Prologue

So, I've been thinking about, and sometimes talking about, converting a gasoline power car to electric power for about a year now. It might be nice to say that my interests were about being green and reducing my personal contribution to global warming, but this would not be particularly accurate.  Mostly I thought it would be a fun project and I'm desperately in need of a fun project that has no connection to my work.  The self satisfaction of doing the right thing an jumping on the green bandwagon cloak covering my real motivation, but it's a popular cloak so I think I'll wear it and show it off a bit.

So, I've been thinking about this for about nine months.  In September 2010, I went to a meeting of a local electric vehicle (EV) club.  This meeting was helpful and mostly showed me that I had to do a lot of background work to scope out the kind of project I wanted before I got started.  So I spent the several week researching EV conversions via the web.  Then the fall quarter started and most all of my evening and weekend time went to grading, reviewing student projects, working with student teams and all those things I fill my time with.

This spring, something finally got me kicked out of background research mode and got me to take this project seriously.  Maybe it was gas prices on the other side of $4.00/gal. Whatever it was, the project is off and running!