We have a scooter, keys, and destruction on our minds

We received the keys to our electric, not street-legal, crap construction, cheap Chinese import scooter.

It looks great in this photo, but it's only worth being destroyed to the bone in order to reuse some essential parts for a new life on our kart's frame. The batteries are pretty much dead, being abused while in stock for too long. We can run for about 500 meters on a night's charge, easily going up to 45 kilometers per hour. But after that, the batteries have already run out of juice.

We'll go and get some new batteries with great amp hours, duct-tape them to the rack at the back of the scooter, and run it again to see whether we get everything good to go out of the scooter and onto the kart. This is quite a remarkable adventure, as the brakes on the scooter are out of order - not that they were any good when we started - but we broke them taking apart the scooter for the first time.

We're trying to get a naked scooter now. We're tearing off cheap plastic panels to access the wiring and electric parts. We're shortcutting useless stuff (like the brakes, heh) and trying to determine the importance of the (few) parts that we need to get a kart running on electricity.

Our first try at really getting an understanding of the scooter's mysterious internals, was to take the back wheel out, which contains the motor, and see how destructive we could get on it. We nearly killed it doing so ... But shortly after forcibly putting the metal parts back together with a hammer, we were riding our brakeless scooter, until the batteries kept dying on us again.

Again, we learned plenty new things. And we're ready for the next step.

We have a scooter (but no keys)

We have picked up our electric scooter yesterday. It's a chinese made "Hao Shun" brand scooter. It sports a set of four 12V batteries under the seat, and a 48V hub motor. The keys to the bike haven't been handed over yet, so we haven't seen it in action yet. Just to make sure everything works, we're not starting to destroy the bike as of yet. Unfortunately, another delay is upon us because of this.

A first problem that needs answering is how we're going to integrate the hub motor, i.e., our motor is embedded in the scooter's rear wheel. This is a common design element in electric scooters (no way this can be done with a gas motor) because it saves energy as there's no friction loss from sprockets or chains in the transmission to the wheel.

In our scooter's motor, the axle is fixed and the wheel with the motor inside rotates. Usually, you would expect a fixed motor with a rotating axle. These are in theory the same things, but there's one difference that needs to be addressed; In the scooter, electricity is being fed to the motor with cables that run through the motor's axle, and not via external connectors to the (rotating) motor block.

As our kart's wheels are smaller than the engine, we'll have to build a transmission from our engine to our rear axle. And since I doubt that we will be able to refit the cables to the engine's block instead of its axle, we'll need to find a way to somehow have a (dangerously) rotating engine with a fixed axle built on top of our kart (e.g., by reusing the fork of the scooter's rear wheel, welded to the kart's engine mount). Additionally, we'll have to fit the rotating engine with a sprocket in order to distribute the rotation to our kart's rear axle and wheels.

So, there's a little bit of progress, and a little bit of extra complexity now. There'll be more to come when we get the keys to our scooter.

Time for some progress

Over the last few months, we've been stuck with budget problems. Getting a motor (like an E-tek R), a controller (like an AllTrax AXE), batteries (4 standard 12V car batteries), battery charger and various parts (cables, components) would've easily set us back 1500 euros, which is quite expensive for building a prototype electric car, just for the fun of building it.

But today, we're at the end of a long quest trying to find a solution for this problem. We've found an importer of Chinese electric scooters in Turnhout. His warehouse/garage is packed with a bunch of electric scooters that aren't allowed on the Belgian market, or on Belgian roads as they're not licensed.

This afternoon, we'll be picking up one of these brand new scooters for about a third of the price we would've paid for separate parts, and we'll have a complete kit to build our kart. The scooter will have a motor, batteries, various electronics and wiring, even stuff like a battery charger will be included. So the plan for the rest of today is to go and pick up this scooter, drive a few rounds with it in order to see how great it is, and then, immediately start tearing apart the shiny, brand new scooter. We'll be extracting the electronics from the scooter, get it back to work outside of the scooter's body, and in the mean time we'll research ways to mount it on our kart.

It's a bit of a shame that we'll be destroying a new scooter, but it'll save us quite a few bucks.

More updates will arrive soon, as time is becoming sparse. We have 1 month left before our showcase at Hacking at Random.

Agni Motors

Received pricing and MOQ from Agni Motors today, prices start at 830 euro.
These motors have the best specifications but unfortunately also the highest price tag (brushless etc.). But it is still a resource to remember (prices drop dramatically if we buy 2501 units for instance, to less than 400 euro per unit.)

So for now the ETEK-R motor is the best price/quality solution for our electric kart since it can be found easily for almost half the price on various webshops.

Gas is dead, long live electric!

Somehow, I have to provide reasoning for going electric when I'm telling people about our project to put an electric engine instead of a fuel engine on our homemade kart. It seems pretty obvious to us: Fossil fuel powered vehicles are dead, long live electric! The list of reasons why we believe that electric vehicles are about to reign the world seems endless.

The first reason is so obvious, I'll just mention it without a rant: Burning fuel is bad for our environment. 'Nough said.

We're out of gas. Some people may argue that we still have plenty of gas for a few decades, but on a scale of technological shifts, the fossil fuel era is over. We simple have to shift to a new power source for our transportation, there's no choice here, so we'll do it. We're going to put batteries or fuel cells in our cars while shifting out fossil fuel munching monsters. Even Ford CEO Alan Mulally has stated a few days ago that "In 10 years, 12 years, you are going to see a major portion of our portfolio move to electric vehicles." I'm convinced that this will be quite a good projection on the timing of the introduction of renewables. We're still having a big economic crisis on our hands, but we have learned that the situation requires a shift in thinking on many levels, which provides amazing opportunities for the environment and our economy. On her visit to Belgium over the last few days, Hillary Clinton stated "never waste a good crisis," and highlighted the opportunity of rebuilding economies in a greener, less energy-intensive way. Yay, I like the vibe of that statement!

Gas is expensive. The cost per kilometer for the Tesla roadster is 0.01€ where the cost of a gas powered car will easily be about 25 times that high! So maybe you're happy that the prices of gas have been dropping considerably over the last few months, it's still insanely expensive if you compare it to the newly emerging alternatives. Note that gas is taxed very heavily and the shift away from gas will imply that our governments will experience a pretty big loss in tax incomes.

Fuel powered engines are inefficient. The Tesla roadster averages its efficiency at 92%. The following discussion from salon.com shows that electric cars don't suck down the same amount of energy as gas guzzlers do, even if fossil fuels would be used to generate the electricity and store it in an electric car's batteries. Obviously this example adopts the worst case scenario for the electric car, so it's much better off in all other scenarios.

"According to Tesla, the well-to-tank efficiency of gasoline is 81.7 percent, while the well-to-battery efficiency of natural-gas-generated electricity is 52.5 percent. At first glance, the gasoline looks more efficient, but keep in mind that efficiency is lost in the combustion engine. Because of the fact that the Tesla electric roadster has no internal combustion engine and no conventional transmission, its efficiency is an impressive 2.14 km/MJ. For comparison, the hybrid Prius is 0.68 km/MJ, and a conventional Honda Civic is 0.63 km/MJ. When you combine the well-to-tank efficiency with the vehicle's efficiency, the Tesla has a well-to-wheel efficiency of 1.14 km/MJ, compared with 0.556 km/MJ for the Prius."

So, if the electricity can be provided from renewable sources, electric vehicles are super efficient in comparison with cars that eat fuel.

There's few interesting discussion topics that come up when assuming that everyone has an electric car instead of a fuel powered one. A common argument is the dooming scarcity of electricity when we're switching over to an electric era. I'm pretty reassured that, if this problem would indeed occur, we can easily deal with it. Renewable energy systems encompass a broad, diverse array of technologies that is undergoing a constant influx of innovations. The cost of producing electricity from renewable sources is a few cents per kWh, which is comparable to, for example, coal. The potential cost of various technologies is much lower than that of coal, so the future is bright. Again, the current crisis brings me in an optimistic mood; The shifts in thinking about producing cars and environmentally friendly energy production will be part of getting us out of the current trouble. Only a few days ago, the Swedish government has been proving themselves worthy in how they're dealing the crisis; With looming bankruptcy for Saab, the Swedish minster of trade has insisted that Saab moves away from producing cars and should shift their business from manufacturing cars to producing wind turbines, if Saab wants to receive any support from their government to get out of trouble. A staggering move, indeed. Let's just hope it inspires other governments (Obama, this is your cue) to urgently consider similar moves.

Another common argument about electric vehicles is about their range of electric cars. In the case of the Tesla car, its range is about 350km before you need to recharge it for about 3.5 hours. That's not good for a trip that requires some 1000 kilometers, but, honestly, how often do you need to drive that far? Many families will have a trip once a year that requires such a range, but I'm sure that more than 95% of the people on the road could easily fit their daily range in a few tens of kilometers, so the range of an electric powered car being in the hundreds of kilometers will easily satisfy many people. Also, I'm confident that the range of electric cars will steadily improve as the technology in electric motors and batteries will evolve, although I'm far from being an expert in these fields. Currently, we're stuck in a virtuous cycle where batteries are considered not to be good enough for producing electric cars, and as long there's no mass production of electric vehicles, there's not enough pressure on improving the state of the art. We'll have to break this cycle in the next few years because of other reasons mentioned above and I'm very optimistic that the technology involved with it will take great steps forward as a consequence, greatly enhancing the range of electric vehicles. Prices for great electric cars, like the Tesla roadster, are extraordinary for most of us, but as the future will bring mass produced electric vehicles from big car companies (like Ford, see above), prices will drop considerably.

There are some serious misconceptions and doubts about the performance of electric vehicles. When we see a rare electric car, it's often a slow one. Golf karts, forklift trucks and stupid looking electric vehicles that can't go above 50 km/h are bad examples of what an electric vehicle can do. Luckily, the Tesla roadster tells the story of a really powerful car with amazing acceleration statistics. It goes from 0 to 100 in 3.7 seconds which puts it well in the top 50 fastest accelerating production cars, just ahead of a Ferrari F40. Electric engines provide 100% torque, 100% of the time. Electric karts have already shown that they could dominate fuel powered karts as well, since the acceleration of an electric motor leaves the gas karts at a standstill at the starting line.

Electric is simpler. Building an electric car requires less skill than fuel powered cars. Note that the first electric cars were invented around 1835, more than 50 years before gasoline engines were getting ready for mass production. Electric engines being less complex is our main reason when getting our hands dirty and building our own kart, but it is also a good reason why it should be phased in into any road vehicle. An electric engine only consists of a few components; a few batteries, a controller and a motor. A typical four-cylinder engine of a conventional car comprises over a hundred moving parts. By comparison, the motor of an electric car would just have one: the rotor. An electric engine doesn't easily deteriorate or break down and doesn't need regular maintenance. You don't need to pay the costs of maintaining a fuel powered engine by frequently having to change the oil, coolants, spark plugs or any of the complexities that come along with gasoline engines. Batteries will have to be changed, though, every 100.000 to 150.000 kilometers. All of the technology that has been developed for fuel munching engines can be thrown out, and the end result is a simpler and better performing car. Electric engines are so simple that I, as a complete newbie on this technical level, am very optimistic that I can build, drive and maintain an electric kart on my own, without having to ever grasp how a gas engine works. And I can't be bothered with that knowledge either. I consider fuel powered motors to be ancient technology.

I strongly believe there's plenty of reasons why we'll be going electric on our kart. If we can manage to successfully complete this project, as complete newbies, I'm sure the car companies will be able to swiftly pull of this kind of a stunt as well. More so, I'm completely baffled that our streets are still filled with fossil fuel powered cars when there's such a better alternative, on every level. But I'm confident that change is upon us and the era of fossil fueled road transportation is at its end. I, for one, welcome the era of electric transportation!

A seat and engine mount

We visited the shop of outdoor karting club Antwerp karting, to take a look at some karts, check out some of the gear they're selling and, foremost, to secure a seat and a mount for our engine. We paid just over 100€ for these parts, the Tillett seat and engine mount being second hands (our butts just barely fit in the seat, there won't be much fun for those with bigger asses, unless we can get a bigger seat later on), and some new kits to mount the seat and engine to the frame.

With the seat installed, as in the following picture, we now have a fully rolling kart, which is an awesome milestone. Additionally, you can see the new engine mount that we bought, at the left of the seat. This is a standard mount for karts and can slide over the frame to adjust the strength of the chain that will connect the engine to the rear axle sprocket, later on.

Up until now, all these jobs are quite standard, independent of whether it would become a gas or electric powered kart. Now it's time to take the big jump into the electric world and get going on installing our own idea of what a kart (or any other road vehicle!) power house should consist of; batteries and an electric motor. Since we don't have these components yet, we'll have a short pause in building the kart. Walle will be going to Egypt for a couple of weeks, and I'll use the time to practice my welding skills to get the frame for the batteries and the frame to bolt the engine onto our new mount. And in the mean time, we'll study the next parts to buy, and figure out a budget that doesn't hurt too much.

It's a DINO kart

I've been wondering about the brand and model of kart that we got, but couldn't find any obvious helpful markings on the frame. The steering wheel pretty clearly shows the "DINO" brand, but since most things on the kart have gone through more than one life, the steering wheel could've been a hack by a previous owner.

Today, I discovered another "DINO" marking on the brake system, part of which is welded onto the frame. It's unlikely that this has been an add-on by a previous owner, so my bet is that we have bought a kart with a DINO kart racing frame. The model is no longer produced (no surprise there, I'm guessing the frame is somewhere between 10 and 20 years old) so we're still in the dark about the specific model. Any help identifying the model type of our frame would be helpful.

Update: The guy from the local kart parts shop confirmed it as being a DINO kart, probably older than 20 years. He referred to the kart as being "retro", which is kinda cool. We'll be going new skool and old skool at the same time.