The other EV...

My second electric car was a Toyota Paseo. Originally converted by US Electricar and upgraded by innEVations (Gary Flo) with a new Auburn controller and more batteries. It had an Auburn Scientific Grizzly controller which can pull 600 amps at 192 volts. It can do 0 to 60 in about 10 seconds. Here are some interesting specs:

Voltage	192 (16 - 12 volt optima batteries)
Maximum Motor Amps	600 Amps, 350 except under the best conditions
0 to 60 in	About 10 seconds
Range	35 miles in a combination of highway (65mph) and city (45mph with stops lights) in the summer.
Charge Times	80% recharge from completely dead in 1.5 hours

The car had three Zivan charges on board. One 110 volt and 2 240 volt chargers. With all three working together that's about 26 amps of charging capacity. It had 16 Optima yellow tops and a micro-processor Auburn Scientific Grizzly controller.

I just installed two roof mounted flexible solar panels on the roof of the car. The stick up about 3/16 of an inch and power an exhaust fan. That keeps the car a little cooler on those hot summer days. It really makes a difference, especially since I didn't bother with air conditioning.

Another cool little toy on the car was the PalmPilot. I wrote some software that reads input from the E-Meter and displays the current voltage and amperage in big one inch high characters. It also calculates the state of charge using two methods; the rest voltage and the power used. The power used calculations use Peukert's constant. Both state of charge estimates are shown with a bar type display. A big improvement over the 4 LED approach of the E-Meter. After collecting the data with the PalmPilot I plot and analyze the collected data with a Java program. The graphs look like the picture below. There is also some text that it spits out that allow me adjust the parameters in the Pilot. Using the graphs and text I can adjust the meter for colder temperatures. The cold has a significant effect and the capacity drop to half of what it is in the summer.