Electric Porsche: The end of a sad saga.

UPDATE:

The Porsche has been sitting in Gordy's shop while he builds a new house & shop. Tim took it to an event where he hoped (unrealistically, IMO) to sell it. But now that I've had some time to cool off a bit, I'm considering having them replace the now-worthless, shot lithium battery pack with lead batteries.

The lithium pack was badly damaged when I got it from the original conversion shop. We considered the idea of trying to salvage the usable cells and build from them a pack with maybe a 30-mile range without sacrificing power. But I'm skeptical about this because I don't think these batteries can deliver enough current if we remove, say, 2/3 of the pack. Gordy thinks they could. Tim thinks not. I think not.

OTOH, originally I wanted 125 miles of range, so as to have 100 miles to 80% DoD (supposed to be okay with LiFePO4). But now that the Tesla is my daily driver and primary car, if I can get the car to 20 miles usable (safe for the batteries) range, and still have impressive power, I could drive it sometimes when I don't need to go farther. Lead batteries are a lot cheaper than lithium. This would be better than leaving it to rust.

So I'm pondering this idea, and Gordy is going to find out for me what such a pack would cost.

 

Yes, I understand the sunk cost fallacy, and I even agree with it. But on an emotional level it would just hurt too much to let it go.

While the Porsche will never compare with the Tesla, there is wide agreement that with its 11-inch Warp motor and the new 1,000-amp water-cooled controller it will have impressive power.

Even now, with the severely damaged pack and the motor needing balancing, it's got enough power that when I stomped on the pedal, Gordy let out a bit of a shriek. The car is no slouch. And it's MUCH MUCH more comfortable to sit in and easier to get in and out of than the Tesla, and it holds the road better in sharp, fast turns.

Everything is fixed except the motor still needs to be balanced (a minor matter, only waiting until Gordy finishes his new house and shop so he has time to take it out.)

Lead batteries have lower impedance than lithium, and so have the potential for more, not less, power. People who understand this stuff better than I do will have to do the math, and the Porsche will never have Tesla performance. But potentially it could have serious muscle-car performance, over a ten or twenty-mile range.

The Xebra was actually a lot slower with lithium than it had been with lead. But it gained considerable range with lithium.

 

What I'm going by is what happened to the Xebra when I switched from lead to lithium. But these were among the very first lithium cells to come out of China. Stepping on the pedal, the voltage sagged WAY down with the lithium. It stayed pretty high with the AGMs.

Anyway, Gordy is going to talk to some battery experts in the EV field and see what they say.

 

Well, it was a short-lived idea. Numerous people have said that my notion that lead batteries have the ability to deliver more current than lithium is mistaken. But I would not have known if I had not asked. We're back to trying to see if we can salvage enough of the damaged pack to get some good performance out of the car.

 

The local Porsche club at one time expressed interest in restoring it to gasoline. Ain't gonna happen. I hate gasoline. For better or for worse, this car is electric now. Work is now going to begin on salvaging as much of the battery pack as we can. We'll see what happens from there.

 

^ Thanks.

 

Thanks, StockBlak.

Note that when I began this project, in 2008, there was not a freeway-capable EV with a 100-mile range that you could buy new. That's the only reason I tried this.

Rebalancing the motor is a simple matter, but will be done by a professional shop with the machinery to do it right.

I have no immediate family to be concerned one way or another.

The legal system is broken. Whether you look at the civil or the criminal courts, outcomes have nothing whatsoever to do with either truth or justice. They're a game that two lawyers, or groups of lawyers, play against each other, where the rules are court procedure, and where the winner is the side that plays better, not the side whose client is in the right.

In any case, I thank you for your good words.

 

Right now we're going to see what Tim can salvage from the existing pack. Then we'll move on from there.

 

The end is nigh:

It's been about a year since the last post in this thread. What's happened since then:

Tim Foster, who helped out Gordy with the electrical work on the Porsche, set about testing the batteries, to see if we could salvage enough of them to make a still-useful pack, though with reduced range. With the Tesla in my garage, I no longer needed the Porsche to have a 100-mile range, or even the 60-mile range the original pack would have had if it had not been damaged. He removed the batteries and tested them, and concluded that they were toast. The car would drive 10 or 15 miles, but the batteries were dying. I put everything on hold for a long time while I pondered where to go, from springing for a new pack, to donating the car. Eventually, I decided to have the car appraised. In order to take a tax deduction on a donated car, it must be appraised, since otherwise you could buy a $50 car, donate it, and claim a $5,000 deduction on your taxes. The appraiser wanted two things: A list of everything in the car and its cost, which Gordy provided for me, and current, high-resolution pictures. So I asked Tim to put the batteries back in, even not working, just to make the car suitable for pictures.

Tim promised to have the car ready a couple of weeks later, but then he had some family problems, and asked f0r an extension, which I gave him. Then he asked for another extension. Then another. And another. I kind of blew up at him and demanded my car back, finished or not. I had paid him for all the work he had done* and the work of replacing the batteries.

(* He claimed to have done much more work, but said he was only charging me for part of his work. He also was charging an hourly "shop rate" comparable to what a professional shop would charge, even though he was one person working out of his garage. So I figured it balanced out, and paid him what he asked.)

He begged for more time, and asked me to visit him, which I did, whereupon I saw the car, almost completely torn apart, and utterly filthy, including several scratches on the body, though it had been immaculate when he got the car to work on the batteries. He must have stored it outdoors in someone's yard. If he had told me that he didn't have a place to store it I'd have made suitable arrangements, but I had supposed it was back at Gordy's. Tim promised he'd be done the next day, though it looked to me like two weeks of work to put it back together. Tim, it turns out, had taken it on himself, not to just replace the batteries as requested, but to re-design the electrical system. Throughout this project, Tim has done work I never authorized, thinking to make it better. He seems to see this car as his ticket to EV conversion fame: Make it into the best EV ever so people will come to him for similar jobs.

I went away for a trip, and came back two weeks later, and asked Tim about his progress re-assembling the car.

He replied, very upset, that I should not be so impatient; that he had had to put the Porsche aside in favor of another project that was a prior commitment (though he had never mentioned this when I first asked him to replace the batteries.)

The car was basically trashed. But then, it was trash when Paul first sent it to me, and trying to reclaim it from then on has been a fool's errand. So I made my decision:

Nobody is going to want to spend the money to put a pack in this car. Nobody. No school, no funder. There is no market for backyard conversions now that several OEM EVs are available, and no grant money in this economy. Tim put the final nail in the coffin (for which I am grateful to him) and made up my mind. I had Gordy haul it (non-functioning) back to his place to part it out, and today I went to Gordy's and symbolically began the dis-assembly by removing the bolt holding the wires to the speed controller. Gordy will part it out, sell the parts for whatever they bring, and sell the glider for whatever it will bring. The scratches will greatly diminish its value, but it's still nice looking on the outside, and the glider is in good condition.

I'm done with it and happy to be done with it. It was a mistake from the beginning, but you live and learn.

FWIW, I think Tim is delusional. He thinks that for $50,000 he could make the Porsche into a Tesla killer. He had a harebrained scheme to get a professional grant-writer to get money for a local high school to fund the job, and to try to convince me to donate the car to them, and then the school, with the grant money, would buy the batteries and parts from Tim (conflict of interest, and unethical) and then Tim would fix the car, allowing the high-school kids to "help" as justification for getting the school to sponsor the project, which would then establish Tim as the nation's premier EV converter, allowing him to set up a business converting classic cars to electric, which he claims he can do cheaper than the big car companies. I'm not mad at Tim. The car was trash when he got it. He just let me see that.

Requiescat in pace, Porsche. This chapter of my life is closed. It was the third worst mistake I've ever made in my life (no, I'm not going to discuss the other two) and with the decision to part out the car, it is now officially behind me.