Robert’s FIRST Electric Car Is Reborn!!
Hello and welcome to fully charged this week I’m going to be doing a review of the car I’m driving every day at the moment this is the Mitsubishi IM one of the first really sort of proper family-sized electric cars to be released for sale in the
UK back in 2009 I was part of a government scheme in the UK to have a possession of an electric car for a year and the car in question was one of these the Mitsubishi IM I had it for 12 months I drove over 12 half th000 mil in it I
Love this car it was absolutely brilliant today I’ve come to Brisbane Australia next to a very very busy road to have a look at this company that are refurbishing these cars now these cars are generally between 14 12 and 14 years old and the original battery pack it was
Tiny 16 1 12 kwatt hours they’ve doubled the capacity of the battery they’ve increased the range enormously they’ve done a lot of work on the software it’s amazing what they’re doing cuz what is so important is to keep these cars going as long as possible and not throw away the batteries the
Batteries are being used in other applications so that is the original fabulous Mitsubishi IM and this is the fully charged show like fully charged you’ll love our fun-packed everything electric Expos around the world next up Australia and London remember energy and transport professionals Go free on the first
Day so this is the first time I’ve driven an IM I reckon in have I had a go in one since no I don’t think I have so since 2010 so 14 years but this one this one is a bit different so I’m just going
To let it so oh yeah okay the throttle mapping is really different so and the and the regen on the braking is mindboggling on this thing it is really very different so we’re not going very fast yet so I’ll just but what is so nice is look at that t
It’s so tight it’s such a great little car forget everything about the electric the drive anything like that the actual car itself is an absolute joy to drive I used to really love driving this and uh and this I mean this car is you know of
A similar age about probably 12 13 years old but it’s got a completely new battery pack it’s got massively increased range from how when it was built and um and it’s also got quite a lot of difference in in it in its driving abilities now that is not like the old
Im so grae this is really I’m very attached to the im as a car I loved it it was my first electric car and what you’re doing I just want to know what you’re doing to it cuz I can see went up there not got a battery in it but it was
Such a simple car that’s how I remember it the engineering and the the drivetrain was so obvious and simple there was a motor between the back wheel a battery pack it was pretty basic early electric car so what are you doing to it there what what are well you’re right
It’s not not not a great deal difference from a conversion which is where we start off doing conversions on older cars you know and upcycling older cars so here uh basically we saw a need we started seeing about four years ago we started seeing om of owners complaining
About the lack of range all that sort of stuff and it struck me that well this can’t be too difficult that was a silly thought okay um so and in a in a way once Solutions are obained you know then you can work these things out so we
Decided Well let’s see what we can Max it out to now the original car was 16 Kow but by the time we saw them be lucky if it was 10 Kow packs you know probably less than that you know so we pulled them out we found a battery uh form
Factor we could use we had to do some modifications make some brackets um develop a lot of little bits and pieces for it to work and we stuck it in the car and we got back to the original um 120k Range it couldn’t get any more than
That on on paper it should have done a lot more um so we went away and had to think about it and uh several months of trying different ideas to trick the car into believing what we wanted to believe right um and you know modifying current
Sensors and all that sort of thing it all sounded great um we had one time there we got it up to 180 km but every charge after that kept the car kept pulling it back down oh so it wouldn’t charge the batteries full then it it charged the batteries full but it
Wouldn’t discharge whole am so it discharg the top bit and we look at the batteries we use a proper SC to look at the batteries and you could see that there was still heaps of current left those batteries but the car was reporting as being nil and going to
Turtle mode um that’s great because that that battery pack would last forever yes you know um so we went and thought went away and and I I know Francisco from other projects and we had a bit of a discussion about it and he had an idea
And it was a really good idea and basically um we we we cut into the can bus of the car and we U made a A 4channel can Bridge um and we run the we only only we made it four Channel because we could see a future for it in
Other cars right okay um so we basically take the signals we figure out and that took the longest time is to figure out what all the canbas signals do cuz no one will tell you right uh and uh diagnose what they are um see what see which ones we wanted to pass through
Which just went straight through is normal so we didn’t interfere with those um the ones we wanted to interfere with we worked out what calibrations we needed to change um and changed it have I said that correctly yeah more pretty close it just takes a lot longer than what you said yeah yeah Yes but one of the things I love about this is It’s kind of it’s it was on that real cusp of analog to digital so the the controls are really pretty simple um they’re not telling you anything very it’s not like having a really complicated screen mine didn’t have a a
Screen like this in it at all so it was very very basic but I didn’t mind at all I mean the only disadvantage this car had when it originally came out was one it was insanely expensive and two it had very limited range it had a much smaller
Battery so this battery is literally double the size of the original which means it goes and it just just go it will go further double the size same weight so uh double the capacity the energy capacity but the same weight so you know really big difference this this
This has now become a completely acceptable range car now it’s kind of going to be you’re not going to drive across country in Australia in this car but in any European country you could go anywhere you know you you’re not restricted it rapid charges it’s it’s you know really comfortable to drive
It’s got really good visibility it’s really you know it’s a very reliable machine I mean it’s they’re really good little car mil and it’s small and it is you know light and it’s energy efficient and now it’s got this kind of braking it is insanely energy efficient that is
Just fantastic so the battery that was in there was for 16 Kow hours so what is what can you fit in it now I what’s what’s the cap with the cells that we getting I think is TW uh nearly 30 KW hours right but um the cells that we’re
Getting uh not quite the same size as the original they’re a little bit smaller so if we actually went and got custom made sales that are the exact same size as the originals we would be able to get another 20% more right so it would be close to double the the uh the
Capacity so you can see how far sales have actually come in the last 10 years like it’s exactly double the capacity yeah so you can realistically expect that you know maybe in another 10 years you’re going to have double what we got now what you got now and then what’s
Interesting I think is that what we’ve now leared is that the the car itself that’s going to you know the motor is not going to wear out or need replacing or perfectly the thing is the people who bought these cars treasured them yes you know they looked after them a they were
Fairly expensive and they still are they were expensive when they were new so you know so they’re going to get this car they love electric they love sustainability they’re the sort of people the first adopters and they treasured these things they looked after them I have not really seen a bad one
Yet and these cars are getting like 10 10 years old now you know so they’re in really good condition so they’re Prime uh their Prime fter to to upgrade and save them but that’s the main thing from my point of view it’s it’s a great car I
Want to save it keep it going and if I’m going to do something rather than put like for like and I’ve always said for years I want to be the hot rod shop of the future so I want to upgrade things I always want to make it better than it
Was before so every single car we’ve done now we’re doing the Outland and we’re doing the niss and leaf far greater range than they were when they were brand new right yeah so now if I’m going to do that I put that on yeah so that’s that’s on
Cruise control now going down a hill 45 kph loads of regen I mean it’s just the B you know that you could I could drive for hours and you wouldn’t use any bars on the battery which in the old IM that I drove I’d drive two miles up the road
And I’d lose a couple of bars you know so this is a really really different experience what it means is this car’s got a huge amount of life left in it it can be used for another 20 years probably and it’s you know really really super efficient low energy car and it’s
Using you know all the materials that are embedded in this car are going to be really useful for a hell of a long time which is what that’s what cars should be like so not only have we upgraded the battery we’ve added one pedal driving as
An option um basically we I’ve driven to gimpy which is 400 K and not touch the brake pedal wow okay I can bring the car to a standing St halt it also incorporates hill hill hill hold so if I come up to a hilly thing with a stop
Light it’ll sit there um and then I want to go just press accelerator while we go again so we still have a brake pedal yes but we really need to to use it yeah if we need to stop in a big hurry I’ll stand on it that’s for sure so the
Essentially have you upgraded the ren braking from the original version correct and we also use uh cruise control where you factor that as well so when You’ got the one pedal driving it adds about 30k to the range so the new battery gives you around the 230 240 um
With the regen braking out the uh we call it gasometer comes up at 265 um because it adjusts for for for the value of power coming back and I mean what because you have to do it in kilometers for me cuz I’m thick what what was the or so when when these cars
Came in and they they were down to sort of 80% between 40 and 70k is what they had so it’s gone from let’s say it’s gone from 70k to 240 240 that’s that’s an impressive Increase so I’m grateful to be sitting in the shade uh of these wonderful recycled solar panels which are charging these old Mitsubishi batteries these batteries are being used in loads of different applications all over the place so we’re going to find out more about that in other episodes but that
That’s it for this show please do subscribe please tell your mates about what we’re doing and as always if you have been thank you for watching
Robert reconnects with a pioneering electric car in which he covered many a mile when it arrived back in 2009: The groundbreaking Mitsubishi i-MiEV. But this particular car is rather special: thanks to some tasty upgrades it’s been made more capable than it ever was in period, all while repurposing its outgoing tired components. Is it time for Bobby to add an I-MiEV to his garage once again?
00:00 Intro
1:26 Reconnecting with the i-MiEV
2:38 Major upgrades!
5:47 Joy of simplicity
7:14 New specs
9:02 A bonus upgrade
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