franken-ev, nsu prinz powered by tesla.

figured i should start a build thread here!

a while ago i bought a 196x's nsu prinz for about $400 including shipping. since then i struggled to find a power plant that could fit into its tiny bones. then my wife got her fit ev, and i a fiat 500e. it was now clear, i would start an ev conversion.



so now i had a good plan, get some CALB 180Ah batteries and shove them around here and there and everywhere.
then i decided to check out what i got myself into.


thats the rear hub. a silly y plate that bolts on mounted to a swing axle. not an ideal arrangement. so rather then dealing with finding parts for a hyper rare car i went with what i know, miatas.

found a friend of mine who was parting out his old racecar and pillaged it for parts.

 

building out a new chassis and mounting a suspension correctly is a bit above my pay grade, so i enlisted the help of moti at blackbird fabworx. ive known moti for a long time and when i told him what i was planing he was both afraid and excited. so dropped off the car and we talked a lot about how we were going to go about this.

picked up a HPEVS ac-51 motor and a smart ev transmision. but... it turned out the smartev transmission was too large for the car so a quick call to ev west and we got a VW transaxle to mount onto the motor.



so now that was sorted i was now on the hunt for tiny little wheels that could mount onto the miatas hubs. thank god for honda civic dragracers.




last was finding some seats which i stole from my broken supercharged miata racecar...

 

ruff layout for how the motor transmission and batteries will sit within a shortened miata subframe.



ripping out the old stuff...

and now for the fun part, moti just updated me on the progress today. he is well into crafting the chassis.


here we are looking from the front of the car to the rear where the motor will be mounted. in those rectangular voids will sit 8 smart ev tesla modules. with room for another 4 should the range or power not be enough.

close ups of front and rear suspension mounts.


and now, the cutting!

 

another update.

how the batteries will be sitting. space for 12 smart ev tesla modules.



front hood area.


behind seat with roll cage mock-up.


front



wheels on just for fun. fenders require cutting for the car to sit on the ground with those wheels.

box of batteries...