WSIU In Focus Reports on EVTV Motor Verks and First Electric Vehicle Conversion Convention - EVCCON

On this edition of WSIU In Focus, you may not know it, but a region could be ground zero for a potential electric car revolution. That's because two entrepreneurs and innovators, Jack Richard and Brian Noto, decided to set up shop in Cape Girardeau. From a garage in Cape called EVTV Motor Verks, they produce a weekly online television series that shows their adventures as they convert traditional gasoline-powered cars into electric-powered autos.

The duo doesn't call what they do television production, but rather publishing and community-building. The videos they post tend to be rather long, fairly technical, and a bit quirky, but they've developed a loyal following of people from around the world who watch and blog about the do-it-yourself approach they advocate. This cyber-community of aspiring electric car makers and the folks making products for this fledgling market recently got together in Cape Girardeau for the first-ever Electric Vehicle Conversion Convention.

Our cameras were there to witness what could be the birth of the next big technical revolution. This is the main part of our facility where we actually do the work on the cars. This is the shop facility.

This is the second vehicle that we did here, is a 2009 Mini Cooper. And today it's the subject of our, at least part of our show. We've got a few cars that we work on here.

We've also got this Porsche replica we did in here. We do all types of work in here and it's always full of vehicles. Jack Rickard is the driving force behind this operation where they build and test electric cars, like this electric Cobra prototype.

If you ask Rickard what they do, he will not say they're car makers, but rather that he's catering to people who want information and that he's using a time-honored business model to provide it. We're a publisher. We published a magazine and directory and did trade shows for internet service providers throughout the 80s and 90s.

And I sold that in 1998. I recognize the same passion and the same grassroots movement in this group that I saw in the early band of people who actually built the internet. And so I feel very privileged to actually get a second rodeo, if you will, in discovering a group that's working on pretty much the future of transportation.

And they're doing it with a great deal of passion. We'll do a TV show for them, a magazine for them, whatever we have to, but we're a publishing outfit. We see this as an extension of that same publishing model, except for the fact that we don't smear ink on dead trees anymore and send them out in the mail.

We really feel that, especially for our audience, about 40% of our audience is out of the United States. They're in other countries, especially countries where gas prices are high. Europe all over, Australia, Asia.

They're very interested in other forms of power for their vehicles. It's just a choice of power plant versus an internal combustion engine is what we talk to people about. It's just a choice of you having a car that is powered differently instead of burning fossil fuel by using electricity.

As a power source, electricity has many positives going for it. An electric makes sense because you don't have to build out an infrastructure like you would for hydrogen or natural gas. Electricity is everywhere.

The combination of the ubiquity of electricity and the game being changed with the lithium ion batteries, we really feel that electric vehicles have really got a chance this time. Lithium batteries are pretty much the news and the enabler for these cars. There have been electric cars for a hundred years, and there's been individuals converting cars for the last 50 years.

The sea change, or what we call a threshold of viability, is the availability of the lithium ion phosphate cells where we can build a car with an 80 to 100 mile range or more. Suddenly instead of building a science project or demonstrating a car, you can actually go into your garage and build a car and use it as a car. That's really kind of news the last three years.

The type of cars that we're talking about, the lithium ion powered battery electric vehicles, which is really the game changer in terms of making these real cars and perform like cars, is there are maybe a few thousand in the world of these vehicles. This process is still going to take years. We're in the tinkerer stage.

We haven't even approached early adopters really. The early adopter stage is typically classified as 2.5 percent of a market. That would be 375,000 electric cars a year.

There's probably 15,000 electric cars in the world using lithium batteries. EVTV spends a lot of time testing the ion lithium batteries. And these are some of the batteries that didn't necessarily survive.

Here we've got a battery that has been abused. As you can see, if I put a side view of it, it's swollen. It's got a bulge on each side.

And that's an indication that that battery has been overcharged. We're looking with this setup here to abuse batteries for the most part and to test them and to see if they actually deliver the amp hours and the performance that the manufacturers are stating. At EVTV, if we murder our batteries, either by accident or on purpose, in some sense we can keep 700 other people from making that mistake and likewise murdering a battery.

And we fall on our sword on the expense of the cell, but several hundred other people don't have to do that then. Once a week, they shoot enough material to create a program that is 90 minutes or longer. Their setup is simple and the production is basic, but the content is highly technical.

We're setting up the studio. This is the shop portion. This is where we do most of our work.

And then we have a little studio up front. And depending on what we're going to be doing for the show, for this show, for instance, we did a lot of work on the Mini Cooper. We found that we had developed a leak.

Our pack voltage somehow had found a ground to the chassis. That's kind of a dangerous situation. If you are touching the metal and you touch the terminal of the battery, you get a shock.

This car, a lot of our cars are fiberglass, but this one's metal. And if you lean across the metal and touch your battery and one end of it was tied in the frame, you get 380 volts. Right, right.

And it hurts. Yeah, it does. So our pack is actually, our entire drive system is entirely isolated from frame to frame.

Yeah, it's never tied into the frame. And the fix was easy. It was more of the step-by-step how to find it.

To talk cogently about how you can build a car in your garage, we need to build one. And so at this point, we're kind of not only building them serially, but sometimes in parallel we'll have two or three car projects going on at the same time. Revisit earlier builds as things come up with those.

Show what's happening on our new build. And often preview the car we're going to do next and talk about the components, the processes and the techniques to convert an existing automobile to electric drive. And that's what we're about.

This vehicle is a replica of a 1965 or 66 Cobra from a manufacturer in Granby, Missouri. And we're doing the prototype work for this, the electric vehicle conversion. They have an interest in producing these cars in Taiwan.

And right now we have produced it and we are testing it. An onboard camera lets viewers come along for a ride as they perform a coast-down test. I did some reading about coast-down tests and how to do them.

And basically we incorporated the concept of running a car up to 75 miles an hour, taking our foot off the accelerator, and putting the gear shift in neutral, and calling out a time mark when it crossed through 70 miles per hour. And noting that as time zero. As it descends through 60, we call out a second time mark and note that as the 60 time.

And as it gets through 50, the 50 time. And so on down until it rolls to a stop. And we basically have compared the difference between the big fat tires that you would normally find on a Cobra car and low rolling resistance tires.

We finished that test this morning and we graphed that out. That's a 31 second difference. It is.

And it does turn out that low rolling resistance tires are in fact a lot better. They do provide less rolling resistance, in this case maybe 20-25 percent better rolling. You're looking at a lot of difference, maybe 15-20 miles in terms of overall range.

Electric car converters are hungry for this kind of information. And Jack Rickard breaks it all down for them. It stands better on those wide tires than on the narrower Michelins.

But we're not close. It's not worth the price. This is a 60 watt-hours-per-mile difference.

Calculating watt-hours-per-mile is not a trivial exercise. Knowing this number can affect the number of batteries used for a build. It's also vital in calculating the payback time of an electric car.

Finding ways to improve this number is a big deal. So despite the long presentation and technical nature of each show, there is an audience that visits EVTV each week for more. We do the final filming on Friday, edit it on the weekend, and it's usually up Sunday or Monday on Amazon's cloud net.

For viewers worldwide. The viewership, and I've got pretty good tools to look at this, has been growing pretty steadily. I think it's something that an increasing number of people are becoming aware of.

The internet allows us to reach a wider geography. And at the lower costs than normal video production, we can afford to do it for a really narrower audience of people that are quite interested in actually building a car. You know, if an old 57-year-old guy in Cape Verde can do this, I can do one too.

And so they'll start looking at a little S10 pickup or a Ford Ranger or something, and just do their own electric car, and it'll work well enough. And to be perfectly honest, we are here very, very early. I mean, two years ago, when we really started the show, yeah, the parts guys were out there, they were selling some parts.

More of what we're trying to do is get information out to our viewers to build electric vehicles, one car at a time, basically, one vehicle at a time. And that's the way we see the world changing. And we also needed to be there early to give the market what it really needs.

I mean, a market needs information. And in this case, a video magazine, a publication, a trade show, to really let people get together and to form a market. The trade show brought viewers that had been working in isolation together for the first time.

They arrived at Jack Rickard's garage for an initial meet and greet, but the conference itself was moved to a hangar at the airport. We thought that our entire trade show was going to be able to be held in this, you know, 14,000 square foot building. And look at how wrong we were a year later that we thought that was the market.

And the market ended up being 140, 150 people coming to Cape Girardeau. So why is Cape Girardeau home to EVTV? The reason Cape Girardeau is because this is where this Jack was born here. He was in the Navy, lived in Southern California, in Denver, where I met him in Denver.

So he came back after being gone for 28 years. This is his hometown. We're a little bit of an enigma in the local community.

I'm kind of the eccentric guy down on the south end of town. And so there's not a great deal of cognizance in Cape Girardeau itself. I moved here to help Jack with some some completely unrelated projects.

Jack started fooling around with hydrogen and we needed a place to store it. That really didn't work out that well. But that got us interested in the lithium ion batteries.

It just seemed like everything that we had done before that led us not only here to Cape Girardeau, but to this market at this particular moment in time. I would have expected this in California. I never expected it to be in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

I'm just just amazed, you know, but but here it is. And a good deal of that is because of Jack Rickard, Jack's personality, Jack's drive. He's a he's a big part of the reason that we're here today.

Jack Rickard has made many friends along the way, like Dwayne Ball, whose replica of a Porsche 904 was one of the major attractions of the show. The 904 is our second EV that good friend and and fabricator Scott Smith and I built under Jack Rickard's tutelage through EVTV.me. It's gorgeous. It's a dream car.

Dwayne was a viewer and called several times with questions, emailed, and we kind of got into a daily correspondence. Much of this dialogue occurred as Dwayne Ball attempted to build this replica of a 1950 Porsche 550 Spyder called a roller. These kits include the body, chassis, interior, axle, transaxle and brakes.

It all started where we were going to buy a roller and make a little hot rod out of it with an internal combustion engine. And then Scott said, well, we've already we've done that before. Why don't we why don't we make an electric vehicle out of it? While proud of the end result, the satisfaction didn't last long as Dwayne Ball missed the challenge of the bill.

And Dwayne wanted to do another car. That's the cure for this sort of emptiness syndrome when your car doesn't need you anymore. And we discussed a roller that again, a chuck back reproduction that was just coming out of a 1964 Porsche Carrera GTS, the 904.

He had quite a bit of money in this car and that roller was going to be quite pricey. And so basically, I agreed to purchase this one from him and we'd work with him on their next project, which was the the Porsche 904. If you'll follow me with a camera, we'll walk around the car and I'll kind of show you the the build and open her up so you can look inside.

George Hamstra from Netgain talked us into a warp 11 inch. We switch controllers to the Evnetics Soliton One. We use the same 180 ampere hour China Aviation lithium batteries.

We have 52 of them in this car. We have 36 cells in the back and four cases and 16 in the front. The biggest challenge is about 50 percent of the build, Jack would say, is locating space for the battery boxes, building the battery boxes.

And installing the boxes. This car has a little more range than the than the Spyder. The Spyder was maybe a 110 to 120 mile range.

We feel this one is probably 130, maybe a little more. I've driven it 110 miles a couple of times and the percentage left in the pack has led me to believe it'll go at least 130 miles. We've geared it and we think the car will probably do in excess of 120 miles an hour.

Dwayne Ball has a Netgain motor and Ednetics controller. The presidents of both these companies were invited as speakers. George Hamstra, the keynote speaker, did so well in the computer industry, he retired at age 37 and built an electric dragster just for fun.

We initially started with an off the shelf motor and we kept destroying the motors. What we decided was we needed a motor built for our needs. So we worked hand in hand with Warfield to develop a motor and we've been continuing to enhance that motor for the last 10 years and it's becoming popular with EV enthusiasts.

And I've been contacted by Chinese manufacturers and they've tried to clone my motors and they've offered me prices that are one half of what I can have those motors produced for here in the United States. Warfield Electric has worked with me for 13 years. You know, I wouldn't do that to them and I wouldn't do that to their employees because their employees are like my employees.

They're not just my manufacturing facility. They're also my friends. Everything we make is made in America.

This is 200 horsepower motor controller and a 400 horsepower motor controller that we make. Sebastian Bourgeois is another conference presenter that got into making electric car components because he saw a need based upon his own experience. I think like most people, once gas prices hit a certain point about in 2008, I figured there must be a better way.

And so I built a car out of existing components and then realized that those components were much more than augmented golf cart technology. And so, you know, went back to engineers I knew and we got a team together and designed essentially products made specifically for electric vehicles. It's not only a motor controller, but also kind of the heart and soul of an electric vehicle, essentially the link between the battery pack and the motor.

It makes sure that the battery pack is OK, the motor is OK. It gives you whatever power you desire. It also enables you to run some automatic transmission functions, spoofing signals.

Then you can interface with a lot of the existing systems and make a modern conversion without compromising things like traction control, stability control, cruise control, ABS brakes. All these systems can remain in place. And we allow, you know, we make that possible with the controller.

Sebastian Bourgeois' current conversion, a Porsche 911, is a brute. This is a twin nine motor setup. This is good to run 400 horsepower, 600 foot pounds from stall.

This is probably, I would say, three times more torque than this car had originally. And, you know, easily two to two and a half times more horsepower. So this this goes like like stink.

Most of the cars on display at the convention were not as sexy as the show cars built by the high end converters. Jason Horak is a more typical home converter, choosing a 1987 Dodge Daytona for his conversion. He started by setting a price point that was within his means.

Initially, I set my sights at about fifteen thousand dollars for the whole build. It seemed that that was kind of a reasonable price range for a car that would have the kind of performance that I was looking for. I mean, you can build an electric car on a budget for, you know, a lot less money.

But I wanted one that could go, you know, 75, 80 miles an hour on the highway. I wanted it to accelerate as quickly as the original car and, you know, basically be a fun to drive vehicle that I could do all my daily driving in. Daily driving is what cars are mostly used for.

On average, people drive less than 50 miles per day. The projected range is between 100 and 120 miles. That puts it into the realm of practical for most people.

And so I'd be able to get back and forth to work every day, you know, without paying any money for gas. That's kind of cool. Electricity is very inexpensive to charge your car.

It's pennies on the dollar. Electric cars with their limited range make perfect sense as commuter vehicles. You may have noticed that Jason Horak used the term projected range.

I had an issue when I originally came in. My car didn't run and I shipped it here. So when I got here, there was the owner and operator of EVnetics was under my car fixing it and making it go.

And it was just an amazing experience. While tweaking the controller is something many first time builders seem to struggle with, most of the build, such as wiring the batteries, is basic electrical knowledge. These are the batteries and this is how they're all hooked together.

It's really kind of straightforward, but each battery has about 3.4 volts individually. And so in order to get up to a high enough voltage to run a car, you have to hook them together in series. Can anybody build one? Probably not.

But somebody with average or better than average mechanical skills can certainly be very successful at this. Many people attending the electric car conversion conference are just starting the process. How many of you are building an electric car but have never driven one yet? Others had finished their cars in time for the conference and wanted to share what they had learned.

At an event open to the public, you could see they also wanted to know more. First question everybody asks is how far will it go? On paper, mine should go 80, 75 miles, I think. I finished it two weeks ago and I don't even have that many miles on it yet, so I'm not sure.

The other question people ask is, what does it cost? I spent more than I care for my wife to know, but she won't be watching this, so I'll share. It was $25,000. I wouldn't be surprised if we had 65 grand in building this car.

Even at the lower price range, electric cars at this time are not likely to provide a return on investment that makes them cost competitive with fuel efficient conventional cars. But that's not what is motivating many of these tinkerers. When I looked at the unprecedented wealth transfer from the United States to offshore powers that frankly are not friendly and in many cases are quite interested in our demise, I figured that by making a small contribution to the reduction in the use of fossil fuels, I would be just reducing some of the money going offshore and keeping it here in the United States where it belongs.

Oil is at the center of the struggle of controlling resources. So I'd like to be able to enable an easy way out of that, for one. You have the obvious pollution issue and they're fun.

They're absolutely amazing. Just yesterday, I rode this BMW and the experience was truly exhilarating. So they don't have to be these little putzter little cars that barely move.

They're actually incredibly fun and fast. Right now, there is a market for electric cars and the products needed to make them. That's wide open.

So there's a lot of opportunities and a lot of the attendees here at the show have already developed products, motors, controllers, chargers, pedals, just instrumentation, things that you need in any vehicle. But some of those have got to be specific to electric vehicles. And we're really seeing a push for people to have a business, not only in products, but also in converting cars.

What I want to do is make electric conversions such as these as a profession. This is why Wayne Alexander, who's done close to 150 conversions since 2005, was invited to present. Like car painting entrepreneur Earl Scheib, who used to advertise he would paint any car for $29.95, Alexander will convert any car starting at $12,500.

But the $12,500 is the lowest in the country. And I like Earl Scheib. I'll convert any car, any color, any size starting at $12,500.

I think Wayne Alexander has a lot to share. He has a very simple process of doing this. We haven't even scratched the surface of electric vehicles in this country.

Even if it came to the point of one percent of the vehicles on a road were converted to electric, it'd be a huge amount. George Hamster is even more bullish than Alexander about electric cars. This is the next opportunity, like personal computers.

As a matter of fact, it appears to me after seeing the turnout here in Cape Girardeau and what's going on, that this is going to exceed the growth curve of personal computers. You may recall that PCs got less expensive and faster. Software was developed that met the needs of consumers and businesses and companies that dominated the mainframe computer market fell by the wayside.

So don't be surprised if electric vehicles become more and more viable, fueled by leaps in battery technology or other innovations. These are unlikely to come from major car companies. It's more likely that the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is among this crowd.

And that's what EVTV is banking on. We're still at the face where this industry is being developed at a grassroots level. And that, again, is what's really exciting for us, because we don't know where the next, you know, Google or Facebook or something is going to come from.

This message resonates with the EVTV audience. I like the idea of being able to do something that the big companies can't. It's kind of a thumbing my nose at the man.

Even if you're not ready to make an electric car, there's a lot to think about in this story. Wasn't George Hamstra totally inspiring by his choice not to outsource? It's no wonder Jack Rickard selected him to be the keynote speaker. We'd like to thank Jack Rickard and Brian Noto for inviting us in.

And if you would like to see what EVTV Motor Verks is doing, simply go to www.EVTV.me and check them out. You can also visit our website at WSIU.org to watch or share with others the online version of the segments we air, including this overview of EVTV Motor Verks and the buzz surrounding homegrown electric cars. As always, we encourage you to make it a point to join us here each week on WSIU In Focus to learn something new and perhaps to even be inspired.

Video copies of this program are available to order. Call our customer service department at 618-453-6184.