Agreed, the oil industry grew out of almost no where from scratch and now their is petrol stations on every corner and a global supply chain network.The point is that EV ownership will take a decade before it came close to surpassing ICE vehicles, which means that electricity supply will have no issue from EV’s drawing too much from the grid in the early years, which allows time to improve & increase supply. And this has been proven in other countries with higher EV take up while some of those countries transition to renewables.
The one difference is that back when petrol stations, oil refineries etc were being built it was a matter of someone buying some land and doing it.With EV’s the aren’t starting from scratch there is already electrical grids pretty much nationwide, augmenting it to charge cars is very simple compared to building out the ICE car fuel system.
Electric-powered 1965 Mk1 Ford Cortina
By slinging an electric motor and Tesla battery pack into this 1965 Mk1 Cortina, Tim Harrison has turned an unused project car into a daily driver
SILENCE. That’s what gets you with electric cars. Stomp on the throttle and you’re flung forward at surprising speed, but your senses aren’t properly satisfied. No trace of the familiar suck, squeeze, bang, blow of combustion; no grin-bringing exhaust music as you tickle the redline. When a Tesla whisks by, silence is expected, but what about a 1965 Ford Cortina Mk1 humming along like a spaceship?
Welcome to the world of electro-modding. Gone is this classic Cortina’s traditional 1500cc Kent four-pot; in its place is a 100kW/235Nm electric motor fed by a 31kWh Tesla battery pack giving a driving range of about 180km.
In pubs around the land, beer is spraying from the mouths of the disgusted. Outrage! Sacrilege! Burn the witch! But hang on. What if converting a classic car to electric meant it went from being unused to being a daily driver? Surely that’s a positive. Especially if nothing’s been modified to prevent a petrol motor being dropped back in at some point down the track.
The Cortina’s owner, Brisbane’s Tim Harrison, is not some soulless tech nerd. Quite the opposite. He’s one of us, having previously owned a 1971 Valiant VG hardtop and a 1960 Holden FB wagon. He gets old cars, but is incredibly happy his Cortina’s now electric. “There’s always traditionalists and purists who don’t believe any old car should be touched, and I agree with them to a degree,” he says. “Valuable and rare collectible cars should be maintained for their historical value, but there are a raft-load of classics waiting to be resurrected that otherwise wouldn’t be on the road. These are the ones I want to bring back and be enjoyed.”
So, how’s it all been done? Tim found an unfinished project Mk1 Cortina with a good body but toasted engine. His job as a project manager at Evie – an electric vehicle fast charging network – had turned him on to electro-modding. He’d seen some converted VW Beetles and Morris Minors, so a Cortina EV had appeal. “I really appreciate electric vehicle drivetrains – their efficiency and the thrill of them,” he says. “But I’m not necessarily taken with all the new EVs on the market, so a classic Cortina was a good challenge, as nobody had done one before.”
Appreciating Lotus road and race car history and the fact that the Mk1 Cortina is a lightweight legend thanks to its Lotus association, Tim’s first experiments began. He bought a wrecked 2011 Mitsubishi i-MiEV (a horrible little overpriced electric city car) in the hope he could do a direct electric motor and battery transplant. This was thwarted by “software limitations and modern OEM controls on the ECU and drive unit,” he says.
n the States, electro-modding is already a thriving business, so Tim turned to NetGain in the USA for its off-the-shelf HyPer9 motor and on-board charging and battery management systems. “I then upped the ante and found a written-off 2018 Tesla Model X 100D,” he says. “I salvaged the battery pack to use in the Cortina, but only about one-third of it. Using the full pack would have meant it’d be way too heavy, deteriorating performance, and I’d need to upgrade the suspension.”
Brisbane electric car conversion specialist Traction EV did all the battery work, motor integration and installation, Suzi Auto balanced the driveshaft and totally reconditioned the diff, while Tim “hovered over the top, doing the interface between the displays and the driver interaction pieces.” An Android head-unit screen is a required modern compromise – mounted just above the long-throw manual gear-shifter – and it runs the Torque Pro app, giving a suite of digital gauges to show the likes of power, rpm, regeneration kW, amps, motor temp, battery temp and inverter temp.
Interestingly – and unlike modern electric cars – the Cortina’s four-speed manual gearbox has been retained, although this is a reconditioned Mk2 version upgraded with a high-performance clutch. “You can drive it like a manual or an automatic,” Tim explains. “The electric motor, when it idles, is not spinning, so you can shift to any gear when stationary without using the clutch. When you’re on the go and the motor’s spinning and accelerating, you can shift through the gears just like a normal manual.”
I’ve driven nearly every electric car on today’s market, and practically all are single gear ratio. All the motor’s torque arrives instantly – that’s the fun part – but not having any gears to move through seriously dilutes the driving experience. In Tim’s Cortina, having a clutch to dip and that lovely long-stalk gear shifter to stir feels so much more involving, even if you don’t actually need to do it.
As a bonus, when stuck in city traffic and feeling lazy, you just stick it in third gear and drive it totally clutchless. “It’ll do zero to 100km/h in third gear without touching the clutch, and it’ll never stall, as it’s an electric motor,” Tim said.
Lack of noise aside, it drives very much like a 1960s Cortina. The strawberries-and-cream front bench seat – beautifully restored – means you have to hang on to the giant original steering wheel when cornering. Up front, Ultra Low King Springs coils have been fitted, helping with handling and stance. Original Cortina leaf springs are retained at the back, but are due an upgrade or reset, as they’re a bit compressed due to the weight of the rear battery box. It handles quite sweetly, helped no doubt by a low centre of gravity from those heavy, low-down batteries.
Unlike every modern electric car, this Mk1 Cortina doesn’t feel lardy. Its finished weight is just 1007kg – only 100kg over an original Cortina Mk1, so it pulls away from standstill in an eager, light-footed way. It’ll hit 100km/h in around 7.5 seconds and on to over 130km/h, meaning it’d outrun even the iconic Lotus Cortina of the era, and wipe the floor with the Ford-powered family sedan version.
As for sending some charge back to the battery, there’s a switch just beside the oversized steering wheel to control regenerative braking. You can simply select Hi, Lo or Off depending on your drive. Lift off the throttle and the car feels like it’s braking for you, all the while adding extra driving range. A lovely touch is the repurposing of the Cortina’s original analogue fuel gauge, converted now to display battery capacity.
Also repurposed is the Cortina’s rear-mounted fuel filler. This now has a Type 1 AC socket for home charging, giving zero-to-100 per cent charge in around 10 hours. A public DC fast charger does the job in around 60 minutes, and Tim can bank on a range of around 180km with a full battery.
One of Tim’s goals in undertaking this project was to make this conversion totally reversible. There are no modifications to the Cortina’s original body and no welding or cutting. The only compromise needed was to remove the original fuel tank from under the boot floor (won’t be needing that anyway) in order to house the high-voltage components. It’s a flush job, and it means the boot still has its as-standard capacity.
“I didn’t want it to be compromised as a car,” Tim says. “I needed it to fit luggage, and be safe enough for our two kids. We’ve fitted modern seatbelts and two child seat anchor points.” Imperative for a Queensland summer, a high-voltage compressor runs off the main battery pack to work the electric air conditioning.
Regardless of one’s thoughts on electro-modding classic cars, all should appreciate the quality of work here. And Tim’s keen to change people’s perspectives – even the most hard-nosed purists: “Electrification takes away the reliability issues and maintenance, as servicing is much simpler and easier,” he says. “They’re easier to drive and you can focus on just enjoying them.”
With an electric conversion such as this costing in the region of $30-40,000 it’s certainly not cheap. That said, many spend this and even more on a classic car’s engine and drivetrain rebuild. An electromod should prove far more reliable too.....................
Electric-powered 1965 Mk1 Ford Cortina
By slinging an electric motor and Tesla battery pack into this 1965 Mk1 Cortina, Tim Harrison has turned an unused project car into a daily driverwww.whichcar.com.au
Nice car: like range and regen braking but far too exp for our need as a small car.a decent option for a family car..with kids and city driving@qldfrog here is a write up on the new Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, not here yet, but can't be far away.
2023 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV review: Pre-production drive
Mitsubishi’s pioneering plug-in returns with a bigger battery, more power and more ways to use it. We take a pre-production Outlander plug-in hybrid off road in an exclusive first drive.www.whichcar.com.au
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Australia needs to get smart in charging electric cars
In 1900, electric vehicles outsold all other car types in America. Yet three decades later they were gone, a key factor in their demise being the discovery of oil in Texas leading to fuel prices falling dramatically.
Cheap petrol combined with the mass production of the Model T Ford made the internal combustion engine a winner. While EVs were quieter, cleaner and vibrated less, simple economics put the electric-vehicle industry out of business.
The reverse of this is now well under way. While Teslas remain expensive, the move towards mass EV production by all major vehicle manufacturers is pushing EVs inexorably down the cost curve. The fuel cost differential is stark: a 2019 study estimated it is $1600 a year cheaper to run an EV than a petrol car – and that study was done using a petrol cost of $1.50 a litre, not the $2 a litre that car users are getting used to seeing. Servicing an EV, with about 20 moving parts, will also cost much less than servicing a petrol car that has closer to 2000 moving parts.
While Australia remains an international laggard in EV adoption, demand now greatly outstrips supply, and when global production ramps up we will see a rapid growth of EVs on Australian roads.
Following the federal election, Labor now has the mandate and in fact the demand from the public that they want real and tangible action against climate change. The rise of the teals and wave of support behind the Greens clearly points to a shift in public expectation towards something other than lofty targets.
What solar panels were to the mid-2000s, electric vehicles will be to the 2020s and beyond. But if they are plugged in unchecked without clear policy leadership they will wreak havoc on the electricity grid.
For our electricity sector, mass adoption of EVs will be a major new load on the system. The average Australian house uses 5000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. Adding an EV will increase that by about 3500 kilowatt hours – a 70 per cent increase.
That’s a lot more electrons flowing through your meter and, importantly, through the poles and wires running down your street. How much new investment will be required in those poles and wires (and therefore cost to electricity customers) will depend on how smart we are with when we charge our EVs.
One small step will make a huge difference: ensure households adopt peak/off-peak electricity pricing when they get an EV. Picture: Getty Images
In most of Australia, peak electricity demand occurs in the late afternoon of blisteringly hot summer weekdays, often a few days into a prolonged heatwave. The demand peak is largely driven by airconditioner use. These peaks drive investment in power supply as we need enough generators to make, and enough network capacity to transport, all the required electrons.
The dystopian nightmare for the electricity sector is that uncontrolled EV charging will make peak demand worse. If we have millions of Australians coming home during these heatwaves, turning on their air conditioner and starting to charge their EV, our grid won’t cope.
The good news is this dystopian future can be easily avoided – if we act soon.
Most Australian homes pay a flat rate for their electricity regardless of what time they use it, but this is changing and more are moving onto peak/off-peak tariffs. Off-peak pricing is common in many parts of the economy. It’s always cheaper to get a flight when you can avoid business travellers and school holidays and most cities offer cheaper public transport fares outside peak times.
One small step will make a huge difference: ensure households adopt peak/off-peak electricity pricing when they get an EV. While “forcing” people down a particular price path tends to make politicians nervous, in this case it’s forcing new EV owners towards major savings on their power bill. If the difference between peak and off-peak rates is 15c per kilowatt hour, the average EV owner will save $525 a year by charging during off-peak rather than peak times.
Aligning EV charging with off-peak times is easily done. It does not involve setting the alarm at 2am to get up and plug your car in. The smarts in chargers and on phone apps set charging to off-peak times simply by pressing a couple of buttons. You can still plug your car in when you get home on those sweltering summer afternoons, but your smart charger will know to not start charging until the off-peak period begins a few hours later.
While there is much interest in the business models of fast-charging networks, most EV owners will not use these very often. Most Australian dwellings have a garage or carport and these will be fitted with EV chargers over the coming decades. For those households, more than 90 per cent of EV charging will be done at home and almost all of this can be effortlessly managed so that it occurs outside peak times.
Managing the EV revolution well isn’t just about avoiding grid dystopia, it’s about delivering nirvana – much higher utilisation of our existing electricity assets. While parts of the grid have virtually no spare capacity at peak times, overall utilisation of our electricity networks is about 50 per cent. If the increase in demand from EVs is managed with smart EV charging, we can greatly increase this. That’s more electrons through the same poles and wires, which means cheaper rates for each kilowatt hour and lower bills, including for those who don’t have an EV.
Even without considering the emissions benefits, the clear reversal of the simple economics from a century ago tells us the EV transition will happen and it may happen sooner than most people think.
The benefits of smart EV charging with off-peak pricing are obvious, but we need to act now to make it reality when EV adoption takes off.
Our new federal Energy Minister will have much to achieve in the next three years, but an essential leadership task will be working with state energy ministers to ensure EV owners get onto off-peak pricing.
It’s a rare policy win-win: EV owners save on charging and we all benefit from lower network charges.
Tamatha Smith is the acting chief executive of Energy Networks Australia.
Most single phase home supplies are 60A, so about 15Kw, if you have 3phase on that is obviously more, the limiting factor will be the distribution transformer, the one that is usually up the top of the pole in one of your nearby streets.I would recommend some of our members stop reading the ABC which is now more suited to discussion on the sex or non sex of anges than any technical, economic or scientific article.
The sex of the angels was the debate during the fall of Constantinople,while Rome was more concerned about sports if i remember well .. in 2022 people wave Ukrainian or rainbow flags from their Tesla...history repeats
Was ready an article stating a household with a tesla requires 75kwh capacity out of a 100 max available in domestic connection.
And only 3 at a time out of 25 can be handed by the current grid..unsure if US or Oz...
Anyone can confirm..or not?
Or if the figures are accurate as i found an error in another chapter of that story
With the uptake being so slow due to to E.V supply issues, it probably isn't an problem, but if it accelerated and a lot of people in the same area bought E.V's the volt drop would start to show up and the transformer would have to be beefed up in all probability.
The slower the uptake, the easier the integration.
The smart chargers we were talking about the other day could prevent spikes in demand, as could night time charging.Most single phase home supplies are 60A, so about 15Kw, if you have 3phase on that is obviously more, the limiting factor will be the distribution transformer, the one that is usually up the top of the pole in one of your nearby streets.
With the uptake being so slow due to to E.V supply issues, it probably isn't an problem, but if it accelerated and a lot of people in the same area bought E.V's the volt drop would start to show up and the transformer would have to be beefed up in all probability.
The slower the uptake, the easier the integration.
Where would all this spare capacity be coming from?The smart chargers we were talking about the other day could prevent spikes in demand, as could night time charging.
After 12am when the hot water systems that began heating 2 hours earlier have shut off, the average neighbourhood would have huge amounts of spare capacity.
That's true, but they wont be cheap, even a basic 7Kw charger is about $1,000. Also the install could be fairly expensive if your car parking is a fair way from your meter box.The smart chargers we were talking about the other day could prevent spikes in demand, as could night time charging.
After 12am when the hot water systems that began heating 2 hours earlier have shut off, the average neighbourhood would have huge amounts of spare capacity.
When looking at prices for a 7kw charger in the Noosa EV fests, charger cost was more $2k installed.That's true, but they wont be cheap, even a basic 7Kw charger is about $1,000. Also the install could be fairly expensive if your car parking is a fair way from your meter box.
It is an interesting topic and it isn't anything that can't be resolved so it will be resolved. When rooftop solar was introduced a lot of the distribution system had to be adjusted to accept the inflow, this wont be any different.
Most people with Ev’s are paying to install chargers anyway, so a $1000 definitely isn’t a deal breaker, it’s about what they cost.That's true, but they wont be cheap, even a basic 7Kw charger is about $1,000. Also the install could be fairly expensive if your car parking is a fair way from your meter box.
It is an interesting topic and it isn't anything that can't be resolved so it will be resolved. When rooftop solar was introduced a lot of the distribution system had to be adjusted to accept the inflow, this wont be any different.
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