I came across a clean Datsun 720 pickup for sale, wit a blown motor! With no rust, clean body and a 5spd manual transmission, it’s the perfect candidate for an EV conversion!

The only problem is that it’s located in a remote part of Vancouver island, and the shop is full.

so what should I do?

Convert it on the side of the road!

Ingredients:

• Nissan Leaf motor + inverter (em57)
• Mitsubishi Outland PHEV On Board Charger (OBC)
• Zombiverter VCU
• gen1 Chevy volt battery (16kwh)
• simpBMS
• Leaf adapter plate
• Nema spacer
• Datsun adapter plate
• Leaf coupler
• 0/1 cable, crimps, sheathing, etc
• water pump/plumbing/fittings
• steel scraps

Tear down:

Time to ditch this blown motor!

Made friends with the tow truck driver, he lent me his engine crane for the night!

After about an hour of pulling all the axillary parts out of the engine bay, and wrestling with the transmission bolts, the motor was out!

Drive train + charging

Now that the motor is out I can start making the motor coupler. First I removed the splines from the clutch disk. Then took measurements from the transmission mating face to where the splines start on the input shaft. These measurements will give the desired length the coupler needs to be, which will connect the leaf motor’s output shaft to the transmissions input shaft.
Then did a quick test fit of the transmission adapter plate to confirm fitment.

Awesome! The leaf motor + inverter fit tight to the fire wall. Hmm the leaf PDM (Power Distribution Module, aka the OBC) is a bit too big to fit, and if I have to relocate it, I might as well go with something more elegant.

The outlander OBC (On Board Charger) is nice and compact! It also fits right on top of the inverter, and under the hood.

Battery:

The simplest plan of action for getting the truck driving, is to use the battery in its original state. So I just mounted the Chevy volt battery pack as-is in the bed of the truck. This keeps things simple, as it’s already weather sealed, has all the HV contactors and safety we need inside, plus a BMS system. No need to reinvent the wheel here, the OEMs already did all the heavy lifting, best to reuse all their hard work as much as possible.

Control:

Now that the drivetrain and battery are all setup, how am I going to control everything?

With an opensource VCU, in this case the Zombiverter VCU. A project from Damien Maguire and team over at openinverter.org

Luckily all of the parts use CANBUS for control and communication. All the necessary messages for talking to the motor, OBC, and battery have been already decoded and are programed into the Zombiverter VCU. So now I just need to wire 12v power and CAN to everything, tune the throttle, and set up the necessary parameters in the zombieverter’s web interface!

Houston, we have lift off!

Lots more todo such as power brakes, power steering, DC fast charging, bigger battery, heat, proper wiring/connectors, better coolant system,…. etc

BUT it drives…

time to go surfing