It has been a few months since I posted the first article on my TukTuk. I needed the time to first make it useful and then to actually drive it enough to get some statistics.
I bought it for Q29,000 which is about $3700. The batteries sucked. To make a long story short, the seller took his (second set) of bad batteries back and gave me Q5000. These were 52 Ah AGM lead acid batteries. I made an upgrade to 100 Ah lithium iron phosphate batteries and also added a battery balancer system. Total cost of the upgrade was about Q8000. Well worth it.
I also added a real state of charge meter. It uses a hall effect sensor to measure current going in and out of the battery. This only cost about $20 and is a great addition as the built-in battery monitor is pretty useless.
I am charging it right now. We traveled about 40 km and the battery was at 69%. It was all stop and go driving in the city with speeds up to 50 kph. As the TukTuk doesn’t have regenerative breaking, that is not exactly the best driving for maximum range. There are five 12 volt batteries so that means I used about 18.6 kWh or about 465 Wh/km. Not exactly up there will Aptera energy usage numbers but acceptable. The make the numbers look better there was a reasonable amount of time stopped but with the lights on plus one trip with the defroster on.
Bottom line is that 100 km per charge should be easy which is further than I really want to go on one trip.
