Re-Involt 50-mile EV Conversion for Gen2

not sure it is a good idea economically.
When I purchased my 2007 Prius, it was going to cost about 12k to convert it - so I thought it would be cheaper now.
Also, if you should get rear ended, would your insurance pay for the repairs (the conversion)?

 

haven't seen this mentioned before, nice to see people are still trying and i think they have a decent reputation.

 

Yeah pretty pricey. You'd have to do an awful lot of short trips and have access to fairly cheap electricity for that to pay off. We're paying close to 25c per kW/hr here in Australia at the moment.

Even if electricity was only 10c/kw-hr and gas was $5/gal, my calculations make it about 185,000 miles of all EV driving just to break even!

I would like to see someone offer an aftermarket (drop in replacement for original) LiIon battery though. A higher capacity battery would be a good simple upgrade for anyone unfortunate enough to need a new traction battery anyway.

 

ReInVolt is promising a drop-in LiOn replacement HV battery for Gen2 Prii later this year.

We plan to offer a powerful Lithium replacement battery pack for 2001-2009 Prius in 2013.
If you are interested in this product, email us at [email protected].

JeffD

 

It will be interesting to see what the price is when it's released.

 

14,000$ = 3,500 gal. of gas at 4$ per gallon. @50 mpg + 175,000 mi.to break even.
If your Pri. was a taxi and you drove it 300 mi. a day 7 days a week. In 583 days you would recoup your investment. Oh wait you would have recharging costs and maintenance for the Battery. And it will only go 50 mi. on all electric then needs 6 to 8 hours on the charger !! Not a good investment any way this dumb old truck driver see's it !!!

 

article from 2009

Hybrid Cars: $6000 for 50 miles of EV power for your Prius

 

The point is not always to recoup money. For some people paying 3x the price to not burn oil is worth it. I have solar panels and buy a good portion of my bill on wind power. I will be doing an EV conversion. It won't save me any money really, and it will cost a good $3K to $8K depending on what I want. But the payback comes in the fact that I do not need to ever go to a gas station.

 

I copied it from their web site today.

JeffD

 

In earlier discussions the point what's come up is the lack of traction motor power. For most of us the stock electric motor in the Gen 2 (or conventional Gen3) won't keep up with traffic beyond 20 mph or so.

 

MG2 (~50Kw) can handle twice the power than can be supplied by the HV battery (~25Kw, a bit more in the Gen3).

JeffD

 

jungle motors has (had?) a shady reputation. no pun intended.

 

All this is is a Plug in Supply kit offered by ReInvolt. This is nothing new except they are a little more truthful about the kit than PIS. At least they tell you you can only go 52 mph in all electric mode.

This system still has all the same problems as PIS's kit or any other kit for a Gen II Prius. The main problem being that the Prius is designed as a gasoline car with electric assist. In order to get any substantial use of the 10kw battery, you have to disable the ICE. But... the Prius relies on the ICE for power, maintaining speed on upgrades (try to go up a slight upgrade w/out firing up the ICE but maintaining speed and you'll see what I mean. Most of you have already done this and know how hard it is). The electric side is just too underpowered to be solely relied upon for locomotion and the ICE (by itself) is too underpowered to be solely relied upon for locomotion. The two, work as one.

Disabling the ICE is actually dangerous both to the driver and others on the road. If an insurance company was insuring you, you had an accident and didn't tell them about this conversion, they would be within their rights to refuse to cover the accident and drop you from coverage.

The Prius has advanced, high-tech monitoring systems (ECU's) that all work together to make this engineering marvel work. Adding more battery capacity requires modifying what one ECU sees which causes multiple problems with other ECU's.

The old adage that "every time you fix a problem you have to solve another" has major application here. A typical scenario may go like this:

Problem/Fix: The battery runs out or low in "EV" mode, I need a bigger battery (thousands of dollars)
New problem: Adding a bigger battery requires spoofing or/reprogramming the Battery ECU
Fix: Then I will reprogram/spoof the ECU so I can use the bigger battery (hundreds of dollars)
New problem: Now that I have this bigger battery and the ECU spoofed, the ICE still wants to come on when I accelerate normally
Fix: I can use OutOfGas mode to stop the ICE from coming on (cheap)
New problem: The stock electric motors/inverter setup are not strong enough to power the car in most situations and... if I want to use the ICE, I have to pull over, turn the car off and then back on to allow the ICE to be used (then you have the above problem of the ICE coming on too much)
Fix: I need to install a larger electric motor (thousands of dollars)
New problem: The inverter cannot power the new motor
Fix: I need a new motor controller/inverter (thousands of dollars)
New problem: I've spent so much money on converting my Prius that there is no return on investment and I can't sell it b/c noone wants a car that's had this many mods
Fix: I need to take every mod off and return the car to its original state (thousands of dollars)

 

I think the PIP is all I will ever require. 10 miles is all I need. 90% of my trips fit into this. I wish re-involt would spend more time on something like 10 mile range and maybe the price would be more reasonable! H

 

Reinvolt is only the middle man at this point. They are basically an installer.

 

Yes I realize this. I'm just saying what I think re-involt should maybe spend more time on? I would purchase a Leaf if I want range rather than spend $15000 on a G11! H