openinverter forum

This is my -73 1303S that will be converted to electric. Have an Outlander motor with reductionbox, inverter, charger/dcdc that I might use but a Tesla sdu sounds tempting. Haven't seen any real performance number from outlander setups yet so I don't know what to expect from that. Please feel free to comment and give advice

I’ve been wanting to do a bug with outlander running gear for a while, I think it’s the perfect combination. I made drive shaft adapters for the outlander drive unit, so the stock vw axle flanges fit. Thus the stock vw axle bolt right up!

a smart fourtwo battery might be worth looking into, the 3 modules would fit nicely, and you would have 17kwh.

It would move good with the outlander motor, especially how light the beetles are

I will have a look if I can fit a Bmw I3 battery as a friend has one for sale.

They will, in the front where the gas tank was, and a few modules behind the rear seats from what I remember, but it’s tight

To answer your question, an outlander rear drive unit at 300VDC be good for 185Nm from 0 to ~4000rpm. This is not my real world experience, it is from the wiki.

To give you a bit of a comparison, a Golf 3 GTI peaks at 175Nm, at 2000rpm. You should expect strictly better performance from the outlander motor for the entire rev range.

Long story short, I would imagine that an outlander powered beetle would _move_.

Sure, you could go SDU, but that would be ridiculous - and you’d need to engineer accordingly, upgrading the chassis strength, sispenaipn, brakes etc.

The i3 pack is 360V so that would probably deliver a few more Nm's too. So the outlander-route perhaps wouldn't be boring at all. And give that the beetle is lighter than a Golf Gti...and I can always add more lightness as I have carbon doors

I'd like to see an Outlander conversion. People do do Tesla SDU conversions but have to de-tune them for the reasons above, so seems a bit of a waste of effort. I know @Bigpie did a modern Beetle conversion with an Outlander motor. According to the wiki there's a front transaxle and a rear drive unit, which are you thinking of using?

I saw a sdu beetle and It did wheelsspins with 1/4 powersettings so yes that's almost waste if you can't get the grip. I have a rear Outlander driveunit. With i3 batteries and EVS-VCU that would be a nice package

I didn’t know about EVS-VCU. Looks really slick!

So I have decided to use my Outlander rdu in the Beetle. Will probably sell the charger/dcdc and get a small aircooled charger and dcdc instead that fits under the rear seat for a neater engine (motor?) bay. I know that a Chevy Volt/Opel Ampera dcdc fits. Perhaps a CCS Socket for a future fastcharging upgrade. Still believe @tom91's EVS-VCU will be a excellent choice to control it

I have an Ampera DC/DC converter left over, can add a picture later if you're interested

And here you go.
It comes with a pigtail to make contact to CAN and, as far as I remember, a 12V enable signal. I think it needs one CAN message to start producing and sends one or two messages with status info.

The back heatsink has some indents were it sat on the Nissan inverter.
I bought it back in the day from arber, he included two fans but I ran it without them and made sure it gets a little air stream from driving. With that it stayed reasonably cool (50°C) even loaded with 90A from my PTC heater.

I cut the fam bracket because I used one for cooling my Nissan battery. If you want I can include that second fan also.

Swapped the Outlander parts for a Tesla SDU

I want it to be ridiculous fast