I had a steady stream of people looking at my truck.  I was on my feet all day and talking to a lot of people.  Many people seemed genuinely surprised that it is possible to make your own fully electric vehicle and were very interested in the project.

Here I …

I will have my truck on display at the Austin Mini Maker Faire, with AustinEV, this Saturday May 12.  I hope to see you there!

As of today I have logged 1526 miles of almost daily service.  My weekday round trip commute is about 12 miles and I usually put 20-30 miles each on Saturday and Sunday.  I have used a total of 4350 Ah, which at 141V (nominal) is about 613 kWh.  If I derate assuming a charging efficiency of 90% then that is about 680 kWh from the wall.  At 13 cents/kWh that comes to about $90 of electricity to go 1526 miles.

Today I drove the truck to my house.  After "living" at Bill's house for about 1.5 years, today we declared it ready to drive home.  So after spending the afternoon taking test rides and enjoying some good food and drink, tonight I drove it back to my house.

Once I got home, I plugged it into the socket in my garage that I installed just for this purpose.  Here is a photo of my truck plugged in at my house (first charge at home).

Charging at home

Click to keep reading ... 

When I started this project I wanted to know how the weight of the truck would change.  I was also hoping to change the weight distribution a little since the back end of the truck seemed light to me.  We weighed the truck before removing the ICE (internal combustion engine) and after, and just recently weighed it again with all the electrics installed.  Here are the results:

Note: Total includes 100 lbs for transmission which was not in the vehicle when "Removed" measurement was made.

Thanks to Bill taking some time out of his day yesterday, the truck is now street legal.

Inspection and Registration Stickers

If you look carefully you may notice that the inspection sticker is not the same as a normal car.  Apparently the normal sticker is a safety plus emissions sticker, and this is a safety-only sticker.

We took another test drive of the truck.  This time it was a little longer, and in the day time.  We drove it 8.5 miles in total.  In that distance I used about 20Ah from the battery.  Using a nominal voltage of 141V for the battery pack, that works out to be 332 Wh/mile.  That is not too bad I suppose.  I had seen estimates of anywhere from 250 to 400 Wh/mi, so I am not unhappy with that.

Elcon PFC 3k charger

I bought the Elcon PFC 3000 charger for my truck.  This is a 3kW charger that can handle 120 or 240VAC input.  I thought this would be handy and I would be able to normally charge using 240 at my house, but opportunity charge at 120 when there is a normal 5-15 plug available.

I am using an mr2 power steering pump but it is not working well and needs to be replaced. I want to order a rebuilt but I need to know what year or year range to use when ordering a replacement. Can anyone tell me the year for this pump …