I had the car shipped from its California home to Colorado with the understanding that it was inoperable. The PO, at one point, was able to drive the car under its own power but that was over a year ago. As I understood, the car was kept in storage since then and the PO wasn’t able to coax life back into the batteries.




On the afternoon the car arrived, I looked everything over. This thing was really cool! I had seen pictures of course, but up close everything seemed very well executed. I could see the battery boxes, Elcon charger, Curtis controller, and AC motor (8" AC51). The dash was a bit of a mess - more on that later - but I really wanted to check out the batteries which is where I thought I would need to focus to get this thing running again. (Who knows if it ever really ran??)

These are 3.2V nominal 180Ah CALB LiFePO4 cells. Upon checking with my trusty free Harbor Freight voltmeter (more on that later too), the batteries were holding a charge of around 2.7 volts - a low voltage - but nothing seemed to be off the rails.





So, not knowing anything about anything, I plugged in the charger to see what would happen.

Nothing happened.

The battery charger illuminated a nice green LED at me and that was it. I did notice the label on the charger indicated that a green LED indicated the batteries were at full change (they weren’t) OR there was no Battery Management System (BMS) present. Well, I knew there was no BMS included with this car so that had to be it. The charger wanted a BMS. So how did these batteries ever get charged in the first place? Well….

Inside the car, the PO did include a few boxes of miscellaneous (extra parts, wires, manuals, etc), and in one of those boxes was a another box that, as I discovered, contained a pigtail to be plugged into the charger to spoof a BMS. So that’s what I did. I plugged in this pigtail to the charger and then plugged the car into the wall and boom - the charger came to life. The batteries began to charge!