When converting a car to electric, rather than designing a model from new (which is what we are talking about) you have to work with what you’ve got.
Now the best most obvious way to do it would be to rip apart a fiat 500e which does already have bespoke systems in place for electric drive and would likely fit a panda, that said buying a 500e would cost several thousand dollars and you’d have to ship it to the U.K. from California.
To custom build your own drive train would be phenomenally expensive and require a lot of trial and error to get right.
So what all conversion companies do, and do so that it can be reversed back to a petrol engine in the future especially with classic cars like Porsche’s and VW vans and beetles, is bolt onto the transmission that is there, this is the easiest but also the far better option.
Given that the motors and electronics for a conversion can easily run to £5000 then having it fitted and all the other extra parts needed like batteries which will also cost thousands, there is a very good reason that people are not converting pandas or other every day cars.
Nothing is impossible but if you’re building an electric car anything that draws power can have a notable difference to your range, so you can buy electric car specific electric low power air con pumps, you can buy specific special vacuum pumps, you would benefit from switching all lights to low powered LED lighting and stripping out as much unneeded weight as possible, for example you won’t need as much sound proofing on an electric car.
Basically it depends on what you what from this, if you want a car at the end which would go head to head with a Nissan Leaf or similar in terms of range and quality of build, then you’re talking about custom building something from scratch with many bespoke parts and even having to introduce your own can system to manage it. The cost of this would be tens of thousands
Or you trash a 500e, ship it back, chop it up and use all the bits of that car, you’d probably need about £10,k for this option buying and shipping the car then doing the work, maybe far more if you’re having to pay someone to do this, there are no 500e specialists or experts in the U.K. and getting parts if needed would be a near impossible and expensive task.
The final and cheapest option would be to hack something together yourself from parts and your own engineering solutions. This would be a cheap and cheerful job but would still cost you upward of £7-8k with buying the motor, batteries, controllers and such, then some very interesting work on hacking the canbus system to still work for things like the dash, the body computer and aircon or climate control which uses inputs from the engine ecu normally, the abs the stability control on later cars, all interact with the engine ecu normally and so would now be confused to have a big hole in the system.
You could actually end up spending much more, or you could have to basically rewire the whole car to remove canbus an install your own computer to drive the dash and other controls.
The reasons this all works so much better on old cars like a classic beetle or Morris minor, is the complete lack of electronics making everything so much easier.
