David Heacock's 1985 Avanti EV Conversion (In Process)
When I received my dream car it was driven a few blocks from the truck carrier to my driveway. I’m not sure how that was accomplished because the truck driver indicated gas had been leaking from somewhere at the rear of the car and in order to get it on and off the carrier he would have to add a little gas to the tank. I figured no big problem since all the gas components were coming out anyway until I realized it would be difficult to push this 3500 pound car in and out of my driveway if I had to move it. So the first thing I had to do was fix the gas leak which turned out to be a damaged hose just below the 19 gallon gas tank. In an odd way, this process just helped me feel that converting the car to electric was the right thing to do. At one point I was having trouble keeping the car running and thought for a moment that maybe I could check the plugs. Here is what I saw under the hood and I started wondering how anyone would be able to even find the plugs.
I thought I was going to register the car, change the title and then place it on an in-operative status while I converted it to electric. Come to find out, in California an out-of-state car cannot be registered unless it passes the smog test even if you plan to park it in the garage and never drive it until it is converted. The title can however be changed. Again, looking under the hood it was no wonder why it just barely ran. It was sort of like a game of “see how may hoses and disconnected wires you can find”.
So I finally decided to pull the car into the garage and start removing the various liquids such as the engine oil, transmission fluid, the radiator coolant and the gas. That is when I realized that with the fluids out, this car wasn’t going anywhere for a while and I would need to determine how to make this work. The good news is we have a three car garage. One of the first things I decided to remove was the gas in the tank and the gas lines because it seemed safer to me to have all the gas out of the car before I did anything else. I had tried to keep the amount of gas in the tank to a minimum with a limited number of trips around town, one on which I actually ran out of gas. It turns out that one concern from Avanti owners can be the smell of gas inside the car. As the following picture shows the gas tank is just behind the back seat. I started thinking I was going to be real happy not having 19 gallons of gas maybe three feet behind my head.
After removing the gas tank and getting the gas out of the lines I decided to remove the exhaust system. Since the car is 20 plus years old I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to get the pipes out in one or two pieces. My game plan was to remove the engine and the transmission together and I figured I could leave the exhaust manifolds on if I could just remove all the pipes. Thanks to a sawzall and a few bent blades I was able to remove the exhaust system as shown below. This pile of metal weighs about 65 pounds or the equivalent of one six volt deep cycle battery. I was starting to think of removing items in terms of how many batteries I could put back in the car.
My next job was to disconnect all the hoses and wires connected to the engine. The radiator also had to be removed before I could remove the engine and transmission as one unit. There were a lot of wires connected to the engine so I labeled each one and decided to determine later if they would actually be needed. I kept thinking I was not going to miss all these complicated gas items.
The following picture shows some of my labels for the various wires. If you look toward the bottom center of the picture you can see the dip stick which is wired in place as the bracket was broken and it took me 15 minutes one day to find it when I was trying to check the oil level. I also found there was almost no automatic transmission fluid in the transmission so in order to drive it I had to add fluid--talk about counter productive. But again, these were things I would not need to do again once the car was converted.
After disconnecting a number of wires, which were mostly connected to the engine or some related component, I started thinking most of this wiring would not be needed after the conversion. I spent time trying to trace back the wires and they seemed to be going through the firewall to the computer under the dash. I pulled the computer and the wiring harness and as the following picture shows it appeared a lot of wires could be eliminated as they had been connected to the engine. However I tried to keep from cutting any wires until I was really sure they would not be needed later.
I continued to disconnect various linkages and wires associated with the transmission along with things like the air conditioning unit and power steering. I was beginning to think there was no end to the complicated gas engine environment when I decided I was ready to try to lift the engine and transmission out as a unit. The engine had to be tilted almost to 45 degrees so the transmission would clear the firewall and the engine would clear the front end of the car. The engine did not give up easily as it was stuck to the motor mounts and I had to have a neighbor help by jumping up and down on the frame while I lifted the engine. The following picture shows the engine out of the car. By simply cutting the exhaust pipe just below the exhaust manifold I figured I saved a lot of time and bruised knuckles trying to get the rusted bolts undone. At this point I was starting to wonder how an electric motor, probably smaller in size than just the automatic transmission, would be able to power this car after conversion.
Looking back into the hole where the engine had been I was thinking about how much space there seemed to be for batteries or whatever was needed for the conversion. I was also thinking there was a lot of cleaning necessary as can be seen from the following picture. On the far right of this picture toward the front of the car you can see the radiator bracket used to support the front of the fiberglass body. As it turned out, the right side of the bracket support had been broken off, thus limiting the support for the right front of the body.