01-31-2012 Updated Estimates

One common question we get is "how much will a conversion cost?" We try to answer this on our web site by providing project estimates with various driving ranges.

Last year, we added the Federal Tax credit into these estimates and this year, as most of you probably know, the Federal Tax credit for converting your car to electric has expired. Though there is still some hope that it will get reinstated, the fact is, it's gone for now.

So, we recently made an update to our Estimates page to remove this tax credit and in doing so, refreshed a lot of the numbers. ThunderSky batteries seem to have fallen out of favor recently, so we replaced the batteries in the estimates with CALB. Of course, these estimates are only posted as examples to help you plan your conversion - there are hundreds of motor/controller/charger/battery combinations that you could use with our EV Miata kit and it would be pointless to try to document them all.

There was one anomaly that we wanted to point out before the emails starting coming in...

The 100ah DC estimate costs more and results in less range than the 70ah estimate.How could this be right? Well, there are two reasons for this -

1. Each ah rating uses a different cell size. We calculate how many of these cells we can comfortably fit into each battery pack. Some cells just fit better than others. The 70ah CALB cells happen to fit better than the 100 ah cells.
2. The motors/ controllers we use in the estimates have maximum voltages. This limits the number of cells in the pack. Now we do look at using "buddy" cells where appropriate - that is, wiring groups of two or three cells in parallel to reduce the overall pack voltage.We do this with the 40 and 70ah estimates for both AC and DC and 100 ah for the AC. 

Let us know if you have any questions in planning your conversion. We are here to help. sales@evmiata.com