Retro-electrification, converting retro Ford to electric power.

Here is a pretty cool conversion of one of Fords finest, A MK1 Cortina.

The conversion was carried out by Charged Garage in Australia (https://chargedgarage.com/). Check out their page for more details and information.

Tim Harrison runs the car out of Brisbane and his conversion had a moderate budget in comparison to some others. It uses a Netgain HyPer9 AC electric motor and a batteried from a Tesla totalling 31kWh. Utilising  a CHAdeMo charging port fitted (where the exhaust pipe used to be) for DC fast charging.

More details here : http://evcentral.com.au/australian-electromod-tesla-batteried-1965-ford-cortina-mk1/

Great RetroEVmod. Well done to all involved.

Retro-electrification, converting ‘retro’ BMW’s to Electric.

The world of electric vehicle ‘retro’ conversions has been active for a good few years. It has remained largely confined either to geeky types who are plugging away in their home garages and labs doing some really clever things adapting parts from crashed EV’s and putting them into slightly retro internal combustion cars, or larger commercial workshops who are fitting kits of bits provided by others into more expensive classics cars.

One particular pioneering type, Damien Maguire, an engineer from Southern Ireland, who we’ve followed for the past five years, has converted several ‘retro rides. His particular thing (well one of his ‘things’) is the EV upcycling of old BMW’s, using a variety of electrification componentry. These conversions don’t necessarily cost £1000’s, in fact he has a series of videos which focuses on low cost conversion (an EV conversion for 1000 euros).

Mr Maguire’s skill set goes way beyond the mechanical aspects of bolting car bits from crashed EV’s into broken internal combustion engined vehicles. His background as an electronics engineer means that he has geek level knowledge and skills when it comes to reverse engineering CAN signals, reverse engineering hardware (such as inverters and their controller function) and developing (or co-developing) an open source motor controllers.

If you have an inkling that you’d like to get into EV, and perhaps convert one of your own project vehicles to electric power, head over to Damien’s Youtube channel – it will be time very well spent, and will give you a detailed lowdown on how to make this happen.

Check out his channel…… Link to Damien’s Youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/Evbmw/videos