# Conversion of Polaris SxS with Leaf motor



## Johntee (Jun 16, 2019)

I'm also thinking about a controller and solar charging So I hope somebody knows.


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## Crawford_D (Jun 16, 2019)

I won't do solar charging on this, I have grid-tied PV on the roof of my properties, so power is free to plug into. 

But I would like to make it clean, fast and quiet. 

Looks like the controller is the hard part, the rest of this is fairly simple electric wiring.


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## brian_ (Feb 7, 2017)

A Leaf motor is pretty big for this purpose, and it isn't trivial to get any inverter working with it. But it's certainly a reliable and powerful choice.

I assume that a Leaf motor certainly needs liquid cooling, since it isn't designed for air cooling at all.

The nominal battery voltage of a Leaf is 360 volts, and all of that is needed to produce full rated power at the top end of the speed range. I haven't seen data for power available as a function of speed at lower voltages.


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## dain254 (Oct 8, 2015)

In my town, in Iowa, UTV's have no path to being street legal. I've currently got a Tomberlin Vanish that I use for utility purposes - it is based off of the Polaris ranger 500 chassis and converted for electric. Running that thing around back and forth between my two properties gives the desire for a UTV that is quite a bit faster, and street legal. Instead of a leaf - you may want to look into the Smart for Two electric vehicles. They are actually incredibly cheap, and the major components would be easy to repurpose as they are rearwheel drive with a swingarm style suspension. The nice thing about basically just rebuilding a vehicle like that is you have all power solutions already finished... charger, battery, bms - it's all there and all works! Removing glass, body, etc and fitting a minimal tube chassis and a box or however you want your UTV setup can nearly cut the weight in half, so the 70hp becomes much higher performance!


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## brian_ (Feb 7, 2017)

dain254 said:


> ... Instead of a leaf - you may want to look into the Smart for Two electric vehicles. They are actually incredibly cheap, and the major components would be easy to repurpose as they are rearwheel drive with a swingarm style suspension. The nice thing about basically just rebuilding a vehicle like that is you have all power solutions already finished... charger, battery, bms - it's all there and all works!


The Smart ForTwo (and Roadster) rear suspension is actually a weird variant of de Dion beam axle (not trailing or semi-transparent trailing arms or swing axles) but it might work okay.

I agree that the Smart ED hardware seems reasonably sized for a UTV, and the package on a subframe might be easy to adapt to a typical UTV structure. There were multiple generations of Smart Electric Drive, with substantial changes to the EV systems, and at some point they stopped using the subframe... so choose your donor Smart ED carefully.


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## xjaywalker (Aug 22, 2019)

Not sure if the OP is still around and moving forward with the EV conversion of the Polaris SxS. 

I have a Ranger 700XP that I would like to convert. I know Voltronix has a kit for the Li-Ion batteries and management systems for $5000. Eck??

Has anyone look at their systems? Kind of expensive. But I would figure the entire cost would be around $7-9K. 

I have seen where people are using electric motors from forklifts as well. Anyone have experience with those?


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