about accidents, you drlve that way. Me? I don’t want to cream anybody. And, admittedly, I don’t want to get creamed. I want to avoid a collision, not prepare for one. 

The only answer that I can come up with when someone asks me, “Why an EV?” is “Why not!” Which, I must admit, is not very original or information-filled. If I got very philosophical and serious about it, I'd probably just answer that question with a stare and walk off and sulk. First thing you ought to know about me is that I don’t want to convince anyone that they should build or buy an electric vehicle.

Contents

This ebook covers every aspect of building an EV from motors to wheels and equipment to safety.