Behind me is a 1995 military Humvee that we're turning into an electric vehicle. Keep in
mind that when we're done, this thing is going to be just as powerful if not more powerful
than the Hummer H1 Alpha, which was the pinnacle of the Hummer H1 back in 2006. The difference
between the Hummer H1 and the military Humvee is that the Humvee was made for the military
and there were about 280,000 of them made while the civilian version the H1 Hummer only
had about 11,818. They were made popular by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The H1's are kind of
considered the manliest of manly vehicles which is why we want to turn it electric.
We're going to take the gas guzzling military machine and bring it into the modern era.
You've probably already watched the videos of us removing everything like the old engine.
And you've probably seen us install the new electric drivetrain, like the electric motor,
the torque box, the transfer case, and the inverter. We've also done the 12 volt system
which handles the headlights, and the power steering. So if you're not caught up on everything
you can check out those videos, or in this video we're going to start with the high voltage
stuff. Some electric cars like Tesla's are totally silent, but I'm kind of hoping my
electric Humvee will sound more like one of these Formula E race cars. Should be a pretty
interesting video. Let's get started.
[Intro]
So apparently you need more than one pedal to drive a vehicle. Luckily we have that problem
solved with this guy. This is an electric gas pedal or accelerator pedal that we can
connect straight to the VCU, which I'll show you in a second. A couple things I like about
this is that it's a variable pedal. It's kind of
like a switch. Instead of just being off and on though it works by sending a 5 volt signal
to the VCU, sending nothing when it's not compressed, and sending 5 volts when fully
floored. As well as inside it has double springs, so if it's ever compressed it can always decompress
and come back out. Because an accelerator pedal that's always floored would be a very
bad thing with this much power. This is what the old pedal looked like, which is sitting
right here in this crevice. But obviously we can't use it anymore because there's no
electronics attached to it. And the new pedal, lucky for us, is about the same width and
is going to fit in pretty much the same spot.
[Drilling sounds]
And now we should be able to accelerate and break. So as we're making this electric vehicle
there's a lot of parts that need to work together, and the thing that makes them all work together
is called a VCU or a vehicle control unit. A VCU doesn't need to be large - this little
guy right here is super tiny, but it is also mighty. I'm not sure where that came from.
And it's what controls the throttle. the brakes, the forward, neutral, reverse... pretty important.
It's also what controls the high voltage and the contactors, and that's where things get
dicey. Luckily we have Jeremy here who's done this before. So he has built an entire Tesla
Roadster almost in his garage which is pretty impressive. I've done a whole video about
that if you want to check that out. What is a contactor?
-So in the simplest form contactor is a switch. So it takes voltage and essentially closes
the switch so the high voltage can run across.
-So if i got this straight we'll have the high voltage running to one side, and then
the motor and the inverter connected off of the other side. Correct?
-Yes.
-So we'll be mounting the VCU up underneath the dashboard and about this area here.
[Drilling sounds]
So the brains is mounted and we should be able to do wire management from here as well
as this top corner on the other side. Eventually we'll have all the wires managed very well,
right now is not that time.
Powering the VCU is done with the 12 volt system, using that car battery that we have
running all of the other low voltage components. It's plugged into a fuse on my control panel
with wires running across the vehicle under the dock house, and into the cab. I'll put
all these wires in a wire loom, you know, for protection once I know everything is working.
I'll also be running a few of these VCU signal wires over to the inverter so it can control
the forward, reverse, and throttle. Once those inputs are sent through that small vehicle
control unit. Jeremy is soldering the plug for those little wires. The plug is water
tight with a rubber seal and connects to little pins inside of the inverter.
Okay so we have the throttle officially wired up to the VCU. Remember that's underneath
here. We also have the inverter, that guy, which changes the DC power from the batteries,
and the AC batteries aren't wired up yet. They're over here. And that is all powered
with the key in the ignition. We have communication. Inverter voltage too low. It's probably because
we don't have any batteries attached to it. But that is progress. Now the brains of the
electric vehicle is talking to us and we can get everything else figured out. We'll see
if the throttle works. So now if I compress the throttle...Okay, so let's throttle now.
three okay compressed all the way.
-Yeah four point eight three.
-Okay do it halfway...
-One point three seven.
-Yes! All right we've got the... I'm gonna turn this off. We still have not gotten the
power steering quiet, but we now have the throttle communicating, the inverter communicating.
How does it feel?
-Step one.
-Yeah.
-Doing good.
-What's cool with this is like each thing is like a series of problems, like it took
us we had to troubleshoot like four different steps to get the throttle working, because
like there's just so many variables going on. But it's fun,
-It is fun.
-So right now we are going to connect the AC high voltage lines that go from the inverter
to the motor. And the high voltage lines might look a little sketchy because they're big
and they're orange, but right now there's no power flowing through them so we are safe
to work on everything. The only thing we would have to worry about is when the batteries
are connected, then we have to make sure there's no power flowing through the cables before
we start touching stuff.
AC lines of the motor are installed. Now, we have to connect them to the inverter. There's
a rubber washer for the seal. And lastly, we have the DC cables that are coming from
the battery. That is a lot of orange. One cool thing about both of these plates though
is that there's a high voltage interlock, meaning that if the connection is broken or
the plate is taken off, power won't flow through these cables. So you can see on the back of
this plate is a little nub which presses down on this switch here and stops power from flowing.
We have the boxes laser cut, we have the motor connected to the inverter, and now we're going
to skip a couple steps and start wiring together batteries. This isn't exactly what we're supposed
to do, we're supposed to have the BMS all connected, but we want to make sure that the
motor turns before we get too far. We have some help with Jacob and Jeremy today. And
to get the batteries connected we're going to use these. These are nickel coated copper
busbars with an insulated orange coating on top. Should look pretty cool when we're done.
So we've laser cut the boxes in a way that seven modules fit on this plate, and seven
modules will fit in the passenger seat on either side of the Humvee. And we'll have
another box there in the center. But in order for the Hummer to spin, the motor needs at
least 250 volts, and so we're going to wire together 10 or 11 of these modules because
each one of them is about 24 or 25 volts all by itself. And if we wire them in series,
the voltages will add up and give us about 250 volts to turn the motor.
As always, current is dangerous and so we're taking as many steps as possible to keep the
current from flowing through us, one of which is wearing rubber gloves. These things are
good up to 1000 volts. Pretty cool. And when we need them, we have insulated tools, as
well as insulated sockets, which once again help keep the current from flowing through
us.
[Dramatic music playing]
So now that we have seven of these modules wired together, let me explain what's going
on. Each of these are wired in series, meaning that the positive of one battery is connected
to the negative of the other batteries, adding up the voltage as it goes along. So this battery
right now is at 24.6 volts, added up with this battery at 24.6 volts, all the way to
the end. Which means that all of these batteries added up is 172.2 volts, which is an incredible
amount of voltage but still not enough to turn the motor on the Humvee. We have a few
more to go.
[Dramatic music playing]
With 11 battery modules all wired in series, each being 24 volts, if I hold my lead on
the negative end,
Jacob holds his lead on the positive end, we should have 270 volts. Which is enough
to turn the motor on the Humvee, now we just need something that will connect everything
together. Which brings us to Jeremy who's been building this contraption right here
which we'll explain later.
-This allows us to switch high voltage on and off safely.
-To connect the positive and negative ends of the battery we're going to use two watt
wire, and do basically the same thing that we saw in the 12 volt video, but on a much
larger scale. We're still going to crimp a terminal onto the end of the wire with a pair
of large hydraulic crimpers. And put some black heat shrink over that connection, insinuating
that this is going to be the negative battery cable...just like all those tiny 12-volt connections
we did in a previous video, just this one is much, much larger, all due to the amount
of electricity that's going to be flowing through it.
So we are almost ready to turn things on. Just as a quick summary, we have the inverter
connected to the motor with the three AC cables, and then we have the two, the red and the
black, positive and negative cables coming out to here, which is Jeremy's contraption.
And then we have the positive and negative after the fuse coming to the positive and
negative ends of the battery. Hopefully after we connect the positive and negative to the
battery we can raise the Hummer a bit off the ground, and hopefully something turns.
My transfer case is in neutral as well, but it's still a lot safer to have the tires off
the ground so we don't accidentally go through the door. Okay, negative?
-Sketch!
-Okay, everything's wired up. We have Jeremy doing the honors of turning the car on seeing
if we get any error messages out of the VCU. Shall we?
Contactor went off.
-Converter voltage too low.
-We're not off to a good start.
-But did you hear two contactors?
-Well that was a little anticlimactic. We spent about another hour last night trying
to figure it out, um but there's not a whole lot of people doing stuff like this. We have
some of the two only people here in the room right now, but we reached out to a guy who
has a YouTube channel called Greg Goes Electric, who's worked with UQM and the Thunderstruck
VCU that we're trying to run. And he suggested, which now that we think about it is pretty
smart, to connect to the inverter and make sure it's programmed, which we haven't done
yet. So right now we have the inverter connected to the laptop here and we're making sure all
the settings are correct. And now that the inverter knows to accept signal from the VCU
underneath the dash, we might be able to get the motor spinning... assuming, of course,
one of the other five million things don't go wrong. We will take the Hummer... Contactors
went off. Throttle contactor enabled. There's no other warning signs, so are we going into
forward? Nothing. Pressing the throttle. Hmm. Whoa!
-I heard it.
-No way dude! Yes! No way! That's freaking amazing. We have motors turning. Okay, so
we gotta figure out why forward's not working, but reverse is working. I'm gonna see this
from the other side. Oh man, that's amazing. I don't even know... do it again!
All right we have it shifted into gear and we're gonna see if the back wheels turn. Let's
do it. That is going in reverse! Yes! Sick. That is amazing. Yes! I'm so pumped.
So don't get me wrong, spinning the tires is a huge milestone for this project, but
at the moment they are only spinning in reverse, which is totally doable. Just get a nice rear-view
mirror and drive backwards everywhere. To get it spinning forward though, if we wanted
to do such things, there's probably a setting either in the VCU, the inverter, or there
is not a grounding strap between the motor and the inverter yet. And the manual says
that the grounding strap is necessary to make sure there's no funny business. Because when
we are going between forward and reverse, there is only a 2.5 volt signal heading to
the inverter to tell it which direction it needs to go. And that two and a half volts
might be getting interference from the high voltage wires next to it. So hopefully this
grounding strap fixes it, if not we'll have to delve into the settings a bit farther.
Now this grounding wire is grounding the frame of the inverter with the frame of the motor,
because it's attached to a bolt down there as well. So we have the ground connected and
it can detect our throttle. As you can see we have direction forward here, and it can
also flip into reverse. So it can sense the throttle, it's just not moving in a forward
direction.
So we've been working on this for probably two or three or four hours, but we figured
it out.
-Yeah, so all it was is we have things wired to the brake switch and whenever we press
the throttle, um if the brake if it sees the brake is applied, it'll ignore all throttle
input. So all we had to do is kind of press that brake switch and we're good.
-Because we don't actually have the brake switch connected to the brake pedal, it just
thinks that the brake is always on. And so we would press the throttle and it wouldn't
do anything because it thought the break was engaged. Anyway it's working now. Yeah! So
it was just dangling down and the VCU kept thinking that the brakes were being pressed.
We have forward motion. Obviously we're not going to gun it while it's up on the lift,
and we're not quite in the situation where we're ready to be moving forward, but we just
hit the milestone of having the motor spin and I am super excited. After getting the
motor spinning I wish we could say we were close, but we still have the BMS system to
install, the DC to DC converter, the charging system, the cooling system, and I think that's
close to it. But there's a lot more that needs to go inside of this vehicle, but turning
the wheels is a massive milestone and I am super excited about it.
If you have any questions for us leave them down in the comments and we will try to answer
them. I mean, we're not the best at answering questions either, um but yeah. This has been
super fun. I will leave Jeremy's information as well down in the video description if you're
curious to see his channel and his build. He's been working on it for quite a while.
And yeah, thanks a ton for watching, and we'll see you around.