mjrickard

Sadly and painfully behind on my blogging duties, it is probably poor form to attempt a remedy with one massive update. But we do what we can. We HAVE been a bit busy with the roundup of the EleCobra prototype for Aptima Motors. Recall, if you will, that I was vaguely disappointed in our performance […]

The Aptima Motors eCobra is coming along. We are in the final days of this project. It rolls and drives well. One of the concerns with this car has been the amount of power required to move it. For a two seat convertible sports model, it is a bit heavy at 2961 lbs – no

Interesting week last week and growing interestingier as we start this one. Last Monday, we were doing some range testing at 60 mph in the eCobra when the Netgain Warp 11HV let out all its smoke and ceased operation somewhat noisily. This led to a crusade to swap the motor that I’m more than a

In this week’s underdog adventure, we retrace our steps on the Aux battery and the 12volt subsystem. We have a number of loads that need to be on all the time – parked or running. In fact, the number of these is reaching kind of alarming proportions. The latest that slipped under the radar was

Several hundred years ago, in a war weary and torn rural England, there was a great famine. The war and the weather had conspired to fail the crop entirely and hunger was rampant across the land. So scarce was food that violence was a daily occurrence with the strong taking what they needed from the

This week we try to catch up a bit on the eCobra project, which I would like to finish sometime in THIS life. This car has been a struggle. The bad news is it has just featured some really difficult geometry to fit in a 41 kWh battery pack in a small two-seat sports car.

First drives are always an excellent event. Weeks, and for us, usually months of effort in the shop eventually lead to a vehicle, still in some disassembly, but running out of excuses NOT to go drive. And then it rolls. The magic never lessens for me. It is always an exhilarating moment to see the

Still catching up with all that happened at the Electric Vehicle Conversion Convention EVCCON 2011. One of the “featured” speakers of the event was Chris Paine. I often ask people how they got started in electric vehicles as kind of a warm up question. The most common answer is “I saw this documentary, Who Killed

On Friday, after a long day of technical sessions, EVCCON attendees turned outside to nice weather and a bit of a play day. We had a weigh station where attendees could get the weight and distribution of their cars, a drag race, and an autocross. To spice it up, EVTV had offered a purse of

Christopher Fisher has created a private forum on LinkedIn for EVCCON attendees to stay in touch. I kind of like this service as everyone has a photograph next to their posts and I’ll e able to connect the face and name. No little kid “handles” and stuff on LinkedIn. More of a professional service. EVCCON