The blog for conversion of vintage BMW 3.0 CS coupes to Tesla powered electric vehicles
The Transplant is Successful
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I've successfully transplanted all the components from the donor Tesla Model S into my 1973 BMW 3.0 CS coupe. The last organs to be inserted were the 10 battery modules up front. Now, all 14 batteries are in place, the motor, inverter, and differential unit is installed, the iBooster is operational, and even the Tesla electric air conditioning compressor is in place.
Tesla drivetrain fully installed
I slid in all the batteries, wired them all up, and made some cooling manifold mounts. After failing to keep my cool previously, I rerouted all the battery cooling lines in parallel using a couple 10 port manifolds so the box is all ready to be connected to the radiators. Once everything was in place and hooked up, I installed the acrylic skin and put the box on the winch.
Ready for installation
All wired up
Cooling hoses all connected
Needs a small adjustment to get the strut bars to fit
No extra room on the right, just enough for the A/C hoses
A perfect fit
No extra room on the left
I was able to lower the battery box into the car quite easily, all my myself one evening. It went in like butter. There's no extra room in the engine compartment but everything fits like it should (See below).
As you probably know, I'm not converting just one BMW 3.0 CS coupe to Tesla power but two. One for me and one for my son-in-law, Alex. In fact, I'm involved in a third project for a customer as well. Brett Perkins at P3 Conversions is handling that build and I just consult a bit but I thought it would be interesting to compare how each project has tackled similar problems in different ways.
There are 350 DC volts of Telsa LiIon batteries in my car but I need a 12 volt source to kick off the electronics that energize all the complex systems such as the precharge controller and traction contactors. Therefore, I use a small LiIon 12v battery designed for a motorcycle. The problem is, I keep some things, like my Raspberry Pi gauge computer constantly running so that everything works instantly at the turn of the key and that drains the little 30 Ah battery pretty quickly, like in a day or two.
You've read about the fancy digital dash app I've written that displays all sorts of information on a display in the hole that used to belong to the tachometer. But that still leaves four other analog gauges in the instrument panel: The speedometer, clock, fuel, and temperature gauges. These are old school VDO gauges that just look proper and cool so I want to make them all work with this new digital vehicle.
