If you are not familiar with The Smart Drive’s electric car, check out the post on The Electric Car Experiment.
For a quick summary, The Smart Drive’s electric vehicle was built in 2001 and competed in two road rallies in the Northeast in 2001 and 2002. Since 2002 it has been used continuously as a commuter vehicle in New Jersey and an every day vehicle at Virginia Tech.
While the car is at its new home, it isn’t quite ready to use. Over the past 8 years the car has traveled about 30k miles on two traction batteries packs. Electric vehicle lead acid traction batteries have a limited charge and discharge cycle lifetime and the current battery pack, installed in 2005, is at the end of it’s life. This means time for some new batteries! This weekend my father and I spent a good deal of time removing the old batteries, cleaning up the battery brackets and installing the new pack. The new batteries are 6 volt deep cycle golf cart batteries with a capacity of 225 amp-hours. The specification and form factor of the cells almost exactly match the T105 batteries from Trojan Battery however rather than costing $125 and up these batteries cost $71.28 and can be purchased off the shelf at Sam’s Club almost anywhere in the US (The Costco I checked didn’t have them). The model is the GC2 and the new set I got for the car were Energizer branded. The batteries used in the old pack we removed were also purchased at Sam’s Club and performed at the same level as an OEM supplied original pack.
Check out the gallery for some pictures from the upgrade. Take a look at #9 then #8 for a before-and-after under the hood!