The Aphid project

The Aphid project

The name Aphid comes from the small bug that live among the leaves in plants. The Swedish name is “bladlus”, can be translated as leaf louse, sounds like the perfect name for when you combine the drivetrain from a Nissan Leaf with VW Beetle, or a Bug.

I’ve learned from similar projects in the past that blogging about it is a great way to document the work for myself, as an added bonus I hope to collect a lot of information around doing an EV-conversion for anyone else that is interested.

The timeline

History

When i was a kid, my dad restored an old VW Beetle that he used to drive to work with. I remember riding in the back seat that didn’t have any seatbelts. I remember the smell inside the car a warm summer day. Most of all I remember the very distinct sound of the air cooled 4 cylinder boxer engine.

More or less since I graduated from university 15 years ago, I have been working with electric vehicles in some form. All this time I’ve had an idea that it would be really fun to make an EV-conversion of an old VW Beetle. It would be such a mindf**k to glide around in one completely silent.

My younger brother is a much bigger car enthousiast than me, especially when it comes to old VW cars. A few years ago he managed to buy the exact car we had when I were a child, even though he probably never rode in it. Since then, it has been parked in his barn waiting for a purpose.

Today

I recently turned 40, and as a birthday gift my brother bought me an used Nissan EM57 motor with a very specific project in mind…

Future

This will likely take us many years before we have something that can be used to drive around on public streets, if we ever get there. My plan is at least to document this with as much details as possible on this blog.

The car

More info to come…

See all posts with the tag vw

The plan

The plan is to restore the car to a nice condition. In addition to this replace the internal combustion engine in the vw with the electric drive unit from a Nissan Leaf but keep the original gearbox locked in 2nd or 3rd gear. We want to do this in sucha a way that the car can be registered as a modified vehicle and be road legal to drive in Sweden.

The team

See the About page.