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This may be of interest to those doing conversions and who drive on the "wrong" side of the road. It is a bit of a sermon but does lead up to an important question.
Josh Usher (University of Technology Sydney), Ray Clout (UTS) and yours truly have just completed what we think is the first Australian PHEV conversion and dare we say the first in the southern hemisphere. (Objectors please respond if you think otherwise!)
We worked on a 05 Prius, purchased by UTS, using the Prius Plus information and adding some ideas along the way. Our initial tests have been with 20 x 12AH PbA batteries, but the UTS has just received 3 x 240V Nilar NMH packs and these will be fitted in the next month. A second car (my own 04 Prius) is on the blocks for conversion and will receive the PbA batteries from the first car.
Our first challenge was that all the instructions, especially fitting CAN-View, are for left hand drive vehicles. In Australia we drive on the left so all vehicles are right hand drive. We found however that the instructions generally worked if the reverse (or mirror image) view was taken. "Remove panel on the far left", equates to "Remove panel on the far right" and so on.
We used Chris's Alternative approach and placed our Brusa charger and low voltage electronics under the battery pack in the spare tyre well. We had the idea, later confirmed by Chris, of putting all the HV electronics, including the contactors, battery fan and regen diode into the "tool box" compartment on the rear left. This keeps all the high voltage stuff together in an insulated box and allows the battery fan to push air out of the car via the nearby rear vent. A "Danger High Voltage" sign and a screw will hopefully keep prying hands from lifting the cover of this area. The low voltage electronics, including the 12VDC supply and circulating fans, we put into a standard metal instrumentation case, which was rather larger than it needed to be but was reasonably accessible with the batteries in place.
One of the easier jobs was accessing the EV mode wire on the front dash. All non-US Prius's have an EV button fitted, so rather than trying to insert a contact pin into the difficult to reach HV ECU plug H14, it is only necessary to run a wire from the black lead going to the EV button. Because we were using Chris's basic control board, we only needed two LEDs on the dash which we placed in one of the push out "spare" panels near the driver's left knee.
During our test drives, it was a thrill seeing the OEM battery recharge from the extra pack and to note the low petrol usage. We estimate the PbA pack is only good for about 10Km (6.3 miles) assuming we could maintain EV mode.
One problem we have with non-US Prius's however is that maximum speed in EV mode is only 44Km/h (27.5 mph). Suburban speed limits are typically 50Km/h so keeping in EV mode is tough and probably annoys the guy behind. This appears to be a Toyota software issue and I'm not sure if we can change it. If anyone knows how to raise the EV threshold to above 50Km/s (as in the US), we would like to hear how?
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