What's the best small cheap used EV platform out there? I'd like to get into one for under $5k to play with for a bit. The long term goal is to transplant the batteries/drivetrain into a 914 shell I have. So what should I be searching for? Chevy Spark currently has my attention.
I don't have a deep insight into this, but I've heard of 500e parts being used for swaps because of the value of the donor. The Leaf is probably the most common if you can accept the likely battery degradation.
Leaf's are probably more common at that pricepoint... and there's already a fair amount of homebrew support for using their components in budget EV swaps. You probably want to look for a 2014+ though, they've usually got bettery/larger batteries and a higher performance onboard charger.
Volts are probably the next most common, and would have better battery performance "out of the box" because the packs are liquid cooled... but I don't know what the state of using the Volts ac motor/control outside of the Volt is; and there's been some evidence of the packs having issues despite the cooling (mazdeuce experienced this, iirc).
3rd option, that's about 2x the price right now is the i3 (~$10k). It's also got liquid cooled packs. No idea if there's been any attempts to hack its controller for use outside of the original architecture. The power also might be lacking for what you want. And... you know... the whole "relying on BMW electronics for an EV car"... thing. I wonder how much the carbon monocoque means the cars are getting salvage titled for 'minor prangs' nowadays?
There's a couple of other pretty knowledge EV people that will chime in here in a bit, though.
Leafs are cheap and the motors can make good power.
Dala had done great stuff with swapping newer batteries and inverters into the early chassis to make a leaf, and eventually 914, quick.
Brat Industries makes porsche based inner CV's to make swapping easier. He also does gear swaps to put the final drive in then 4/1 range instead of the factory 8/1 which gives me evil ideas of using a replacement inverter board from:
guys on the Open Inverter forum to combine the tall final drive with pushing the amperage up of the inverter and making a car that pulls to past highway speeds intstead of petering out sub 100mph.
Edit: the factory inverter and battery swap can supposedly get you in the 160KW range (224 hp) but I don't believe anyone has managed more than 130KW.
Arlin Sansome has pushed the Leaf motor to 300whp with his own inverter and is now part of a team that has built an inverter he has used to push the motor to 200KW (280hp). Neither of these setups would be possible with leaf batteries.
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