Texas Teen Builds His Own Electric Car on $10,000 Budget
This fall, Texas teenager Lucas Laborde will be driving to school in an electric car he built himself. The 17 year old spent last summer converting a conventional gas-powered car to run on batteries. Total cost? Around $10,000.
Luke’s EV is based on a kit car, known as a Bradley GT II, which his father bought on eBay for just $5000 splashing out a further $5700 on electric conversion parts and batteries. The rest was left up to Luke’s ingenuity and technical know-how.
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After 150 hours of work, Luke had hooked up eight 80-pound lead-acid batteries in the space left after removing the fuel tank, as well as several other ‘creative locations.’ He finished up with an EV capable of travelling 40 miles between charges, a top speed of 45mph, (more than enough for the local school run), and heaps of low-end torque. As Luke told reporters, “it has a lot of power.”
The car isn’t without a few ‘quirks’ though; the weight of the batteries has caused the fiberglas body to twist slightly, meaning that the gull-wing doors don’t completely close. However, by using his own initiative, and making use of widely available existing components, Luke Laborde has put many global car companies to shame by creating a working, highway-ready EV, in far less time and on a much lower budget.
Image Credit - Steve Striharsky at bradleygt2.com
That is nothing crazy. EVs have been around since the 1960s and had a huge amount of advancement in the 1970s. This is just a good example that someone (a young kid) can take off the shelf parts and then put them together.
What would be innovative is if he built the electrical system from actual parts. A kit doesn’t seem so difficult.
This kid gets major kudos for initiative! One thing that automakers are working on is an electric car that travels at normal highway speeds - in excess of 80 mph. Hard to say whether that factor alone results in an electric vehicle that costs 3-4 times what this high school student put together though!
Just saw a news that a Chinese car manufacturer introduced a new solar panel car for 30,000 RMB, which is less than $5000, ere is a link, sorry it’s in Chinese, but you can see the picture of it.
Speed up to 70 km/hr, plug in 10 hr for 150 km range, 1 hr sunshine for 5 km.
http://news.wenxuecity.com/messages/200810/news-gb2312-719207.html
Nothing Crazy? Look at those doors! Look at the colors! Even if he did it with a kit, the kid is stylin. Drive slow homie, drive slow.
Congratualations on a beautiful conversion. You are one motivated young man. I hope you manage to stiffen the body up so the doors work better. As far as range and speed goes I have a few comments. Perhaps we are looking at the whole thing backwards. Instead of making EV’s that go 80 MPH with a 150 mile range, perhaps we should shoot for 50 MPH and 75 mile range and make them affordable. How many people actually commute more than 35 miles each way? I know I squeek under that figure and also 30% of my travel is 45 MPH or less on that trek. I have slowed from 65 to 55 on the highway part as well, I save a bit of fuel that way. We are worrying about shortages of fuel and EV’s are a good way to lessen our dependence on combustibles, yet once everyone has an EV, we should start thinking about the next logical step and learn to reduce our electrical load too. It has to come from somewhere too, and it has cost. We need to work on making it possible to work, eat and play in a smaller footprint around where we live. Our grandparents did.
If he would have used Lithium Polymer batteries it would weigh less, increasing the drive time..
I keep wondering why one of these cars couldn’t be fitted with a clean 5 or 10 HP engine generator set to run full time for long trips.
Go rent “Who killed the Electric Car”. We have had the technology for a long time. Unfortunately, rich oil companies have combined their efforts with government and car companies to keep it from coming to fruition. Kudos to the boy. We all should do this and put big oil out of business.
Lead Acid batteries do not respond well to being fully discharged…. Fail