Can you tune electric cars

wizzer

Road Burner
Points
202
Location
Lyndhurst, Hampshire
Car
VW Golf 2.0 TDi
I see that more manufacturers are turning out electric cars, hybrids and non combustion engine powertrains.

Does this mean that car tuning is dead or is it still possible to tune and improve an EV?
 
Yes you can. Handling wise the same principles apply, suspension mods geometry etc... The car is heavier usually because of the batteries.

Making more power you focus on the following areas
  • Battery upgrades, increase the battery capacity, and perhaps even running a slightly higher voltage will release more power. Heat build up and lower range are the issues you'll have here. It's not unheard of for batteries to be swapped out from more efficient makers. For example Tesla batteries are very well designed, from the case which aids cooling to the electrodes/electrolytes formulated. Battery tech will always improve, offering more dense storage of power and lower issues with heat. As batteries age they degrade, although clever charge discharge management have prolonged them.

  • Electric motors, adding additional motors to each wheel or both axles will give twice the grunt of a single motor application. Some electric car makers specify different models and power ranges, and this is generally a function of the number of motors they have. If a model can come with 2 or 4 motors and you only have half of this fitted you can bet there is space to fit the battery and subject to wiring and management changes can be made to work.

    Additionally adding more powerful motors will help. Having stronger magnets and different windings, from different grades and formulations of copper will produce more power.

  • Engine management, if you can access the management you can usually bypass some of the safeguards to extract more power. Battery life may be reduced, range may suffer but you'll get more power. As modern electric cars are computerised, you'll need a different skillset to tune and modify them and most manufacturers protect, encrypt or obfuscate the management setup in the computer to make it harder. Given time, most can be cracked and tweaked.


  • Battery cooling, if you can keep the batteries cooler you stand a chance of getting more power as most EV's are setup to cut power output when the batteries heat up. Air cooling, water cooling and changes to heat sync design can all help with this.
I do plan to cover EV's and hybrid engines in a future article as this is the way the motor industry is going.
 
All very true. And certainly of interest, as one of my plans is to build a Cateram 7 type (from chassis up) with Full EV power.
Then the plan is to convert an early Range Rover to Full EV. If I can get decent Range out of that, then I can get decent range for anything.
 

Similar threads


Please watch this on my YouTube channel & Subscribe.


Back
Top