An Electric Car:

Events finally finished catching up with me.

Now the events are public, (see http://moneyam.uk-wire.com/cgi-bin/articles/200605030700433234C.html for example) I can talk about them: our jobs have not been secure for some time, and now our jobs are secure, it is only by selling us to a company that is too involved in defence for me to be comfortable working for them.

Our main response to the financial uncertainty at work has been to save money (that is, not spend it on electric car components) and to work on the house (as opposed to the car). The result of that is that the house is sold, four weeks before my job dissappears -- but the car is still languishing in the back garden, with a broken engine.

I'm not looking for another job. Instead we're planning to do something more drastic: we're selling up and moving to somewhere where we can afford to buy a smallholding for less than the equity in our ex-local-authority terraced house. There we want to learn how to be independent in food and energy.

Unfortunately, the sorts of places we're looking at are 50+ miles from the nearest town, which makes the batteries I currently have too heavy/small to be useful in practice. The batteries are also going to be needed for the house. A biodiesel engine seems like the answer, and I'm fetching one (with attached MoT-failure car) next week.

I still want to make an electric car, but my problem just became harder, and my time is likely to be diverted into more home improvements, as some of the places we're looking at don't even have a roof. For the forseeable future, our cars are going to be propelled by diesel engines: hopefully running off crops grown on our own farm.

If you're interested in our thoughts for green houses, as opposed to green cars, they're over here.

Old Information

This website is something I started because I wanted to save money on transport. Since I live in Britain, and outside London, public transport is not a viable alternative, and also since I live in Britain, I pay about 80p (about $1.30) per litre for petrol (gasoline). I also don't agree with the massacre war in Iraq that was done in my name.

The obvious alternatives were LPG and electric. LPG is just making oilmen richer through another route, so electric is the ideal. These pages bring together my researches on the subject.

The latest is that I'm building. This is a long-term plan, but I'm starting to acquire the bits I need to do the design and build work, intending to get a prototype that will get me to work and back, and allow me to explore the electronic design. Here is my build diary

Here is why I'm not buying.

The alternative is to construct - so in the hopes that it will be useful, read about an open source car project - Ernie, the fastest milk-cart in the West.

Lastly, there's a page of links about electric vehicles that I found interesting.


This page is part of an Open Source Electric Car Project, and is written and maintained by Simon. At this stage these pages are constantly under revision. Thoughts and comments are welcome.