I have been interested in designing and even building a electric car, instead of buying a car for around £3000 and then paying £1.23 a litre at the pumps.
Ive looked online over the years an have seen many projects built and working really well, but mostly communting cars with not such a high top speed and range is fairly limited.
Ive just bought myself a RC buggy and from looking at it and using it for many hours I realised it handles brilliantly the speed is incredible and acceleration is stupidly fast.
On a 7.2 vold nicad battery I can get about 15 minutes of full power and a further 5 minutes at slower less impressive speeds.
These companies who build the best RC cars are the likes of, Losi, Team associated, Tamiya, HPI, Traxxas the list goes on.
These manufacturers have been compeating for years at world cups and massive racing events so have perfected the art of making the fastest quickest best handeling electric scale models possible.
Now I was thinking couldnt this just be scaled upto real life car sizes using exact plans and blueprints as the scale models themselves.
I know nothing about buliding, drawing or fabricating vehicles or anything else for that matter I was hoping some of you guys could expand on this and could it work?
Dune buggies, sand rails and “Pre-runners” are the current full scale versions of the RC buggies.
In my neck of the desert, sand rails are big business. It’s not uncommon to see them selling for $150,000-$200,000 - serious performance machines with lots of custom goodies, no doubt. They’re light weight, insane 24" of suspension travel, and big big horsepower. Most of the people buying them just buy them as status symbols to out-do their buddies, they’ll ride the dunes for fun but won’t ever race them seriously!
Less elaborate buggies could be built and there’s no reason they can’t be fitted with electric gear. Even Yamaha Rhinos could be converted, even though they’re heavy pieces of junk. You could actually start from scratch and build something lighter, stronger and safer if you have fabrication skills or know someone who does. Around here there is no shortage of knowledgeable fabricators that can crank out a roll cage with ease.
I’ve thought about the same question, and I really think it would be a good idea to take some of the design ideas from R/C cars. I’m designing an electric car right now that takes many ideas from R/C cars, some from airplanes (real ones), and a couple from race cars.
I’ve started to think that electric cars (not counting conversions) are done too much like conventional gasoline cars. The big thing being the battery position. That’s one of the biggest advantages the R/C cars have, the battery is in the ideal position.
I dont think scaling would quite work out. How much does the RC car weigh…2-3 pounds? So you take a 2500 lb car scaled up from the RC car, and you’d need about a 7200 volt pack to match the performance of the RC.
