Company Turns Familiar Gas Cars Into Electric Vehicles
How would you like to drive an all-electric Mini? An EV Smart Car? A PT Cruiser? With the help of Hybrid Technologies, you can. They’ve taken many familiar vehicles, ripped out their engines, and replaced them with lithium batteries and electric motors.
On the surface it makes great sense and it seems there would be a huge demand for this sort of thing. Electric cars are nearly maintenance free. They don’t need oil changes and they have 90% fewer parts than gas cars. Plus, these EVs look like the normal cars that are already popular with many folks.
Cool. How much will it cost? Glad you asked. How about a slick $40,000 for an all electric Toyota Yaris hatchback? Or $60,000 for the Mini? Come on now, I know you wanted that Beemer, but let’s be realistic, the price of gas is only rising and you never liked going to get oil changes anyways.
Given the savings on fuel and maintenance, the company states that they believe their prices are “competitive” with other vehicles when looked at over a 7 to 10 year time frame. Although this is probably true, I see some issues with their business model.
To start with, I’m guessing that coming up with $60,000 all at once (or even paying $1,200 a month on a 5 year loan at 7% interest) would be out of the realm of “doable” for the demographic typically interested in buying a Yaris, a PT Cruiser, or a Mini.
Secondly, at $60,000, you’re 60% of the way to buying yourself a Tesla Roadster with much better stats (not to mention a status factor light years beyond a mere all-electric PT Cruiser). Chances are, if you have $60,000 you can throw at a vehicle, you probably can manage the stretch to $100,000 as well.
Lastly, I think the company has missed a bigger consumer demand for converting cars that people already own into all-electric vehicles. If you’ve owned something like a PT cruiser for 6 years, you’ve probably paid it off and you might be thinking of buying a new car.
Buying a new car would cost you around $25,000. If the conversion to all-electric costs around $25,000, why not just do that instead? In the process they remove all the parts that tend to break down, you end up with a car that costs pennies per mile to operate, and you’ve essentially recycled your old car.
In 4 years time, I’d do that with my 2007 Yaris in a heartbeat.
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- An Electric Car With Muscle: The 175 MPGe X1 Prototype by Wrightspeed Inc.
- Inflatable Electric Cars: Surround Your Body in Bliss
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- Snapshot of Battery Technology for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Cars
Image Credits: Hybrid Technologies
@ EVcast (Bo Bennett)
Thanks for your comments. I’ve seen videos of the people who run Hybrid Technologies, and they do seem like knowledgeable and nice folks. From comments posted here and elsewhere on the internet, their “premium” for the EV conversion does seem quite high, but it also seems they throw in a bunch of other extras (such as a redone dashboard with a LCD display similar to the Prius). Not sure how much the extras make up for the premium, but thought I’d throw that out there just to be fair.
Be realistic…$40,000.00 to convert to electric car?. $1,200 monthly on 5 year loan?. Car life is 5-7 years, and new car cost $15,000.00. I pay $150.00 for gas by month.
If you consider the cost of a new yaris $15,000.00 plus $150.00 monthly for gas and expecting 7 years car life ($12,600 for 7 year gas) this makes a total of $27,600.00. If somebody can sell electric car for $25,000.00 (or less considering to make attractive to buyers) will be a serious option.
Converting a sub-compact car to battery power can be done for less than $10,000.
Motorcycles for less than $3000.
There are car manufactures who build non-ICE cars and sell them around the world.
It’s your politicians who disallow them to be sold in the US.
I think you make a great point about people owning their cars after 6 years. They should be investing their business and money into creating new alternatives. In most cases, finding a solution for commonly used good (gas vehicles in this case) is a great idea. However, with how quickly gas prices are speeding up the switch, the business plan, as you noted, is very short term. Great points!
I’d like for them to turn my 2005 Dodge Durango into a hybrid.
I have converted my 1988 Chev 3/4 ton 4×4 PU that ran on gas @ 15 mpg, to run on a hybred mixture of Hydrogen. The conversion cost a total of $250 in parts. I now am getting 30+ MPG. The milage would need to be certified before it goes on the market. This would also work on disel motors including 18 wheelers… There have not been any studies as too the possible saving on disels but my gut instinct tells me it should do about the same? It uses no additional batteries.
The cost reflects no shop time cost, or R&D cost. It seems people are reaching too far at too high a conversion cost to save the world. I prefer to start with basics. And a more afforadable window.
And their cars actually look cool. That is unusual.
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
Well this is an interesting article. Converting cars to electric is definitely a step in the right direction. However, one of the problems we have here in America is that there are two many big old cars on the road in the first place. What is the most prominent form of transit in the world? Why, its the good old bicycle and aside from driving one mile to work back and forth four times a week I pretty much use my bicycle to get around. I am losing weight, feel better and get good exercise that will extend my life. lower healthcare costs and improve my quality of life immensely. It also leaves more dollars in my wallet too due to less gas consumption and maintenance required on my car. Even then I have a car that gets 30MPG highway which is not bad. Even still we need to have mostly cars that get 40-50mpg highway instead of gas guzzling SUV’s and trucks that get 15-20MPG.
Why would you want to convert a 40mpg Yaris? I’ve gotten up to 45mpg highway with my Yaris, which is almost as good as a lot of hybrids!
There are some very good reasons to convert your car to electric. For me, I’ve been pretty upfront in saying I’m doing it to save money. I wish it were a higher cause like saving the world, but it is simply money. To run the electric car it will cost me about 1/4 of what it costs to run my gas powered car. The vehicle should pay for conversion costs in 2-3 years (in fuel savings alone) and everything after that will be true savings. You can visit the project at http://www.zerogasoline.com.