base vehicle

The base vehicle is an 1998 Opel Astra F Caravan, and it had run only 82.000km with its 1.6l gasoline engine. Perhaps not a beauty, but proven durable (you see thousands of them still doing their job in eastern Europe) and meeting at least today's “basic” safety standards.

It came with quite some extras, like anti-lock brakes, airbags, power steering (which I however replaced by mechanical steering for the conversion), air condition (which might be a future project to bring back to life), electric window lifts, fog lights - and even a radio!

Curb weight (before conversion) was 1065kg, maximum total weight is 1570kg (see also chapter weight).

The car may appear rather too large and heavy for an EV conversion candidate. However, getting road admission in Austria is so tedious and prohibitively expensive (we will come to that later in chapter approval), that it pays even less if you add this invariable “base” cost to the conversion of a small car.