# Smart Car Motor Controller



## adamcurtis (Apr 28, 2020)

Hi all,
I have several SmartCar motors from EV West. They are bricked, but I'm hoping to hack them or connect with someone who can/has time to. What is the general feeling on proprietary motors/controllers? I know several of them have been hacked successfully. Anyone have opinions on the SmartCar motor?


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## MattsAwesomeStuff (Aug 10, 2017)

> What is the general feeling on proprietary motors/controllers? I know several of them have been hacked successfully. Anyone have opinions on the SmartCar motor?


General feeling is... you will receive applause if you figure out how to make them work and share it with others.

You say "motors/controllers" as if they're the same thing. Just about any motor can be spun with a different inverter. It almost always comes down to a few (very few) power wires, an a resolver/decoder.

I have no heard of anyone who's reverse engineered Smartcar controllers. But Prius, Leaf, Tesla, and Lexus controllers have been fairly thoroughly reverse engineered, to the point that some of them you can just buy drop in control boards to hijack them.

If you have a lot of controllers and feel like shipping one to the UK out of pocket, there's a chance that Damien Maguire might be curious enough to add them to his mountain of project lists and end up reverse engineering them a bit. I wouldn't expect a timely engineering, but, it could be on an "eventually" list. He's currently hacking Tesla Model 3 inverters (and a half dozen others).


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