First Test Drive of the Electric Drive

Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Rick Thompson

The rain let up for a little while today so I decided to take the car for a spin. This is the first time the car has left the garage under electric.

The batteries have not been charged and I have no real controls set up yet for it. I am using an old game controller joystick for the throttle and it is not mounted. It was acting up a bit though. You can see that when I got out on the road and it quit pulling till I messed with it and made it start pulling again. I got up to 35mph with the electric. There was enough traffic I decided to pull out with the gas motor and just let it idle in neutral just in case I needed it.

The gearing is not really good the way it is set up. It has 4:1 gearing right now but if I go to 5:1 gearing it should pull much better than it does now. The chain was jumping a bit at the start. I don’t really have it adjusted or even lined up perfectly so that is expected.

Overall the car is doing pretty good and I am happy with how it is running. This weekend I will start putting the controls together and actually finishing things up with it so I can start driving the car again.

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No Responses to “First Test Drive of the Electric Drive”

  1. Trevor Heath, on March 27th, 2009 at 10:35 pm Said:

    Rick,

    Very impressive!

    Congrats

    Trevor

  2. Bill Glisson, on April 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 am Said:

    Dumb question….Why didn’t you run the electric motor to the extra pulley on the crank?? Seems like it would have been less difficult.

  3. Rick, on April 3rd, 2009 at 8:40 pm Said:

    If the motor was mounted to the crank then it would have to spin the gasoline motor all the time. The way it is now I could have the motor off and the transmission in neutral and run on electric only. It would be possible to mount it either way I just chose this setup to fit the way I drive.