Dunedin: New Zealand's hotbed of EV activities

Last weekend Mike Laba, Jens Rekker and Adrianne Jones held a public presentation at the Otago Polytechnic. By all accounts it was a huge success, filling a 110 seat lecture theatre and turning a similar number of people away. Interest in Electric Vehicles is obviously very strong. A video of the talk is apparently going to be made available.

Mike Laba had his Mini in attendance. Yes, there is another electric Mini in New Zealand! Mike has had an electric mini for about 10 years, and recently installed the same batteries I'm using. He has 30 90Ah cells from Thunder Sky, while I'm planning on more than 100 40Ah cells (but space & weight issues have not yet been addressed). Mike fits all his batteries on the floor behind the front seats, which I presume makes the car a two seater. One of my design goals is to have 4 seats, I believe I can fit everything into the car and keep the seats, but I may have issues with the maximum weight. I will have to balance the performance of the car with how badly I want more seats. More cells in the battery makes for faster acceleration and more range, but less passengers.

Mike is using a Curtis 400A controller with a 6.7" series wound DC motor. He's driving the standard mini gearbox clutchless using the standard transfer case and an extra idler gear (the petrol Mini motor sits on top of the gearbox and the power is transferred via 3 gears, Mike has added a 4th gear to the train). This is smaller, lighter and presumably more efficient than his previous solution which involved half the cast iron engine block and a large belt. If you want to buy the earlier setup, it's for sale.