- As electric vehicles are becoming more and more mainstream, we're starting to see
more people in the aftermarket wanting to make them go faster, make modifications
to them or even perform electric engine swaps into other vehicles.
So we're here with Sasha from MoTeC Canada to find out a little bit more about electric
vehicle performance as well as the electronic controls associated with them.
So Sasha, just for our followers out here watching, you're no stranger to EV and
you got started a few years ago with what became a fairly well recognised and
popular engine swap into a Lotus Evora, Blue Lightning you called it.
Can you tell us what was involved in that build?
Yeah so with the Lotus Evora, which we called Blue Lightning, funnily enough
that was like a, when I was a kid I would design cars and I'd called it Blue Lightning
so it was kind of just a tacky way to, anyway so it was a Tesla large rear
drive unit and we used Chevrolet Volts, two Chevrolet Volt batteries which is
a plug in hybrid car from the U.S.
- Alright I'm going to just say that as we go through this interview, because I'm
quite fresh to EV, I'm going to stop you a bunch of times and we're going to
dig into some of these things so first of all, as you've just mentioned there,
you're using a Tesla motor but a Chevy Volt battery so there's no requirement
strictly speaking to stick with the same brand manufacturer between motor
and battery?
- No, generally speaking a motor has a minimum and maximum voltage,
as long as the battery works in that range, it'll work.
- So you put the Tesla motor and the Chevy Volt batteries and clearly you can't just
plug all that in and expect everything to work so this is where the complexity starts?
- Yeah and the other thing is we didn't want to just get the motor to spin, we wanted to
have full control of the motor, we wanted to have motorsport like traction control,
we wanted to have full vehicle integration and have the whole platform have a
really OE feel.
- So this is difficult, even in internal combustion engines, the modern crop
of cars, there's a lot of communication between different controllers, different modules in
the car and I'm not even taking about the engine necessarily.
Automatic transmission controllers, even air conditioning, the gauge cluster et cetera
so how did you deal with this in the Lotus engine swap?
- One of the reasons we picked the Lotus Evora was because it's a very simple car.
It doesn't have a very complicated CAN bus, there's not a lot of these modules.
So it was fairly easy, we changed the instrument cluster to a C1212 dash and basically we
just needed to make the factory vehicle stability control system work properly.
And then it was all just integrating the high voltage systems, which are called contacters,
they close the circuits, there's the charger, there's what's called a DC-DC converter
which charges the 12 volt system.
So all of these systems need to have controls and they need to be nicely integrated,
not just a bunch of switches on a dash like in a racecar.
- Alright so you're using MoTeC electronics here, obviously you are a MoTeC dealer
for Canada and how do you go about that, what's involved here, can we directly
control the Tesla electric motor using a MoTeC ECU with the correct firmware or is there more
involved than that?
- So with the drive unit that we're using, we're basically emulating the rest of
a Tesla and the factory inverter in the Tesla motor is still running the motor and it's being
told by the MoTeC how much torque to make and traction controls, these things
are being controlled by this Tesla, we'll call it vehicle control unit.
- So the advantage here with an electric motor is you've got much more precise control over
the torque output than you have with the likes of an internal combustion engine.
So does this give you a lot more freedom with aspects such as the mapping of
driver accelerator pedal versus requested torque and maybe aspects such as
traction control, launch control et cetera?
- Yes the torque is pretty amazing I mean you command the torque, put it on the dyno
and it's a straight line, it's really exact.
It's quite cool and the main thing that's so awesome is the response.
Especially in certain tracks with chicanes and tight features, it just explodes out
of the corner and it's really nice.
And then the traction control's not an option, it's a necessity, especially in an
electric motor with a single speed gearbox, if you get on the throttle and there's no
traction control, and it starts to go, it'll go right to 220 km/h, whatever the
max speed of the motor is.
- Now with the actual motors themselves, when you look at a motor that's for example
delivered in a showroom spec Tesla, is there headroom inside of that motor
to provide more power or as Tesla deliver that car, is basically that the limit of
what you're going to get out of the motor?
What I guess I'm saying here is. is it similar to what we see in the internal combustion
market where more often than not a showroom car has a certain amount of
headroom and by tuning we can release some more power and torque?
- So there's two things we need to separate here, first of all with Teslas they do this thing
called over the air software updates.
So unfortunately if you even were to tune a Tesla, it could just be overwritten.
So let's just pretend that didn't exist, usually an inverter, so kind of take a step
back, an inverter controls how much torque output you get and the battery's voltage
more or less controls how much horsepower you can get.
So once you start to run out of battery voltage, you start to have trouble making
more power.
So you can't really make more voltage unless you change the battery but you can get more
torque and a little bit more horsepower by pushing the inverter harder and above
the limits that either the OE automotive manufacturer spec'd, or that the inverter,
power electronics in the inverter are spec'd at.
- So is that at the risk of overheating and doing damage to these components
essentially?
- Well, how do I answer that question, of course there's more risk but is it
substantial or significant?
It all depends on the situation.
But with electronics, what's different than with an internal combustion engine is,
usually you can always make more power but just for a shorter period of time.
So for drag racing potentially as you've seen with Teslas, they can make a
crazy amount of power for a short burst.
- But that's one thing if you want to get down a drag strip in maybe nine seconds
or 10 seconds but if you want to go and do lap after lap around a racetrack,
this is where you get into the problem with the battery voltage?
- You get into a number of problems, I mean cooling is really the problem,
battery cooling, inverter cooling, motor cooling and we've seen that with all the
new EVs that are coming out, they can go longer and more laps and do better
on the track and so it's a new set of problems to be solved.
And it's also a problem of greed.
With internal combustion engines, you tune the engine for a certain power and
that's it, with an electric motor, you can always get a bit more but for a little
less time.
So as you fix the cooling you're going to hurt the cooling by asking for more power.
- It's always that balance, the tightrope that you're walking?
- It's a different game, it's totally different.
- So at the moment, where do you see the realistic limitations on EV development
right now, is this the battery technology, is it the motor technology, is it the inverter
or the control systems, what needs to improve for us to see that next step up in
EV performance?
- I would say right now the EV performance you can get is already extremely good,
you see the fastest cars in the world...
- No doubt.
- So the limit is the cost, right now the only way to really do it for the enthusiast is
to be using OEM components.
OEM batteries and OEM motors so the cost coming down and allowing for
performance and motorsport oriented batteries and motors and inverters, that cost needs
to come down significantly for it to be I would say easier for plug and play kits.
The OE stuff, it's always hard to integrate with and it seems with EVs, the integration
is even more difficult.
- Now I know this is going to be a difficult question to answer accurately but I think
a lot of people right now will be wondering, if I'm looking at a project car that I want
to build for myself and maybe you're now at the point where you're considering
EV as a viable alternative to internal combustion, and maybe you're looking
at going down the path of purchasing a crashed Tesla for the motor, inverter,
batteries et cetera, what are our options now for aftermarket control of that, I mean I know
you're personally running the MoTeC there, we've talked briefly about that but a lot
of that was your own custom firmware package.
So what are the options available to the average home enthusiast who wants to
look at this technology now?
- Yeah so if you follow the recipe that we set out, you can use a MoTeC controller
and use our firmware package, that will work, there is also some simpler firmware,
or I shouldn't say firmware, controllers that you can get that just send the CAN messages
to control a Tesla motor.
And three years ago, we were maybe one of the first or the second to do this and now
there's a lot so it's ramping up quite quickly and as that's happening, there's more
knowledge being built and the other things that will come will be all the suppoting
components to go along with it to make the kits more of a plug and play type of thing
than custom.
Specifically with a battery and the high voltage wiring, trying to make that safer and more
straightforward is going to be helpful.
- Alright so moving onto a slightly different take on electric technology, you're actually
a long term internal combustion guy as well so you're kind of split across both sides
of the spectrum there and on your 350z Time Attack car running the VQ35 based
engine, you're actually now incorporating a KERS system and I want to just talk about
that and how that works so can you give us a bit of a rundown there?
- Yeah totally I mean I'm super excited about this project.
From a control standpoint it's awesome because the ECU is controlling the engine,
the paddle shift, the traction control, the inverter, all the safeties for the
whole system so it's actually quite exciting.
And so basically what we've done is we've removed the clutch and the flywheel and
in that place we've put in Phi-Power motor and so this motor will start the
car from a dead stop and once the car gets up to speed, the engine will come on
and we can use the combination of the motor and the engine to charge the motor,
discharge the motor, have 700 horsepower or charge the battery, we can have all
kinds of different control strategies, whatever you can imagine.
We can use it for Time Attack to just fully deplete the battery in three laps,
or we can have KERS setup which will run a certain power and just try and charge
and discharge at an even rate.
It's unlimited man, the things that you can think of.
- Alright you've just dropped a whole bunch of information there and I think we need
to go back and unpack a little bit of that.
So first of all, for those trying to get their head around it, so you've removed the
clutch and flywheel assembly, so you've got this electric motor essentially fitted
within the bell housing backing that VQ engine, so you mentioned there it starts the engine,
so it can actually motor the engine so you don't need a starter motor.
Can you only get away with this system with no clutch and flywheel because it
is sequential and paddle shifted so traditionally you wouldn't be using the clutch out on the
racetrack anyway or would this still be something that you could incorporate
with a synchromesh box?
- Yeah exactly the design idea was since we only use the clutch to get going, let's ditch
all that weight because we're trying to offset as much weight as possible to make this
a viable performance upgrade.
- Alright so in terms of the available power from the electric motor versus the
internal combustion engine, can you just give us some rough numbers on those?
- You did mention 700 horsepower total but can you break that down?
- Yeah so the VQ right now is the highest power VQ, naturally aspirated I think that
exists so that's already making 500 wheel horsepower.
And then this hybrid system will add another 200 horsepower.
- Now getting the control of those two aspects there, internal combustion and the hybrid
side of it, the electric side of it. is obviously where the complexity lies and if you don't
get that right, it's going to be very difficult to control so again is this all custom
firmware that you've written to do this?
- Yeah so we used the GPRP, the paddle shift base package and then we've
added everything in for all the electric control.
A lot of it which has come from our Blue Lightning project.
And we've integrated it with a lot of the other function in GPRP, so for example the
paddle shift will also integrate the motor cut and the traction control also will integrate
the motor cut.
So we can, basically with the hybrid system, we definitely don't want to use battery
energy to spin the tyres, or it's a waste of energy.
These are all aspects that are nicely integrated and put together and then
we've added a bunch of different drive modes and map settings to be able to vary these
different torque maps and output.
- Now in terms of getting those batteries charged, you're able to use, as I
understand, regenerative braking so essentially when you are braking,
the car is essentially driving the electric motor, turning it into a generator and
then in that turn it's recharging those batteries.
But you mentioned off camera that there's a limit to how hard you can charge those
batteries, can you just talk to us about the complexities there?
- Yeah so batteries are really difficult and what I mentioned before is batteries are really
expensive so we're using an OEM battery from a BMW i8 and the trouble with using OEM
batteries is you don't really know the safe limits of them.
But one thing we know is that you can't charge a battery as aggressively as you can
discharge it.
And the heat created will be more so when you're trying to charge it very quickly.
So yes we can't take 150 kW of power and shove it into the battery in every braking zone.
So that'll be a balance of watching the temperatures and the voltage because
when you try and charge a battery, the voltage of the battery goes up and you can't
exceed the safe volts of the battery so when it's near full, you can't give it all of the
power but when it's low you can stuff more in.
- So when you say there you can't really charge it too hard in the braking zones,
so the regenerative braking essentially there you're kind of limited on how hard you can
charge it but you did mention again off camera that you can actually charge it
up to sort of a certain percentage of throttle where the driver isn't
demanding maximum power, can you tell us how that works?
- Yeah exactly I mean if you imagine in this case, we're not doing an endurance racing
where our main focus is fuel economy, our main focus in this application
is using as much power from the motor as soon as we can and the constraint for
that is the battery.
So we can take engine power when the driver's not demanding full engine power and we
can suck some of that away with the motor and charge the battery at a more gentle rate.
So effectively the battery's always being charged, unless the driver's at full throttle.
- So essentially there, it might sound a little bit counter intuitive but when the driver's
only at 70 or 80% throttle, as you sort of mentioned there, they're not actually asking
for maximum power and I'm guessing that this all feels completely seamless,
the driver would never know what's actually going on?
- Yeah in theory 80% throttle will be all of the engine's power that it can deliver
minus 20 or 30 kW that's going into the battery.
And then as the driver revs it in, the regen will actually turn it into positive power from
the motor and you'll add another 200 horsepower from the motor instead of
taking away that 30 or 40 horsepower.
- Look I know you're still pretty deep in that KERS project and we're certainly interested
to see how it pans out.
I mean it is a technology, EV in general that is really exciting and really interesting,
we're seeing more and more development and as this trickles down to become
more available to enthusiasts we're obviously going to see that enthusiast market expand
greatly, so thanks for the time there for the chat Sasha and we wish you all the best
with the 350.
- Thanks man it was good seeing you.
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