EV Remaps?

[buggalugs]

Wonder how long until there's a remap of some kind for the i3 and its ilk...

What kind of things could be tweaked? What limits removed? Are the motors flat out or torque limited somehow?

How about a tweak to back off the traction control a tad Talk about oversteer on demand...

[Simoted]

I would have thought that the 'ramp up' time could be reduced on the invertor which would make the acceleration quicker......

[Caruso]

My Vectrix is remapped for a higher top speed 62mph upped to 68mph. The remap was provided by the manufacturer. The same firmware upgrade also made the battery level indicator a lot more accurate.

There are also at least 2 other people offering their own firmware updates.

[Greg_D]

I've already enquired with DMS and have been assured by Tony @ DMS that:

"We will most definitely be developing this remap, it will take longer in development of course"
so, yes...

As to what they will be able to do, i've no idea. I kinda like the idea of having an integrated 'sport' button which gives you the DMS settings which pretty much flings the lot at the motor, but the range will go through the floor (for traffic light grand prix and demo drives) after which you can just switch back to comfort.

[peterperkins]

If you can access and reverse engineer the firmware controlling the various systems then the hacking potential is pretty large. However it won't be easy that way unless you have a lot of resources and expertise and some back door into the manufacturers R&D dept. F1 team serious racing team level.

Hacking various current/voltage sensors and analog/digital control signals is easier and what I do with the early Honda Hybrids. In particular the G1 Insight and HCH1 Civic. The Insight motor can put out 20kw when tweaked, which is double it's original output, and in a light aluminium car makes a big difference.

EV motors will generally take quite big power increases albeit for short periods with more heating.

[anonymous-user]

It's worth remembering that often "electrical" components have a much sharper and finite capability than mechanical things. IE for something like a piston, yes the ultimate load (peak cylinder pressure) matters, but it can take a significant extra load if the number of cycles is small. This is because these components have a large physical mass. For something like the IGBT in an inverter, this is not the case. It only weighs 5g, so exceed it's thermal limits for as little as 5ms and it's toast!

Also, generally, the more mass produced a car is, the more the manufacturer will have tried to save money by using components with less headroom. Things like phase current sensors, and DC link capacitors on the i3 will almost certainly require swapping out to get any meaningful gains.

Without a doubt the aftermarket is going to look at "tuning" EV's (assuming that is still legal, which increasingly in Europe it isn't) but i suspect initially there is going to be an awful lot of the magic smoke being let out while they learn what they can and can't do. (There is also a very real and very different (to ICE vehicles) safety case that i would want to see answered before i let anyone fiddle around with the HV systems of my EV!