# Considering conversion- Ford Transit Connect



## madderscience (Jun 28, 2008)

Welcome

Look very closely at the specs of the Azure Dynamics conversion of the Ford Transit. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Transit_Connect_Electric

It is basically what you want to build, except you want double the range. It had a 28kwh battery, so you will want a 60kwh pack. That is putting you in tesla territory. 

These do come up for sale periodically, at very good prices, if it will do what you need.

Your best bet is to find a running Azure dynamics Transit and see if you can make it fit your needs. The major down side of course is Azure dynamics is out of business, so if anything goes wrong it will be up to you and the (fairly small) enthusiast community to figure it out and fix it. In time, you will probably be able to retrofit a better battery in place of the one it has, but of course that will be money and time. Probably still a lot less than starting from scratch though.

Assuming you could fit two 300W nominal solar panels on the roof without impacting aerodynamics, And the vehicle was in the sun all day, you might get around 5 miles of additional range. (~5 peak sun hours * 400W actual average production * 0.75 overall conversion and charge efficiency = 1.5kwh: 1.5kwh / 300wh/mile == 5 miles) 

good luck.


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