Neither Jawaad Khan nor his family ever owned a car, but the 23-year-old recently became the first Indian to retrofit a 1948 Beetle into an electric car. This car is a part of an event today (February 06) organised by the Indian Postal Services to mark the launch of a special postal cover on vintage cars in Delhi.
“It is assumed that an electric car works only on accelerator and brakes, but I want to clear this that the car is based on the gear system like all other cars. The best part is it doesn’t emit carbon and sound. We can always install an artificial sound system,” adds Khan, who will next convert a Swift Dzire. Khan, in association with Centre of Excellence for Research on Clean Air (CERCA), IIT-Delhi, wants to convert old and vintage cars in Delhi into electric ones to reduce the pollution levels in Delhi.
“Earlier, I had retrofitted a Maruti 800 for my college project. So, HPCL director introduced me to CERCA founder Arun Duggal, who told me to visit a Beetle car parked at a showroom in Gurugram in January last year. He wanted me to convert it. I started working on it but then lockdown happened. So, I began the work in September,” adds Khan, who hails from Bhaderwah in Jammu and Kashmir. He now owns a start-up called Tadpole Projects.
And the electric car was ready by November. Khan, who graduated in electrical from Swami Vivekanand Institute of Engineering and Technology in Chandigarh, says, “This is a 70-year-old car so the risk factor is high. We only removed the engine so we could make a technically efficient car. I ordered the batteries and machines from Compage Automation and Prime Engineers. Seventy per cent of the material is bought from India, only the controllers are imported from China.”
With 90 per cent of its part untouched, the car sports a 15000W motor, and 120AH battery, and can run up to 50- 60Km. It has a Bluetooth dongle with the help of which, features like temperature of motor, battery input power, peak current and rpm, and any errors in the kit can be monitored and controlled using a mobile phone.
“We spent Rs 4 lakh on it, and our expenditure is just the basic one. The only major cost was the battery, and the costs increase depending on the battery size,” adds Khan, who is already looking for a commercial platform. Vintage cars are known to create pollution in the absence of a carborator, so converting these models will be helpful, feels Khan. For a regular car, you need a 400AH battery.
“But in this one, we used a smaller battery because it’s not driven much and the batteries die if the car is not used. So we installed the battery as a removable system in this car. Our next aim is to make it more efficient so that we can compete with Tesla. But the cost of making such a car is 20-25 lakh, and who will buy it. For that, we will have to have a swipeable battery. The range will be decreased to 100km and the battery can be changed at a petrol station. We will also give a warranty of two lakh km on its battery for five years and even on machines,” he says.
Diesel cars in Delhi have a lifespan of 10 years and petrol cars, 15 years, after which it is scrapped. So, cars whose bodies are still intact can be retrofitted, says Khan.
“It will not only help curb the pollution but, also tackle the problem of scrap generation.” But we are still far from Tesla because it has a power backup and the mechanism is too advanced.
“There is a lot of difference between Tesla models and our car. The differential is different, in that the AC induction motor is used that gives higher torque. We want to give a motor we can give service on. To put an induction motor, we need an inverter system, and to use that we need to have a bigger size of the battery. But we don’t have an infrastructure for charging systems, which is why people avoid buying such cars because they get restricted. There needs to be a provision, where customers can do AC charging (at home that requires 7-8 hours) as well as DC charging (stations that take half an hour or so),” he says.