# Nissan Leaf as a Donor.



## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

Hi Andy, and welcome-

Look for the Saab Sonnet build thread - a complete "in vivo" transplant of a whole living Leaf into a much more fun car, is underway right now.

Many partial "parts only" transplants have happened also. There is even more hope for this in future, as there are products under development that you can find out about here, which will allow a person to re-use the power electronics from any OEM inverter to drive any motor. This custom motor driver will allow you to get by without having to deal with all the CANbus crap of a car which is missing a whole bunch of subsystems its vehicle control unit is expecting feedback from, but which are no longer in your converted vehicle.

The easier and more traditional approach is to use a motor and controller intended for vehicle applications in the absence of all the other subsystems, but to use OEM batteries out of a crashed Leaf, Volt, Ford CMax or even modules out of a Tesla etc.. That's the approach I took with my E-Fire Spitfire- except I bought the much more expensive prismatic LiFePO4 prismatic batteries because that was the easiest thing to do at the time. The Leaf motor, with a nominal apparently continuous rating of 80 kW, is much beefier than the HPEVS AC50 that I put into my Spitfire, but my car is loads of fun to drive so I don't regret my selection one bit. If you want to convert a car without mod cons, i.e. no power steering, power brakes, airbags etc., the conversion process is dead easy.


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## miscrms (Sep 25, 2013)

Hey Andy, as Molten said that's the approach I'm trying. Doing some modeling on it, I think the Leaf system should be capable of pretty impressive performance even as is in a relatively small, light, aerodynamic vehicle. At ~1800lbs stock and a CdA in the Honda Insight class, I'm hoping for ~5-6s 0-60 and a significant increase in range. I bought a wrecked Leaf from a salvage auction and am basically treating it like a complete kit. Trying to use pretty much whatever I have to from the Leaf to make it think its still working in a stock setup. There are definitely some challenges to this approach, but I do think it looks like a feasible path to a pretty high performance conversion on a decent budget. My Leaf cost ~$7k after fees and delivery, and was still driveable. 

For the approach I'm taking, the main challenges are:
1) understanding the Leaf system well enough to keep everything "happy" in its new home.
2) mechanically adapting the Leaf components to work in the new vehicle.

I've tried to document things related to item #1 in the Leaf thread linked in my sig. Item 2 will be more specific to the platform chosen, but I'm trying to document as much as I can of my path in the Saab Sonett thread in my sig. I'm going with a very small light FWD sport coupe, so I can use the complete motor/reduction gear/transaxle assembly and just get custom CV shafts made to adapt the transaxle to the wheel hubs. I'm using a 2012 as the separate motor/inverter/DCJB units work better in my long low nose. User dedlast is using the more integrated stack from a 2015, and adapting it to RWD in a Supra.

I'm starting with the motor, inverter, battery and necessary control components to get the drive and charging functional as my first step. Getting regenerative braking is going to be a bit more complicated on the mechanical side, so I'm not planning to take that on for the first version. It will likely mean swapping in the Leaf master cylinder (which has the braking controller integrated), and either getting the existing wheel calipers to work with it (and add wheel speed sensors), or modifying the knuckles to accept the Leaf hubs and calipers, or modifying the Leaf knuckles to work with the existing front suspension. As an EE these are all pretty daunting to me, but probably much more doable for others.

Rob


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