I found a group called the North Texas Electric Auto Association on the web, and lo and behold, they were having their next meeting right down the street from my office! I went to the meeting, which was to include a showing of the documentary, “Revenge of the Electric Car.”
I was amazed. The meeting is held in a different spot each month. It was a coincidence that the month I found them, they were meeting near my office. The meeting location was Dallas Makerspace, a membership based community, workshop and laboratory. It was the
perfect spot for this group of pioneers. The men and women of NTEAA are, for the most part, converting internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to battery power. One is even converting a Honda 1100CC motorcycle! Very few of the members have bought electric vehicles like I have. They were curious about the Volt, but they were also proud of the vehicles they’re converting. I heard about a Miata and a BMW 5 series being converted currently and one of the guys has a Pontiac Fiero (remember those) running on battery power now!
Dallas Makerspace is really awesome as well. Some of the people there has built their own Level 2 charger. They said the total cost, other than the cable that attaches to your car,
was about $300. The ones I’ve seen advertised all start at $800 and go up from there, so that’s quite a bargain. They let me plug in for a while to try it out. It seemed to be working just fine.
Also, in the labs, were other things being built. The most common, were multi-rotor helicopter-type things, sort of like the Parrot AR Drone I’ve been drooling over for a while now.
The documentary was not shown after all, as the discussions about member’s projects ran a bit late. Several members were anxious to head over to a Tesla test drive event to try to get a shot at driving a Tesla Model S. Rumor was you had to have placed a $5000 deposit on a new Model S to be allowed to drive their demo, but the members who went were successful in their quest.
