Converting 1981 VW Diesel Rabbit

Found a partially converted Rabbit online... bought the car and towed it home.  The car had been stripped of it's internal combustion parts.  And had the front and rear battery racks, and 9" Advanced DC motor installed.  So I had a solid leg up on the conversion.  However while it's tempting to say that the car was all but done... I found that this was far from the case.  The car is old and beat up.  It was dirty.  My first task was to clean it up and see what I had.  Then I had to begin finding and buying more than $8,000 worth of additional E-Car stuff (motor controller, charger, batteries, pot box, another rack, DC/DC converter, etc. etc.).  THEN, as if that's not all, I had to begin restoring the car... there were lots of things missing or that have to be adapted to work with an E-Car.  So there was a daunting amount of work left to do.

I will try to document this effort on this page.

10/10/08 - Cleaning the car.  This took several weekends of cleaning inside and out.   

1/12/09 - Have been acquiring e-parts.  Now have pot box, shunt, 36 volt motor contoller (for use during development - will switch to big motor controller later when ready to buy and hook up full battery load), new battery box and rack for an extra 4 batteries to make a full 120v load, circuit breaker, ... some smaller things... I'll add detail later.  I want to get this posted right now.