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Converting an Old Truck into an EV

Rice University engineering students converted a 1997 Chevy P30 delivery van into a fully electric vehicle in less than a year. Watch this video to see how they used a combination of parts scavenged from out-of-use vehicles, custom-built elements, and off-the-shelf items.

“Being able to get these automotive components from other vehicles to function ⎯ and not just function but function in an integrated way ⎯ is a big deal,” said Rice engineering senior, Austin Greer  . “If this truck works, it’s largely thanks to the electrical architecture. My favorite thing on this truck is something inconspicuous that you might not even notice, namely the blind spot sensors. It took hundreds of hours to get those sensors to work ⎯ they are one of the hardest things to integrate.”

Topics:
Automotive Batteries Electrification Energy Power

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:01 [Music] so we are getting in a 1997 Chevrolet P30 uh at least on paper that's what it is but this is an old housing and dining bread truck that we 30 engineering students converted to electric power over the course of uh last semester and this semester hold the power button down take your RF id card put it up against the

    00:00:27 dash comes to life I was sitting with Austin in class uh last spring and he was saying how what we wanted to do for senior design and he was like I want to work on a vehicle cuz he's a big car guy and he said housing and dining has a van and they want it to be converted I was like I'll help with that I don't know anything about vehicles but I just said

    00:00:45 yes and at the request of the sustainability department and housing and dining we took this truck stripped the old power train out of it and did an electric conversion on it took us about 6 months to do and we started in the fall of last year and it's running and driving right now it will be at Showcase and it has about 100 mile range on the highway and 225 is in

    00:01:07 the city because it is a brick on the highway but it will be used for kind of the campus purposes uh by housing and dining to take food and dorm furniture and and those sorts of things around campus wherever they needed to go some of the parts were off the shelf some of the parts were were basically given to us by our sponsor at onni power train they said hey we're interested in this

    00:01:31 project we would we would like you to use some of our parts and give it give us feedback on how how they're going during my first semester in freshman year I didn't expect to be involved with you know a senior design project much less something as cool and ADV Advanced as the Evan getting to work on this has been one of the highlights of my year I had a lot of fun working on it and it's

    00:01:56 been a great learning experience now when you come to Rice you expect to have a holistic experience you expect to have the classes you expect to have a place like the ODC where you can build cool stuff and you expect to have the cool stuff to build this project has certainly fulfilled all three we've taken classroom knowledge we've built it on campus and we've built something for

    00:02:16 campus that's uh students are interested in for me it rounded out my rice experience and it was kind of the cherry on top that uh I was looking for and that a lot of other people were looking for as well [Music] well