The Phoenix is a homemade electric car made by hobbyists Eric Ludgren and Jehu Garcia. Ludgren is the owner of Waste Recycling and Disposal Company IT Asset Partners and Garcia is a youtuber, making videos where he turns old cars into electric vehicles and making DIY guides. The pair intend to beat the record of 700 miles by almost double with their homemade car, The Phoenix, made from recyclable materials.
“If we can do this, anybody can do this,” said Lundgren. “We’re not some mad scientists in a lab. We’re just trying to push this envelope to the max.”
The two men have created a car which, according to Ludgren and Garcia has already succeeded in breaking the standing record. So-called hypermiling is made possible by driving the car at low speeds to optimise the battery conditions. The attempt made in the Model achieved 669.8 miles, but Ludgren and Garcia claim the Phoenix has already reached 748 miles in similar conditions.
Would be nice to know how low the speeds are. There's a video, but it's 11 minutes long and I don't have time to watch it right now.
Eric Langden explained the process: “The batteries all came from cable boxes for your home TV that had little 18650 batteries in them. 2,800 milliamp, 18650 batteries. We used those. Then we used laptop batteries from a well-known brand that I called up and said, ‘Hey, do you mind if I use your laptop batteries?’ Then we used EV batteries that the EV industry said ‘Nope. They’re dead.’”
“What we found was, when you open up the pack, 80% of the actual batteries are perfectly working. They’re perfect. The problem is that once over 20% degradation occurs in the pack, in America we say it’s trash. We aggregated all these batteries and made this giant 130-kilowatt power battery pack.”
http://www.electrans.co.uk/homemade-ev-to-beat-tesla-record/
More than 50 mph.
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