Yes I have a 92 Saturn that's been sitting for about 3 years now. I have the 9" advanced DC motor hooked to the transmission so if I need to move it I can put a 12 volt battery to the motor and use the clutch as a go pedal. Actually hopes are I will have funding to complete it this summer, so maybe... just maybe I can have a real EV (right now I have a GEM).
As far as the Insight EV conversion there are several routes you could take for a drive train. One would be hooking a moderately powered AC motor to the stock transmission. With this you could use whateve type of battery you wanted. 250+ mile range would be realistic with lithium batteries. Heck, you'd be able to have over 50 real world miles with lead batteries probably. The only limiting factor would be I'd be afraid to put too much power to the stock transmission.
Idea two, the cheap route, would be a DC drive train probably using a 6.7" advanced dc motor with a baby zilla controller. This would also use the stock transmission. Then use flooded 12 volt batteries. You could probably do this conversion for less than 10K easily with some hunting for used or other cheap parts.
My ultimate idea would be to ditch the stock transmission and put in something that could handle the power. I'm thinking along the lines of a full AC propulsions drive train with the direct drive single gear reduction. This would take a lot of custom fabrication, but in the end you'd have one heck of a car. I would imagine you could smoke pretty much any car out there with this setup, and with their lithium battery bricks you could probably have a 300 mile range.
With this setup you could also do one other thing, eliminate the shifter console on the interior. This would be replaced with a small forward/reverse switch somewhere else in the area. Then you'd have a bit more room on the inside. You'd have to have a custom carpet cut though to cover the whole floor. Idealy the instrument cluster would be left as is and be hacked to be fully functional. The charge assist gague would act as an energy consumption meter and show use and regeneration. The tach would have to be relabeled to display the ~12,000 rpm motor rpm. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the gas gauge and fcd though.
On the outside I would work on some aero tweaks. The large bottom hole in the front bumper would be eliminated and smoothed over leaving only the small top hole so you could have access to the hood latch. This should also be plenty to provide adequate ventillation for the AC condensor. Or I might even close off the top hole also and do something else for a hood latch that could be accessed after the hood pops up, then do other possible aero tweaks on the under side and make sure no air is dragged through the engine compartment. Then custom fabricate a way to get air flow across the AC condensor. The rest of the underside of the car is nicely done aerodynamically, the engine just necessitates air flow across the radiator.
And at that point if I went through all that trouble the car would have to look good. All wires would be routed through carefully planned wire loom paths. The wiring inside the battery boxes would be neat and the lids to the boxes would be made of clear plastic so they could easily be shown off, yet nicely hidden under the rear carpet. The interior would probably be leather. I would show that car... alot.
Now I don't even want to know what that would cost me... ohh you might also find some ultra light weight Volk wheels for it too.
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Later, Ricky
02 Red Insight - Sold
06 Silver Civic Hybrid
92 Saturn SC2 Electric, Arizona Alt fuel plate "ZEROGAS"
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