This blog documents the restoration, and conversion, of a 1965 Humber (Singer) Vogue to a fully electric vehicle. The Vogue will be powered by an 11kW(modified), 3 phase industrial AC motor, controlled by an industry standard Variable Speed Drive (VSD) or Inverter. To be able to produce the 400 volts phase to phase the VSD will need about 600 VDC of batteries. A big thanks to the contributors on the AEVA forum: http://forums.aeva.asn.au/forums/

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Range - or How far can you go on a charge?

I get asked a lot about the range of the car.
The calculations show the EVogue's projected range to be as shown in this graph.

A glossy brochure would advertise it as "Up to 160Km range". You can see that you would have to be driving at 20Km/h to get that far!
It turns out that the faster you go, the less far you can go. It has a lot to do with how "slippery" the car is when travelling through the air. The Vogue has no published figure for Cd (Coefficient of Drag) so it is yet to be determined (I have guessed at Cd = 0.45 and frontal area = 2m square).

These projections are based on flat and level driving with no start/stop and no hills so the real-world figures will be less. I'm estimating by about 15% but it will be very interesting to find out for sure. The hills don't matter too much as the motor will act as a generator (regenerative braking) when going down hills and even when stopping. In that way I get a large portion of the energy expended going up hills and accelerating, back again.

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