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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

" only available through approved installation centers."

This won't sell; people will just buy a crashed EV for 1/10th the cost and salvage the motor and battery. This is more of an insult than a product. It reeks of "you're not qualified to work on our premium electrons until you pay $10k and pass our one-day eCourse"

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I was excited until I read this and the price. I would love to try and drop this into a 90s Miata for a fun garage project.

The battery weight alone exceeds the load capacity of a 90s miata by 2x. And i wonder how well it would handle with the 1000 lbs of battery under the hood or in the trunk, my guess is not very well.

The battery size really surprised me. I can see this working well with 1/3 the battery, but 1000lbs is crazy. The lighter motor and removal of the fuel tank will help a little, but replacing a heavy engine in the front with a heavier battery in the back can't possibly work.

How heavy do you think the average medium sized EV battery is? Batteries are heavy.

IIRC my NB (2002) Miata had a load capacity of 340lbs. I pretty much exceeded it any time I had a passenger, let alone anything in the trunk!

Yeah I uh… didn’t really think about that haha. Maybe with some frame reinforcements, heavy duty coilovers, and performance brakes?

This, the price, and the power level.

Meanwhile, Ford has been selling the Mach-E motor as a crate motor for years; but it's useless, because they sell nothing else for it. No battery pack, no controller, no regenerative brakes. Pretty much a PR sham. Why bother?

I have a Mustang with a half-disassembled engine that needs major work, so I thought hey this might be cool. Nope.

I'm quite keen to get the battery and motor out of a scrap Leaf to fit to something.

The motor package from a Leaf is about 90kg so probably in the same ballpark as the fuel tank, rear axle, and gearbox. You'd then need to get a lighter battery because a Leaf's battery is about 350kg, or twice the weight of an MX5's engine.

There would be a lot of surgery involved on the back end but since it's a subframe with the diff in the middle you're halfway there.

And for once, the project car's totally rotten boot floor won't be a problem because you're cutting all that away anyway!

Big brand crate engines have always been obscene. Almost every LS swap you see was someone pulling a motor out of a junker.

Only because they will charge a premium if you don't return the "old core". Nobody wants the hassle, or the upfront cost for not having one to give them.

Even with a core, their "performance" engines have still been absurdly expensive.

You're underestimating the complexity of doing what you're describing. There is a market for a $10k package where the communications busses are documented, everything has square plumb mounting, no fabrication is required, etc.

I have done several EV conversions using parts as you describe and there is a healthy amount of reverse engineering, defeating or replicating functions you didnt think of until it doesnt work right with modules that are expecting other modules to exist on the bus that no longer exist, and a million other things.

That's fine for a personal hobby project, but that is a very, very, very small project. The target for this kind of product is conversion shops that want to be able to offer customers tight turnarounds on vanity EV conversions with warrantees. 10k is pretty minor on that kind of project, the lead time and integration complexity is way more important.

Some of that might be to satisfy the EPA since it's technically against their rules to do engine swaps in many cases or delete or modify emissions devices.

Then why are they able to provide a 500hp gas crate motor?

There's probably a disclaimer that it's not for street vehicles.

Note in the eCrate link it's explicitly claimed to be legal when done correctly.

More information:

What I was recalling is the EPA's Engine Switching Fact Sheet from 1991.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/engswitch_...

I learned today that it was replaced in 2020 by the EPA Tampering Policy. This one doesn't seem to focus so much on engine swaps but on the emissions devices themselves.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/documents/ep...

When you do that you're supposed to classify the vehicle as an OHV, or off-highway vehicle. Problem is a lot of states don't actually do emissions testing, others don't do vehicle status inspection, and some don't do either. You ever wonder why Indiana has such a huge number of drag racing cars in the Prostock and Superstock classes? There's no emissions testing outside the capitol.

>> You ever wonder why Indiana has such a huge number of drag racing cars in the Prostock and Superstock classes?

I can honestly say I've never wondered that. It's so oddly specific lol.

Back when people still watched cable Street Outlaws was Discovery's biggest show for a while. It is an oddly specific thing, but a question I heard a lot about ten years ago. The two places where drag racing are biggest are Oklahoma and Indiana.

Having grown up in Indiana, and having watched a lot of drag racing, and even crewed for a friend drag racing motorcycles, I have not once wondered that, either. I, of course, just assumed it was that way everywhere. “What, your small nowhere town doesn’t have its own drag strip or dirt oval? How odd…”

(And when I say “nowhere”, I mean go look up Bunker Hill, IN as a go-to example. It’s a fine town as far as small towns go, but a long way from any major metro.)

Isn't it true that you can also be emissions exempt if you drive under 5k miles a year?

Edit: and off road motors still have standards, just different standards.

That's done on a state-by-state basis. The EPA knows nothing of how many miles you drive nor does any yearly emissions testing.

Of course, the emissions testing is a state issue. Even the federal regulations say that federal government vehicles have to be tested in the state they are stationed in.

I don't know about the federal level, but in NY State, the rule on engine swaps allows for a newer engine to be installed in an older car as long as the newer emissions equipment is installed as well. So swapping a 2010 k series motor into a 90s civic would be legal if you also bring the ECU (because obd counts as emissions) and the catalytic converters. At least that was my read of the law.

My buddy and I did a California BAR swap of a k20a2 into a civic EG. The things a ripper.

We also had to bring over all the emission EVAP stuff, for the evap on the RSX tank (plastic irrc) we bought a new EG tank and welded all the necessary fittings to get it to work.

Very engaging car to drive.

I was looking at buying something similar on cars and bids a couple of years back that didn't have cats, so I looked into the law in ny. I've been in a stripped eg with a similar motor at an autocross and it does rip. Loose rear and front grip with an 8200rpm redline? Heck yeah. Would recommend looking up your nearest scca and going out for a day to see what it does at the limit

As it should be.

I'd rather that reality than the EV conversion hobby be plagued and slandered with "this guy bought official parts and his baby perished in the resulting home fire".

Disagree, premium parts should have premium fail-safes and be robust to reasonably foreseeable misuse.

In so many markets manufacturers are antagonistic to repair and customization; project cars remains this wonderful little niche where DIY excellence is enabled and encouraged. That shouldn't end with ICEs.

We have hobbyist mechanics out here taking their engine blocks to the machinist, rebuilding hydraulic automatic transmissions on the workbench, not to mention safely handling literal buckets of combustibles. They'll be fine.

I think there's a reasonable concern about supply chain here given the complexity of the components. The hobbyist ICE market has had generations of experience, and the risks are better known then with EV power trains, and it's much more difficult to inspect components that are battery or chip-controller based over a standard ICE engine. I'm sure there's also a profit motive, but I also think there's a strong concern around reputational damage and a desire to control the entire pipeline to make sure that doesn't happen.

The valvetrain and fuel injection systems of any given internal combustion engine vehicle made since the 1980s are far more complex than the voltage controller of an EV drivetrain. The difference is that those mechanical components are in a system that can have multiple minor fail states before ceasing to function and contain far less energy than what's coursing through the voltage controller. The reason EVs are more dangerous currently is because they haven't gone through the decades of regulations and testing needed to provide multiple diagnostics and failsafes the way mechanical components have. That's easily fixed by just giving them a few years and letting people develop folk knowledge they way they did with internal combustion engines. Even now hobbyists are developing new ways to test for unbalanced cells, impedance hotspots, and integrating new monitoring systems that don't require costly proprietary sensors.

Most of this limitation from Ford and GM about their EV drivetrains is because they want control over deployment for monitoring, and so they can cover their asses legally if something like a manufacturing defect becomes widespread.

Reasonably foreseeable misuse is a fallacy. The only really possible way to know how users are going to misuse a product, is to get it in the hands of the users. How does the saying go? Design something to be idiot-proof and nature will present you with a better idiot.

It's shitty to just say "you might not do it safely so you can't do it at all". We don't do that when building houses for example - anyone can build a house; you just need to get safety inspections at certain points in the build process. Why not do the same for cars?

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