Electric vehicle conversion

Today's high fuel prices and concerns about air pollution, climate change, and our nation's dependence on foreign oil have led many motorists to look for alternatives to gasoline-powered vehicles. Many countries permit the conversion of existing vehicles to full electric drivetrains as long as the conversion does not increase smog-forming emissions or create other pollution problems. Please refer the guidelines that apply to individuals converting vehicles equipped with internal combustion engines to full electric power for their use in California.

Electric vehicles are not indeed 100% environmental friendly because manufacturing new electric vehicles produce significant carbon footprints. Electric vehicle conversion is environmental friendly than manufacturing new electric cars in that the conversion retains most parts from the existing vehicles. Electric vehicle conversion keeps the donor car frame, body, interior, wheels, suspensions, and even license plates. Electric vehicle conversion also allows small and medium companies to produce electric vehicles.

The world's first extreme off-road Jeep JK Wrangler electric vehicle conversion (August 2015)

EMVcon attempted the world's first extreme offroad electric Jeep conversion starting in early 2015. The conversion has been demonstrated in September 2016 via a motor show in South Korea and Teraflex'sFacebook page video.

The electric Jeep JK Wrangler is equipped with 36 of Kokam's 200 Ah Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (NMC) batteries.

This project was a complete custom conversion that requires a lot of cutting and welding. The purpose of this conversion was to demonstrate how electric vehicle conversion performs under extreme offroad driving conditions.

The objective of this project was to derive the right specification of the traction motor and battery capacity compromising the power, range, and weight. The EMVcon team has over 20 years of experience in Jeep offroad modification and rock crawling. The EMVcon team also has over 25 years of electronics and systems engineering experience. Such profound and in-depth experiences made this challenging project genuinely successful.


The SEMA 2016 Jeep: the world's first bolt-on electric conversion kit for Jeep JK Wrangler (2016)

  • EMVcon accumulated in-depth knowledge and experience as well as a range of field data through the electric JK Wrangler conversion. EMVcon would like to share this fantastic opportunity with many other Jeepers. However, there have been apparent obstacles:

  • Only limited Jeepers can do major custom fabrication with a 3D CAD, professional bending, laser cutting, and so on.

  • Only skillful fabrication mechanics can do plasma cutting, MIG and TIG welding.

  • Very few Jeepers are engineers that have extensive knowledge in both electronics and embedded systems, which is required to understand the control signal wiring between the battery management system, motor driver, onboard charger, onboard DC-DC converter, vehicle control interface such as the throttle pedal, shift knob, etc.

  • EV conversion of Jeep JK Wrangler also involves hydraulic system modification such as power steering. Cooling systems should also be modified for the traction motor, motor driver and battery pack. This process involves custom fabrication as well as special tool access.

  • All the electric systems in the donor Jeep such as lights, power windows, windshield wipers, and so on, should work as they did. This requires an in-depth understanding of the vehicle electrical systems. Very limited Jeepers are skillful automotive electronics engineers that understand the donor vehicle CAN (Control Area Network.)

Only a small portion of Jeepers can access professional equipment for the conversion.

The kit is also plug-and-play so that the kit installers do not need to know electronics and vehicle network. The installers do not have to perform professional wire management with special connector crimping tools. The kit provides complete wiring harnesses.

EMVcon made an agreement with Transamerican Manufacturing Group (TMG) (or Transamerican Autoparts)*, that one of TMG's SEMA 2016 Jeeps would be installed with the EMVcon electric Jeep conversion kit. The project name was "Super Saiyan," named after the "Dragon Ball" cartoon.

*Who owns Pro Comp, Smittybilt, 4 Wheel Parts, Poison Spyder Customs, and so forth.

The EMVcon team installed the world's first Jeep JK Wrangler electric vehicle conversion kit at Poison Spyder Customs located at Banning, CA. The converted JK Wrangler is equipped with a custom instrument cluster that can visualize the battery status as well as display vehicle speed, battery and motor/driver temperatures, etc.


Genesis Coupe 500 kW electric racing car conversion

EMVcon is also interested in electric racing vehicles. This project is to convert Hyundai Genesis Coupe to a 500 kW electric racing car. The traction motor is from AMRacing, the motor driver is from Rinehart Motion Systems, and the battery is from Kokam.