High price of gas got you down? Well build your own electric car and get forget about gas! You know it's going to be back over $4 a gallon as soon as they can get it there. You can run an electric car for 1 to 2 cents per mile!

Now there are a lot of considerations when you are looking to build your own electric car. Do you start from the ground up or convert and existing ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicle? What would make a good "donor" vehicle? What kind of batteries to use? What about a motor? Can I really do this? Will this thing even work? Am I crazy?

Well, first things first.... Yes, you can do it. It's not rocket science and it really doesn't take any more than average mechanical skill to do a basic conversion. As far as starting from the ground up... well if you really want to go that route, more power to you! But I will say that is bordering on rocket science, you'll be a lot better off converting an existing ICE vehicle to electric.

So you still think you want to do this, eh? OK. Step one is to find a good donor vehicle.

One of the first things to consider is weight, how heavy is your donor car? This will significanlty affect the range of your EV (Electric Vehicle).  Remember you are running on batteries and the more weight you have the more power it will take to move the car.  So in general the lighter the better.

On the other hand if your car is so small that it can't carry very many batteries that will also cut down on how far you can drive.

Let me tell you about a couple of vehicles I know that have been converted to EV. The first is a '80 Spitfire, the other an '89 Ranger pickup. Now at first you might think the Spitfire is the perfect donor car, it's small and lightweight and has a lot less aerodynamic drag, and you would be right. But on the other hand the pickup has a much stronger frame and can carry a lot more batteries, so in the end the pickup actually has a greater range, it can make about 40 miles per charge and the Spitfire only gets about 35 miles.

That's not very far you might say, but most of us only drive about 33 miles per day, and if you really wanted to (and had the extra cash) you could put in lithium batteries and get twice the range. We're talking basic, inexpensive, lead acid batteries here, this is about saving money on gas, not going high-tech & spending a lot of money.

When it comes right down to it just about any ICE vehicle will do, but some are easier conversions than others. For example, a rear wheel drive car will be a lot easier to do than most front wheel drive cars. Why? You have a single shaft to connect to you electric motor instead of two.

Plus for some vehicles there are electric motors that are made to connect directly to the drive shaft of certain manufacturers. For instance the Netgain Transwarp DC motors that are designed to connect to the Chevy Turbo 400 transmission or directly to the Chevy universal joint on the drive shaft. Check it out here.

Now that you have a donor vehicle in mind it's time for a closer look at the hardware. You can do a DC motor or an AC motor with an inverter to convert the battery power to AC. I'm a fan of DC myself, hey it's one less piece of hardware that could go south on you, not to mention that it's one less thing you have to pay for...

For these I would go for a quality lead acid, deep cycle battery. Or heck you can throw in junk used car batteries to start and upgrade later. Eventually lithium batteries will be affordable and you can make the change later, but run on lead acid for now to save money. Or you can put in cheap used batteries now and go for quality lead acid, deep cycle batteries later.

Just make sure that you get a good quality programmable charge controller that can handle the battery upgrade later.

So now you're ready to jump into the project... good luck!  Rip out the ICE engine, gas tank & fuel lines and maybe the transmission too.  Mount your motor in place, put in the charging system and battery bank (be careful not to electrocute yourself!) and off you go!

Well, it's not quite that easy, but that's the general idea.  You'll probably need lots of help so here's a link to a forum with some people that have done it all before...  generally happy to answer questions and help out.

I'm out of time for now so I'll publish another episode on DIY electric car conversions later with more details on getting the actual work done.