When it comes to EVs, there should really be two periods: BT (Before Tesla) and AT (After Tesla), although that probably ignores a few other key milestones in the development of the modern EV. Here’s a veteran from maybe 10 or 20 BT, when conversions on small cars like the VW were the primary focus in the EV world.
They inevitably involved heavy and weak lead-acid batteries; the fact that this ’68 VW has oversized rear wheels and tires is a give-away to all that lead it’s lugging around back there. And good luck trying to find a buyer for this now, when one can lease a Leaf, Spark EV, Fiat 500E or other such modern EV for very low monthly rates.
Here’s where those batteries reside, where there once was a back seat and storage area. There was nothing on the For Sale Sign to indicate how many batteries, and more importantly, what kind of shape they’re in. These lead acids inevitably degrade fairly quickly, unless they’re really babied.
These conversions just attached the electric motor to the VW transaxle, resulting in four speeds, although probably just two are likely used, perhaps second or third for around town, and fourth for the highway. But highway speeds resulted in terrible range typically, so these were best for an around-town scooter. In any case, lead-acid conversion range typically was in the 20-30 mile range, with some exceptions.
Most of these conversions did not have regenerative braking, which also hurt range as well as strained the drum brakes.
I have no idea what old EV conversions sell for nowadays, but I have to think the market would be very weak. Recently, the Fiat 500E was being offered in CA for $83 month, for a three year lease and $1000 down! The Nissan Leaf is being offered for $13k off MSRP, and other EVs have terrific lease deals available. The drop in oil/gas prices has not been kind to the low end of the EV market.
I don’t know why this Bug is wearing a sun bonnet, but I don’t think there’s solar panels embedded in it.
It’s a period piece, but whether someone will want to spend any kind of real money to own it is a good question. I’d be shocked if it went for anything near its asking price.
Tesla? dealers might accept this trade-in if you put it thru a battery of tests first.☺
Toyota offers a photocell panel on the Prius, but only to power a cabin ventilation fan, a nice idea for the Sunbelt☼.
Tesla doesn’t have dealers, or do trade-ins.
Jokes don’t need true premises.
Who was it that did the first roof/sunroof mounted pv array to power a fan? I know I’ve heard of that idea before, I want to say from a luxury make. Audi?
I seem to recall Mazda doing it.
Too bad ;
It looks like a nice little Bug in VGC .
-Nate
Sweet looking set-up. Why didn’t Volkswagen offer this during its production run?
For all the reasons listed in the article. Very few consumers would pay for a vehicle with such limited range and only two seats.
Jason,
The “bug” was almost always marketed as a “minimalist” vehicle. The cost of the added hardware would have been significant.
It should be noted that VW was one of the last car makers to market hybrid cars, though I remember as far back as the EARLY 80s that VW was experimenting with hybrid powertrains. Besides, in the 60s and 70s these bugs were thought to be (incorrectly) fuel misers, an electric version would just be gilding the lily, so to speak.
The sunbonnet is probably for a leaky sunroof. The battery covers look neat, sort of like the old ‘utility sedan’ rear area. The covers also look like they’d be nearly impossible to open for battery servicing and filling. A cell goes dry and starts smoking, and you’ve got to unscrew those little angle brackets. Not a good idea.
A Voltswagen! Too bad it’s technology is not current. I’ll stop now.
It really is amazing how far EV tech has come in just the last few years. This VW is a lot closer to the 1917 Detroit Electric that Mike Butts wrote up a few years ago than to anything on sale today.
Indeed that’s a real good point Jim. EVs were stuck with DC motors, crude controllers and lead-acid batteries for the whole 20th century.
Laptops and cellphones made lithium batteries affordable. In fact the Tesla Roadster literally used thousands of 18650-type laptop lithium cells. Silicon technology made high-power transistors affordable, which made AC motors and their regen-on-braking capability affordable. Lithium batteries plus power transistors = 21st century EVs.
There’s something about a VW Bug that gets my wrenching hands all itchy to do a project. Maybe I imprinted on my first car. Anyway if that Bug was half the price I’d be tempted to put a modern lithium / AC motor drive train in.
Considering how clean and original the car looks, the best thing to do might be convert it back to gas. If the electric motor is bolted to the original transaxle with an adapter plate as Paul suggests, it might not be that big of a job.
I don’t know what Bugs are going for these days to know at what purchase price it would be worth the effort. It would also depend on whether the seller hung onto all the parts that were removed or if you’d have to scrounge around to find replacements.
> I’d be shocked if it went for anything near its asking price.
Very punny. 🙂
this is what I was thinking. Whats the going rate on a bug of this vintage with a straight body but a blown or missing engine? Then you’ll have an idea what this is worth.
Why the slot mags on the rear only? I get why the rears are there, but why the frumpy stock pieces up front?
Hmm that’s exactly what I was thinking. Even at that price if it’s not rusty just needs a 1600cc dual port and good to go.
However I don’t have time to put the steering column back in my VW so no new projects for me…
That clothes dryer vent pipe looks pretty lame.
Lame, but functional. It vents the potentially explosive battery gases out of the battery compartment, and is usually connected to an electric blower fan somewhere.
I recall reading a mid-1970s Mechanix Illustrated or Popular Mechanics magazine that featured an article about an aeronautical engineer who did a very similar EV conversion with his Datsun 1200. He used lead-acid batteries, electric motor coupled to the 4-speed manual transmission. The photos showed a very neat professional-quality conversion. Don’t recall whether he incorporated regenerative braking.
Has anyone ever tried a hybrid gas-electric setup similar to railroad diesel locomotive where a small gas or diesel engine powered a generator driving electric motors at the wheels? Is it practical in automotive applications?
That wouldn’t be a true hybrid, according to the way we define them. The electric motors would essentially replace the transmission and driveshafts. Ive often wondered why luxury cars don’t use a setup like that. The goal is isolation, smoothness and quiet so it seems like the way to go for that. Unlike a hybrid, you wouldn’t have to depend on heavy expensive batteries that will eventually die and cost a fortune to replace…and create an environmental fiasco in their manufacture and disposal.
Those mega huge mining dump trucks use such a setup since when youre shuffling around that kind of weight, precise control is everything. 100% of available torque at 0 RPM is a consideration here also.
Actually, the Chevy Volt is in fact a series hybrid like a diesel-electric loco, while a Prius is a paralell hybrid. (Caveat – at highway speeds a Volt does become a paralell hybrid like a Prius, a fact that was used to bash GM for “lying” about the Volt.)
Not quite.. Diesel-electric locomotives don’t have batteries, except for a few switchers. The Volt runs on batteries, and the generator charges them up as needed, when they are depleted, including on the go. The batteries are always a buffer between the genset and e-motors. And at highway speeds, the engine is mechanically connected to the wheels.
A Volt really is conceptually much closer to a loco than to a Prius. Yes, a loco doesn’t have the batteries, but the Volt is still a series hybrid (most of the time) using the genset as a transmission, while a Prius (like most other hybrids) is always a paralell hybrid, that uses a mechanical transmission to combine the power from the engine and motor. Toyota’s Prius transmission was and is quite clever, and it’s what made the Prius so sucessful, compared to e.g. the original Insight. It took other manufacturers close to 5 years to even get close.
Not really Craig the Volt has a very complicated transmission it isn’t just using the gen set as a transmission. That is what the Accord does.
Effective regen braking really requires an AC motor and the associated inverters so that was beyond what was available to the home builders of the 70’s.
Most of the time the latest Honda Accord is a series hybrid but once certain speeds are reached a clutch connects the motor generator attached to the engine to the motor generator attached to the wheels, making it a parallel hybrid. It is very efficient. Whether it turns out to be a great overall car is still up for debate since Honda has a very poor track record with hybrids, particularly in the battery dept.
Scoutdude, Honda copied GM (or at least followed them) for that idea. When GM announced that same technology for the Volt, they were widely criticized in the press for “lying” about the Volt’s technology earlier in it’s development. I’m not a GM apologist, but this was patently unfair and indeed very political.
GM marketed the Volt as an electric car with a “range extender” on-board gas genset. I agree with you that it is more appropriately a series (most of the time) hybrid.
Since it has a mode where the gas engine drives the wheels directly, it is clearly a hybrid, not a pure electric car as claimed. GM didn’t disclose that this mode existed at all in the car. Hence the argument that they lied about it. The marketing was deceptive; GM was trying to avoid a direct comparison with the Prius.
Not really. The way GM originally indicated the Volt would work it was going to have a gen set that would recharge the battery and power the traction motor directly. Howe it ended up including clutches and gear sets and the engine is able to transfer power mechanically to the wheels.
The Accord on the other hand has a simple gen set and a clutch to link the generator the traction motor. Way simpler with less frictional losses than any other hybrid currently available.
Theres a Kiwi who drag races a 1200 Datsun electric its fast too.
The Owen Magnetic was a car made around the time of WWI that used a gas-electric setup like that.
At the time I suspect it was a fairly inefficient way to get power to the wheels, but made for a much smoother driving experience than the manual transmissions of those days.
I know that in the locomotive world, modern computer tech has made it possible to use AC rather than DC for the whole system, and this has allowed considerable improvements in power and efficiency.
Porsche did that extensively with Lohner vehicles, including giant road trains, back in the WW1 era and earlier. A “serial hybrid” is not more efficient than an engine connected to the wheels mechanically though, which is why it’s not done. Its done on big locomotives because it’s the best way to put that much power to the wheels, not because it’s more efficient. there are additional losses in the generator and electric motor.
In a real sense, a serial hybrid like a loco uses the generator-motor comb as a very efficient, robust, simple, and reliable automatic transmission. Unlike a mechanical transmission, the main loss is heat, not friction. It also lets the engine run at it’s most efficient RPM all the time. The Volt is a serial hybrid.
On the other hand, a paralell hybrid has both the engine and the motor mechanically connected to the wheels. Conceptually it’s like taking one of those early 70s twin engine dragsters and replacing one of the Hemis with a big electric motor. (RatFink’s Prius?)
You’re still oversimplifying the issue, and not considering how these all really work.
It also lets the engine run at it’s most efficient RPM all the time. Not in a diesel-electric locomotive. The diesel engine has to adjust speed (and power output) constantly according to demand, since there are no batteries to buffer it.
The Volt and a diesel-electric loco are very different in concept and technology. A diesel-electric locomotive is just an electric locomotive that happens to carry its own electric power plant along.
The Volt is primarily a BEV (battery electric vehicle); when the batteries reach a certain depth of discharge, the gas engine kicks in to re-charge the batteries on the go, and at highway speeds, a portion of the gas engine’s out put is also connected mechanically to the drive wheels.
To answer the original poster’s question: no, a “small engine” won’t work in a set-up like a locomotive, because without batteries to buffer the small engine, there won’t be enough power for the intended use. A small engine can only work if it’s buffering batteries, otherwise it needs to be large enough to generate the maximum hp to accelerate the car without any help from the batteries.
That’s also the critical aspect of the Prius; its low-power engine does not provide enough power for decent acceleration without support from its batteries and its electric motor.
A diesel-electric locomotive does not work that way.
Using electricity to transfer the power is very efficient which is one of the reasons that diesel electric locomotives are done that way. It is also done that way because it does create a very efficient “automatic” transmission. It allows the engine to operate at the speed where it most efficiently produces the power needed at any given time. The frictional losses of the gears and bearings that could transmit the torque required to move a full train would have huge frictional losses.
The Accord Hybrid is proof of the efficiency of that type of system. Yes it is capable of connecting the engine to the wheels above a certain speed to improve the efficiency about 2% per Honda’s claims, however that is only possible because the only gears in the power train are the final reduction and the only bearings are those of the motors. The Toyota/Ford eCVT is a very efficient and durable CVT but the frictional losses are higher than the Accord’s system because of the planetary gear set that is used to create the link between the engine and the wheels.
You could also yank the lead acid and replace them with newer batteries. Give this thing a real world 80 miles and it starts to look better that the 20ish you get on ye-olde lead acid.
I’ll second the other posts that this thing is most likely to get converted back into a gasoline car given the clean & straight body.
If you spend some time on YouTube watching interviews/lectures with JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla, he talks about the change from lead acid to Li-Ion. Most of the early Tesla engineers had made homebuilt or college EV projects with this type of conversion (lead acid, short range, heavy). Even when Tesla was founded, the assumption was that electric cars were essentially golf carts for around town duty.
Their key insight was to focus on the luxury market to subsidize rapid development of their Li-Ion battery pack and power electronics. It is rather amazing that 10 years ago Tesla was kludging together an electric Lotus, and now they sell a 5-7 seat sedan that hits 0-60 in under 3 seconds.
Tesla could still fail spectacularly, but moving the bar for electric cars from this VW jalopy to a Model S is no small accomplishment. The next 10 years are going to be very interesting times for the auto market…
He could swap in a lithium setup from a wrecked Insight or Prius?
They don’t use lithium, and their batteries are designed for hybrid use, not EV use, which places very different demands on a battery.
Right, Paul, plus Prius NiMH batteries are surprisingly small, just a couple of kWh is all a hybrid needs. Only good for maybe 5 miles on an EV.
A fully charged battery for a Hybrid, depending of course on the actual route and actual hybrid battery is lucky to be good for ~2 miles if you were creeping along.
Marc, contact me at this e-mail: curbsideclassic@gmail.com regarding your draft ’58 Chevy post. The e-mail I have for you is no longer valid.
The best thing for this car is a rebuilt 1600, sunroof seals and a back seat. And 2 stock wheels/tires/hubcaps and new bumpers. Then it would be worth it’s asking price.
@ 67Conti ;
Really ? wow .
I’ve been out of the VW scene for a couple decades .
My Son has not only several of my Vintage Beetles but his 1968 DeLuxe # 117 sunroof Beetle race car , it had an AutoStick tranny in it when he bought it , I rather like those and since he no longer races it I imagine I could convert it back easily enough as it was one of those lucky ones that had the clutch cable tube when new .
He’d prolly give it to me if I asked……..
I can’t imagine a ’68 Beetle being worth $6,000.00 .
-Nate
After a little searching around on CL, around 5k-6k max in really good shape with a fresh engine seems to be more in line. Some are asking around 7k but asking and getting are two different things. New Beetles, on the other hand are really cheap. See a couple of around 2000 vintage for under 2k. Found two ’68’s- one nice for $5200.00- one looking almost new for $7900. Neither mention how many miles or old the engine is.
“other EVs have terrific lease deals available” In fact you can lease an electric VW for $229/month.