[Caevlist] Fwd: Cute little EV on Craigslist (2011 Think City)

[Phil Hochstetler]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Phil Hochstetler <phil.hochstetler at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, May 10, 2023 at 10:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Caevlist] Cute little EV on Craigslist (2011 Think City)
To: Christopher Koch <jazzjunkie.chris at gmail.com>


I have owned 2 of them and still own one.  It is a daily driver for my son.
Great little cars and about 60% of the parts are Ford parts since Ford
owned Think when it was designed.  The battery pack is by Enerdel out of
Indianapolis, Indiana.  The can bus info is available and you could
probably reverse engineer enough to interface another battery pack of your
own design with a bit of work.  The existing pack is valuable for spare
parts as the BMS boards (RLEC) are in short supply and no longer made.
There is a business in Portland that still services Think Cities (Foreign
and Domestic Affairs Automotive -- known as FDA Automotive) and there is an
active mailing list for owners to solve problems and find spare parts.  I
would not go with 18650 cells but something similar to the existing cells
(pouch cells) would be a lot easier to work with.  There is no cooling of
the pack so no issues there.

Phil H.

On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 9:28 PM Christopher Koch <jazzjunkie.chris at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I don't want to start a feeding frenzy, but there is a sweet little EV for
> sale right now with a worn-out battery I'm thinking about buying (as are a
> lot of other people, according to the seller!)
>
> I'm trying to gauge the depth of what I'm getting myself into if I try to
> rebuild the battery.
> When I was at Arcimoto I was involved with designing their next-generation
> battery (sadly that project got scrapped) so maybe I'm too cocksure about
> my abilities.
>
> I have a couple thousand 18650s lying around yearning for a purpose, so
> there's a lot of hope that I might have what it takes to breathe new life
> into this thing but I wanted to put it out there for community comment and
> discussion.
>
> Is this a dream project waiting to happen, or is this 2011 EV from a
> defunct manufacturer a trap to avoid at all costs?
>
> -Chris Koch
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Caevlist mailing list
> Caevlist at caevclub.org
> http://maillist.rdrop.com/mailman/listinfo/caevlist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://maillist.rdrop.com/pipermail/caevlist/attachments/20230510/4efc9cd7/attachment.html>