So, you are in the middle of converting your car to electric. Then you probably have said to yourself: “That’ll do”. This post is meant to remind you: It won’t. Sloppiness has the tendency to backfire, as we have experienced it ourselves.
In early 2022 Johannes started converting an Audi A2. The conversion is featured on Johannes youtube channel and went through within one year. Johannes then drove the car for another 6 months before handing it over to his friend as featured in our article.
The first 6 months went smoothly but already when taking the car on a 400 km road trip things started to play up. The last rapid charging session didn’t go through and attempts to slow charge knocked out a number of public chargers – oops!
The car recovered for a while but then the theme continued. The GFCI or even fuse would trip whenever plugging in the car. It took many months to find and fix the culprit:
What you see here is the lid of the Nissan BMS. It had been mounted too close to the battery poles and made intermittent contact with the latter. As you can see that even lead to burn marks. We replaced the lid with the plastic one from later BMS versions.
Unfortunately it didn’t take long until the next issue arose: the car would no longer charge at all. It turned out the charge current had been increased and that had taken out one of the internal cables.
So out went the inverter/converter unit to replace the cable. While at it we found that, probably as a consequence of the former two errors, the AC relay was burned out as well.
Now all went well for a while but next up was the brake vacuum pump. Since the car had been converted it switched on periodically because there was a leak in the brake booster. The pump isn’t rated for this near continuous operation so after some months it gave out. Resulting in no brake boost at all – a terrible surprise if you want to brake hard!
But the car still wouldn’t start up reliably and something would lose power while driving. We traced this back to a poorly crimped connector:
Udo, on the other hand, recently had some issues with loose connections – in addition to the moisture topic described in a previous post (Link).
After charging, Udo’s Volvo would not start. Doing some checks (fuses, for example) it turned out that the ignition wiring did not work reliably. When looking at the crimp connector it turned out that it was somewhat too broad and too short to correctly fit into the WAGO splicing connector used. So, this was a typical “that’ll do” case. If Udo had worked more meticulously during his conversion, he could have avoided the problem.
Correcting the crimping of the ignition cable helped. But still, when starting the Volvo, Udo realized his headlights were flickering which indicated some fluctuations. The issue could be reproduced when touching the connector at the DC/DC converter. Udo pulled the connector and opened it. And well, it was obvious that one cable was not correctly inserted in the connector.
To summarize, the errors described in this post were caused by small mistakes. Most of them could be corrected easily. However, they could have been avoided in the first place.
The issues with the Audi had a special aspect to it: Johannes had sold it and the owner lives 400 km away. In this case every little failure triggered an 800 km service trip – because who else would know where to look? So the above holds especially true when converting a car for somebody else.
