New Co-Sponsor and Vehicle Design Change

We’ve got a new co-sponsor! EV Components!

Check them out at evcomponents.com

I don’t want this to sound like an infomercial, but I really can’t say enough about these guys. They started a business doing custom EV conversions and realized after having spent weeks searching for that one elusive part, like so many of us have, that there’s a lot of unobtainium* out there. So they decided to take the expertise, and blood shot eyes, they’ve gained from establishing a supply infrastructure to build their cars and start a web site selling the parts at affordable prices to help out the rest of us.
They’ve got all the EV parts you’ll need for your conversion or one off, custom, ground up street machine including: batteries, BMS, chargers, motors, controllers, switches, fuses, brake conversion kits and more.

And their prices? Right now you can buy an AC motor and controller for $3500! Thundersky 100ah batteries: $110 each!

If you’re not sure what exactly you need just give them a call and talk to Dave, he’s always happy to give a hand and since he actually builds electric cars, he knows how to use the parts he sells and can save you from learning the hard way. When you talk to him, tell him the Illuminati sent you!

And Dave, if you’re reading this, you were right. I’m gonna need another one of the Kilovac switches, so add it to the list. Thanks

*Unobtainium: A site displaying the exact apart you need along with detailed specifications. However, after hours of searching and attempting to contact the company, you discover it is unavailable at any price.

Fans of the Illuminati, you are probably anxious for an update. Well here it is!
We’ve been plugging away day and night on safety reports, business plans, and detailed schematics for our next big submittal to the XPRIZE foundation; it’s the next big hurdle all the competing teams need to get past in order to continue in the competition. Not to mention digging through miles of unobtainium to try and find all the parts we need and working avidly on building the car itself. Big changes are in the works for our design. As many of you know it is widely believed that the next step for our personal transport infrastructure is hybrid electric vehicles, this is the approach we have been taking in the design of our vehicle, Seven. Although we have built in the flexibility to manufacture Seven as a hybrid, after spending more than a year designing, building and doing research into everything from motors, IC engines and batteries, we’ve decided it’s time to go pure battery electric vehicle, BEV, for our race vehicle. This was a difficult decision to make which caused many sleepless nights and lots of debate on what is the right course of action. There are many pluses and minuses for each design strategy, however the additional hurtles involved in developing a small IC engine that meets USEPA tier 2 bin 5 emission standards in time for the race has proven to be both time and cost prohibitive. Therefore we’ll be taking advantage of the flexibility designed into our original vehicle to add the additional batteries needed to make Seven a viable BEV. Once we remove our IC engine, we’ll be installing an additional 15KW of batteries, for a total of 30KW hours of battery energy storage. This will raise our operating voltage to 307V and decrease our 0-60 time to about 6 seconds. The estimated vehicle range is 360 miles (580km) on a single charge. If you figure that the average utility charges about 10-cents/KW hour it’ll cost about $3 bucks to fill up the ‘tank’. That’s about the same as one gallon of gas, but how many of us got 360 miles out of our last gallon of gas?

As you can see, we’ve haven’t sacrificed performance or efficiency by going to a BEV, nor have we increased the base price of the vehicle. We’re still looking at about $42k for the final production vehicle. This is possible because batteries and the systems that control them have slowly been coming down in price and as we increase production, prices will continue to drop do to volume purchases of these same components.

Although we are no longer incorporating an IC engine into our race vehicle, we’re continuing research and development into a small IC engine that will meet our power needs and comply with all USEPA emission standards and we’ll offer a hybrid version of the car once we go into production for those who want to simply fill-r-up with gas and continue their cross country trek instead of stopping to charge once every state or so. But for the Illuminated amongst us, who are ready to take the leap into BEV’s and the increased power, performance and efficiency they offer (not to mention breaking that nasty Oil habit we’ve gotten ourselves into) we’ve taken that leap with you! Keep your eyes open and we’ll show you just what a BEV can do.

Till next time
Excelsior!