openinverter forum

This may be useful to someone who is looking to jump in to the sport. Forgive me for the slight US bias as we do not get all the good cars as the rest of the world.

Top Tip: I use 3.5 miles per 1 kWh to guestimate my range out of a pack. In my personal opinion I think 100 mile range for an EV conversion using a 30 kWh battery pack is the sweet spot.

3.5 miles x 30 kWh = 105 miles of range

If you dig this idea, and would like me to add more vehicles, please feel free to post those cars below, this is a group effort.

(I hope to see this become clickable some day)

10 years of Nissan LEAF Battery Evolution (2010-2020)

Battery sweet spot is going to be heavily dependent on vehicle and intended use. Having road tripped my car which (with degradation) has about 28kWh, I personally would not build a car with a pack this small again unless it was solely for running around town.

On the '40, I see between 2.5 and 2.7 miles/kWh, which means I could in theory see up to 75ish miles of range, but that's to stone cold dead. In reality, when road tripping I tend to stop every 35-40 miles, and try to avoid stretching past 50 miles, just leave a buffer and because, with the Volt pack's discharge curve, I do have performance degradation towards the end of the pack.

In my Charger Daytona, I see 2.0 mi/kWh on the highway, and anywhere from 2.0 to 3.5 mi/kWh around town, depending on whether or not I'm driving it like the muscle car it is and the no-good dirty-rotten hot-rodding hooligan I am. Aero and vehicle size has a huge impact on range (the Daytona is massive).

Tires are also a big part. Again to use the Daytona for reference, the version with 245 wide tires is rated at 308 mi, the version with 275 (mine) is rated at 268 mi and the version with 305/325 is rated at 241 mi. On the '40, I saw real range increases from running the drag radials at 35psi rather than 20psi.

I've recently spent a lot of time thinking about pack sizes and options for future builds. I want to build some low buck hot rods and/or a shop truck, and will probably target 50-60kWh for those packs (i.e. likely a Bolt or newer Leaf pack). For the next race car, I'm probably going to end up around 100kWh, using a stock Tesla or Lucid pack, both for range (targeting 150-175ish miles) and to match with a powerful drivetrain.

I've told people that with batteries, especially in conversions, you get to pick two out of three criteria - energy (range), power, and cost. You can have high energy and high power, but that comes with high cost. You can have high power and low cost, but that comes with low energy. Optimizing that is a complicated decision based on intended use, availability, and packaging.