It's registered!

So, the car is now registered and ready to go. Not without a few issues though...

I thought there was ~40% charge on the battery, which should have been enough to go to the DMV and back (~20 miles), however, it slowed to a crawl just a few miles from home. How embarrassing... getting towed home on my first real trip! Once home I found that 16 cells were at very low charge. It turns out, the 16 cells I got for free from work were in fact bad. I suppose they were just left too long without a charge... I had charged them up and they appeared to hold a charge, but I suppose not under significant load. So the max cells that I have will be 51, exactly what I bought. Nothing truly comes free...

The other development is that the SmartCharge 12000 PFC charger from EMotorWerks does not appear to be working. It attempts to start charging, but immediately stops saying there is a BMS stop event. The BMS stop input is bypassed so it shouldn't be triggering. In any case, I will need to take it back to EMotorWerks to test. Thankfully they are close by...

Otherwise, the short distance I did drive with it was incredible! The car was always fun to drive, but now that it is virtually silent I find it much more enjoyable. I had the Soliton1 configured with reduced motor current output and it still had plenty of power. I can't wait to get through breaking it in and really turning up the juice...

It runs!

I finally finished enough to drive the car. I'm only using 45 cells for now to break in...

Playing Tetris...

I think I figured out how everything is going to fit... The charger has found its home, and the motor controller will fit right beside it.

The area between the charger and controller and the firewall will be filled with a 12 cell module.

The area in front of the motor (and behind the old radiator support) will hold 2 more battery modules, one of 13 and 6 in the other.

This will bring the total to 66 cells in series for ~220V. Even at full load, and at min voltage, I should still be able to supply the full 170KW to the motor.