Lotus Europa Community
Lotus Europa Forums => Garage => Topic started by: Benjy on Monday,January 06, 2025, 07:23:53 AM
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Ahoy all,
Came across this on Youtube. A Europa EV conversion. Makes sense when you think about it. The first Tesla was based on a Lotus, so why not put a Tesla drive train and batteries in a Lotus?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YCEQIdMVqg&t=2s
It will be interesting to follow this project...
Cheers
Benjy
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But what is the weight of the finished project? A standard Europa is around 700kgs, and that is why it goes and handles very well.
If the finished EV is substantially heavier, the whole suspension and braking system would have to be substantially upgraded.
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Seems he is only putting in a few batteries. I believe he intends to keep the weight the same at the cost of range. We shall see.
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I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand I admire the willingness to give it a go, and he seems to have done a lot already. But, I don't like the position of the battery pack. It puts a lot of weight relatively high and far back. I'd want to stack most of the batteries behind the seats, but I can see it would be more challenging to split the pack into two or three blocks. I can appreciate the need to keep it simple in order to get it finished.
He managed to irritate me by saying the engine was in poor shape and claiming that it is very hard to get parts. I think we all know that it is far, far easier to get parts for the Renault engines than it is to plan and execute an EV conversion. The engine looked dirty, but is it in poor shape? How does he know? He obviously just wanted to do an EV conversion.
He did somewhat address the total mass question by stating that he has six battery modules at 55lbs each. So 330lbs of batteries, which doesn't sound unreasonable if the weight is low and centralized.
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This always reminded me of a Lotus backbone chassis …. some of the batteries were stored in the chassis backbone … plans may still be available …. r q Riley
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He did somewhat address the total mass question by stating that he has six battery modules at 55lbs each.
and the range?
I can only get around 300 miles out of the twin tanks full. Dependant on the pump, that would take about 2 minutes to fill.
I bet the range is less than half of that.
How long to charge it back up again?