Last Updated: 12/27/99

My Old Electric Car

This is my old electric car, which I sold July 17, 1999. I thought the page might still be of interest, so I left it up.

1980 Jet Electrica 007 Coupe

Hi, my name is Mike Chancey. This is my first Web page, so here goes nothing.
If you want to see the pictures first, takeThe Grand Tour.

This page is dedicated to my electric car, a 1980 Jet Electrica 007 Coupe. It was built by a company called Jet Industries from a glider, (an engine less car) a Plymouth Horizon supplied by Chrysler. It was built as part of a government test program with a utility company in Ohio. I don't know how, but after the test was over the car ended up in Iowa. A friend of mine ran across it while visiting relatives. Actually he found two and he bought the better one. Mine had been sitting for about six years. One front spring was broken, one front wheel was off, the rear axle was cracked and it had a large dent in one side. Of course I took one look at it and just had to have it.

That was in the fall of '97, and I have been working on it ever since. About three weeks of hard work was all it took to get it back on the road. It still has the big dent, but everything else has been repaired. I wasn't completely satisfied with some of the engineering that went into the conversion so I have been updating it.

I ditched the original coil-over shock rear suspension reinforcement and put in Corvette air-shocks. See my Shock Upgrade page.

The old General Electric EV-1 (No relation of the car) SCR Controller was yanked out and replaced with a very nice Curtis 1221B MOSFET controller. (Thanks to Gary Flo at InnEVations.)

The local U-Wrench-It salvage yard supplied a used power brake booster and a 12 volt GM vacuum pump to run it and voila, Power Brakes.

I initially installed a set of used batteries, but they didn't last too long. (I don't know if I killed them or if they just died.) Next a new set of Napa/Exide batteries were installed, but after having over half of them fail, they were yanked out, and a set of used Johnson Controls AGM UPS batteries were dropped in. These worked great, but were so small the car would only go 25 miles on a charge. They were donated to another EVer who didn't need much range. Finally I installed a set of new Trojan T-105s and the adventures in batteries was over.

I pulled the original gasoline fueled heater out and replaced it with an electric heater.

The next project was supposed to be air conditioning, but after installing about ninety percent of the system, cold weather caught up with me. I put the A/C project on hold , and installed a battery heating system and an interior preheater. Both have come in very handy.

In case you were wondering, I put about twenty five miles a day on this car, doing the back and forth to work thing. If it looks like just another common everyday car, that's because it is. (Except it doesn't use gas.)

I had several pictures of the car on this page but I decided to reorganize things and created a virtual tour of my car. Just like my car, it is always under construction, but you can take a look if you want. Take The Grand Tour.

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