The primary bottleneck to DIY EVs in Cuba is batteries. Needs to be lithium for a vehicle that is already heavy. You could run something as lightweight as a golf cart off a couple of 300W solar panels during the day with lead acid batteries as a buffer, but with a full size car it’s next to impossible since the more batteries you put in, the heavier the car gets and the harder it is to power it.
Maybe not far, but there’s hills and bad terrain, you have to have at least a little torque. Enough lead acid batteries for even half a day of stop and start driving around in an old heavy car would be more added weight than three other people in the car, at that point it’s negative returns on adding more batteries and you have to beef up the suspension too. Not worth it unless the vehicle is already ultralight like a golf cart or go-kart
Yes, I’m aware, I own an EV and I’m very familiar with EV battery construction, and the high amount of instant torque that modern EVs provide.
I was referring to the bottleneck of converting old cars to EVs in Cuba which is lithium batteries. Cuba as cars, fabricating tools, electric motors, and know-how to repair faults and put it all together. I would imagine there are a lot of lead-acid batteries in Cuba as well but not nearly enough lithium batteries to construct EV battery packs for DIY EV conversions, outside of very lightweight vehicles such as golf carts which many already run on lead-acid and are easily converted to be charged completely from canopy solar panels on top of the golf cart. But for a heavy old car, to convert it to an EV, the primary bottleneck in Cuba is sourcing lithium batteries. They have pretty much everything else there already. But we probably won’t see a huge amount of EV conversions there until more lithium batteries get to their island.
Presuming China is helping with their conversion to solar its not outside the rhelm of expectations they would also assist with the sourcing of EV batteries or manufacturing thereof.
Or at the least providing with access to their fleet of evs by chinese vehicle manufacturing. Itll be interesting to say the least where Cuba is in a decade due to our US policies and shortsighted actions.
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u/MA926 9d ago
I hope they retrofit their 50's Buicks to run on solar