On The Green Hybrid Cart Team

Go check out the conversion kit installed in our golf cart located inside the Engineering II Atrium.

While putting together our final presentation today, I came across some old project photos and was shocked by the transformation this golf cart has gone through. I thought I would post a few before and after photos.

This morning, we presented in the Progress Energy Symposium. Here are a few photos of our day.

Jason

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The golf cart is finished! This morning, we picked up the rivets we needed to mount the body back onto the vehicle and we were driving the golf cart by noon. Everything looks better than we imagined it would.

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Now that the paint was given time to dry, it was ready for the new nameplate Anthony had made. We thought it was appropriate to make it the final piece we installed on the golf cart.

Jason

Today, we spent the entire day putting everything back together and worked on installing the kit. We hoped to have the kit installed by the end of the day, but we didn’t have the correct hardware to reattach the body pieces. We are looking forward to finally driving our finished cart tomorrow.

Jason

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All of our hybrid kit components are finally finished and painted. We’re planning on putting everything back into the golf cart on Saturday.

Jason

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Yesterday, we sanded the entire body with 180 grit sandpaper to provide the paint with a suitable surface to adhere to. We also masked off all of the areas of the golf cart we didn’t want painted. This afternoon, we finally began painting our golf cart!. We wanted to make sure no one would miss us while driving down the road, so chose to paint the golf cart margarita green. We think the color looks great and we can’t wait to install the components back on the golf cart.

Jason

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After we completed our testing today, we began disassembling the kit and removing body pieces from the golf cart. Having the kit components removed from the vehicle would allow us to weigh and paint each of them. It also gave us a chance to time how long was required to install the kit.

Jason

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For the past two days, we worked on testing fuel economy improvements with the kit installed in the golf cart. We repeated all the tests that were carried out during the first round of testing; this includes distance traveled while driving at top speed, reduced speed, and stop and go driving. We also introduced a new test in which we accelerated to top speed, cruised for 30 seconds, came to a stop, and repeated until we used the metered amount of fuel. We believed this test would reveal larger gains than the regular stop and go test and would be much less stressful on the golf cart. These tests were completed for both gas only mode and hybrid mode. Finally, we wanted to test the range of the electric only option. For this test, we drove the golf cart until 50% of the total battery capacity was consumed. This was determined by using our in-dash state of charge indicator.

Results
We calculated our new fuel economy and we’re satisfied with our results; we exceeded our required fuel economy improvement quite significantly. We also discovered that the electric only range we obtained was only 6% off from our estimate.

Jason

Today, we focused our attention on the body of the golf cart. We received the golf cart with numerous holes in the body and the deep scratches along the sides. We used Bondo to repair all of these imperfections. Even without an even coat of paint, the golf cart is looking so much better.

Jason

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