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Long ago, I lived next to a high school shop teacher. The only cool thing about that was that he loved to tinker, and did so with electric vehicles. His first was an uncomfortable folding chair welded to a flat platform on 4 wheels. Under the chair sat a car battery, and buttons rested under the natural spot to rest your feet, one button on each side. When you pressed both buttons, you went straight. Just the right, you’d turn right, and left turned you left. It was a pretty neat toy for his son, and he didn’t have to buy a Power Wheels.
Build Your Own Electric Vehicle by Seth Leitman is a big more complicated than welding a chair down. This book goes through the steps of creating your own electric engine, converting a gas-powered vehicle to support an electric engine, and also weighs pros and cons (such as safety vs. vehicle weight and speed) in trying to get your vehicle greener. Of course, I don’t know if my shop-teacher neighbor was really concerned about going green (the guy had two trucks and an SUV), but were I into mechanics, it would probably be fun to convert a vehicle just to say I did.
