I couple of years ago I used to commute to work in a Smart Roadster and it got me thinking it would make a great EV conversion. Somewhere on Youtube there is a chap doing one, but he has not updated in the last year or so. He has used a non-Smart motor / battery setup.
As you may know there is already an EV Smart ForTwo in the current and previous models - the standard electric motor would fit the rear subframe of the Roadster easily enough. Then the problem would be converting the controls etc etc - this is where my knowledge hits the buffers!!
There is a company in the Netherlands and they can sell the battery / motor / charger etc for around Euro 16k. I think the range would be around 100 miles.
Do any of you have experience of the best types / sizes / outputs of motors that might fit this little thing?!!!
Another car, I've previously owned (for 11 yrs!) was a Renault Avantime - I think this would make a great EV conversion!!
How strange! After mentioning in my opening post that he's not posted in over a year - another update! It shows the full conversion. Hopefully the wait for seeing it on the road won't be so long now!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_UvJRzdXxs
I'm going from extreme to extreme at the moment, i hope after this weekend and talking to some people in the no i will narrow down my list 😉
Absolutely! It would make it go really rather well with the extra torque! The gearboxes on Smart cars aren't too bad, other than taking an age to change (electric auto changes), but as it would drive in just the one gear I don't expect that would be such a problem. The main problem would be space for battery packs - there's a small amount in the boot and more space under the bonnet.
What battery packs are you using for your conversion?
I'm sure the torque would be more though, people forget you feel torque more than bhp. Hopefully the gearbox is strong enough to talk the extra torque
Thanks for that! This is the rear subframe of the chap who has done a conversion already - using the original gearbox. I see the motor you mentioned has the same dimensions as the Hyper 9. My old ICE Roadster had the same power (120 bhp) through a remap.
I don't know much about these things, but it looks a nice tidy solution - the subframe is very easy to drop, as seen in this picture.
Would a Netgain hyper 9 motor not fit onto tyhe gearbox? That would be great performance too, alternatively you could use the smaller motor that converters put into old shape Fiat 500's there are some here Motors (electricclassiccars.co.uk)