EVSupport

Part of the difference is that the originals are road rated and so the vehicles are legal to register and actually use on the road. Many of the std UTV/ATV tyres are specifically marked not for street / road use.

On the E1s I am currently converting to Li ion in the UK, some have real mud problems. This isnt restricted to Hisuns but the Polaris Rangers do as well. The E1 I have just finished had around a barrow load of the stuff under the floor and around the batteries and the side panels. The floor pan under the battery area had had the front edge bend down and was acting like a scoop. So much stuff. The propshaft was completely surrounded by dirt. I would really suggest to users that they take up the tunnel in the front floor and periodically clear this area. Take the sides off and clear out all the mud and debris you can see. This one was exceptional. I had problems reprogramming the charger as the USB flap on the drivers side of the charger had come out and filled with mud. So do check this, blow it out and tape the cover down. This one was so bad and likely to be so again so I have made polycarbonate sheet deflector shields on the front and sides of the charger . The charger fan also didnt work and gave an error as the mud was in the connections and had corroded the fan spade terminals. So just keep an eye out for floor pan damage, and do periodic clear outs. Dont pressure was the motor, or the Sevcon DC to DC or the Charger. Its also easier to get the muck out if you drop the steel floor panel. This uses M6 screws , but has an exceptionally small 8mm head, So I have changed these for some m6 shouldered bolts. I also replaced the cross head screws holding the side panels underneath as these get so corroded that you cant get them out.

Its down to use, here in the UK virtually all UTVs are used in a commercial or farming use, few are for personal/ leisure use. We dont have access to trails etc. So the increasing use of Electric UTVs is in a more professional way, here the land owners are willing to shift from fossil fuels and many have their own Solar or wind turbines. It all looks good shifting to a lower carbon business. My work on UTvs is mainly on Polaris Rangers , converting to Li ion, the costs stack up when you are using a set of lead every 18months which many do. The weight reduction is well over 150kg, and the same on the HisunE1. Here we are seeing a much bigger gain over the original batteries. My own view is the E1 originals are not big enough in capacity and they suffer from higher degradation as a resultunder tough use, but ok at a low / domestic level. In the UK a Ranger is around £14k a Hisun E1 around £9k. Thats a big difference. Now seeing some older E1s and they have taken some serious abuse, and still work well. The one I am currently converting , had been pressure washed before it came in. I then strip the sides off and pressure wash again, then I take out the old batteries, and drop the under pans, and pressure wash again. In all I would guess we got about 10 std buckets of mud out. Thats a lot of weight. The propshaft was not visible under the front floor. It was solid with crud. But still it worked. On the Li ion front I cant get as much into the E1 chassis space as the ranger. But its lighter and the suspension is brilliant. For users here its down to cost. I personally believe the Ranger and the E1 are as capable as each other, I like the ranger being slightly bigger. With Evs the old arguments about power generation losses etc are all out there. But remember the energy used to convert a gallon of gas from crude oil will take a road going EV around 28 miles. Thats before burning the Gas. WIth more and more localised power generation, from Solar and Wind the grid losses are much less of an issue. Especially when you generate the power your self, perhaps with your own storage. Here in the UK we have shifted away from Coal , as certain US presidents have discouraged, we now have a very high % of renewables providing our power. The last coal fired power stations have now closed. So the so called long tail pipe argument is no longer a vaild one. Thats very different in the US where renewables are still not dominant. That will change. In 10 years this discussion wont be taking place. There is also the pleasure of not having a noisy smelly power unit beneath you, and the knowledge that your efforts are making a difference to not only your environment, but the environment of all of us.

50mm 2 cable is adequate for the E1 . Rangers use slightly smaller cable size and many mainstream EVs use 50mm2 for the motor cables. You would need max power for some hours to get the cabling warm, let alone so hot as to melt the outer. As its happened in one location and high resistance would cause the localised heating that has to be the cause. I have owned and work on EVs for my income for the last 10 years. 50mm2 is adequate, for this use. The vehicle does not produce a constant 20+kw its a peak power output, if it did you would be working it continuously under full load, The motors are rated at under 7kw at continuous use under normal usage. At continuous 20kw use the motor and sevcon would have been cutting back due to over heating. Just to say the cable is undersized is to misunderstand how its used and how the vehicle functions., and the motor / controller specifications. It could also be a motor cabling fault at the junction with the three feed cables. Hisun really need to investigate this properly. The cable size has not been cut its always been the same. I have worked on a few early E1s and they are the same. Some have already been through two sets of batteries prior to coming to me for Li Ion conversions. None have had this problem. The cable from the Sevcon controller to the pack is the same size cable and if it were undersized then that would have been the first section to get hot and fail. On the Polaris rangers which I have been in for Li ion conversions, thats so far about 17, which have the higher power Sevcon controller and higher power motor than the E1, none have had fault due to cable sizing . The ranger motor (I just looked ) is rated at 8.5kw and is higher power than the hisun E1. 50mm2 is in between AWG 1 and 0 its larger than 1 (approx 42mm2) and smaller than 0 (approx 53mm2)

But the cables have lost the insulation , looks like its fallen away, so ultimately the cable will need to be replaced. If it was loose connections or crimps that can be re done, then the cables should be cleaned up and a double layer of heat shrink sleeve put over the melted section. Never run these with bare cable.

heat like this is normally caused by connections not being tight, or even the crimp terminal not being properly crimped. The heat comes from the resistance on the connection. With the ign turned off remove the cover and check the tightness of the nuts.

I have a rough Polaris Ranger EV, but my business is building EVs and supplying parts for conversions. And through this I have developed a Li ion Conversion for the Ranger EV, and am heading towards the 20th of those. I recently developed a related Li Ion conversion for the Hi Sun E1 . Through EVs I have also got to support the builds of a number of vehicles uses as specialised camera film tracking vehicles, 4 of which are Ranger EV based,. My battery systems have also found their way into a recent large 4x4 camera crane vehicle powering a 3kw hydraulic pump through a 5kw inverter. But most of my work is on conversions of vehicles to EV and supply of parts. If I can assist with comments relating to Electric Vehicles, I am happy to do so.

As some back ground I run a small business in the UK (since 2012) building EVs, supplying conversion parts, and developing new parts and Li ion conversions. I am not a specifically Hisun oriented business, but have created a li ion Conversion for the e1 , built on the setup I use on Polaris Ranger EVs. Hisun use the DeltaQ IC1200 charger. Each charger has an Algorithm loaded into it that tells the charger to what voltage to charge to at what current, and for how long and at what voltage to go to any maintenance/ trickle charge. It can also be reprogrammed (assuming DElta Q have one suitable) to work with Li ion cells. The algorithm can be changed using a download from a suitably formatted and set up USB storage stick. If you put a completely blank USB stick into the USB socket on the charger, then it will download a dump of charging statistics. Using the software from DeltaQ you can use that to look at the data, it tells you how many charges, when the last one was, if they are full or incomplete charge cycles, any faults, what Algorithm you are usng etrc. It only looks at the Charger. There is no connection to any form of BMS (No Lead systems do that) to give data on individual batteries. Inside each battery there are separate 2v cells . 3 to give 6v 6 to give 12v. and these cells do get unbalanced. That is why a Lead battery always gets over charged in a full charge cycle. It brings up any low voltage cells and high voltage cells just turn the unwanted power into heat. On wet lead thats when you get gassing. So always ensure you fully charge. Its worth occasionally doing a voltage check on each separate battery in the string , starting at the negative end. Note the at rest voltages when you have used the vehicle, then when its been fully charged and left to stand unplugged for say 20 mins. Do the checks again. Not them down. Now look at the data and are you seeing any that are really different voltages from the rest? If so it could mean you have a problem with a cell in that battery. As an example if at rest after use, most are reading at just under 12v, but one is reading a bit under 10v that battery almost certainly has a faulty cell. If these had wet cells then this is the point you re check the electrolyte level. But on sealed gel there is nothing that you can do. It possible that that battery has just got so unbalanced that the onboard over charge cant deal with it. Unlikely but possible, so fully charge the vehicle as normal. Then carefully disconnect that battery (Ensure any cable ends dont touch anything. Wrap the end in insulation tape and cable tie the cable (use releasable ties) or tie them up with string to something solid on the vehicle. No you can remove the battery or leave it in place and put an external charger of the correct type and voltage , leave it for a day. Then remove the external charger, re connect the battery to the rest of the pack, and see if its made a difference. If not then dont delay replacing it. A duff cell not only causes a voltage drop but to compensate the rest of the pack will have to discharge at a higher rate, so it puts all of the batteries under strain. A few terms Series connection. in battery terms, join the negative on one battery to another batteries positive and the overall voltage will be the sum of the two, ie two 6v will give 12v two 12v will give 24v. If you have 2 150Ah (Amps Hours) 12v batteries in series you will end up with a 150Ah 24v battery pack (This is called 2 S , two serial) Parallel connection. If you have two 150Ah 12v batteries and you join both negatives together and both positives together you will end up with a 300Ah 12v battery pack (this is called 2p) If you have two sets of the 300Ah as above and join them in series you have one pack of 2P 2S. Cell . The basic building block of batteries. In lead they are about 2v, in Nicad about 1.2v, in Alkaline/ zinc carbon about 1.5v and Li ion around 3.7v (lifepo4 3.3v) So your 12v lead battery will be made up of 6 separate 2v cells. Any one of which can fail. DC to DC converter. Takes High voltage DC and converts it to low voltage and not simply by using a big resistor. The output is a stable voltage suitable for the vehicles normal usage. It should never be used to charge another 12v battery by jumping of the onboard one Motor controller / Inverter. In the HiSun, this is the SEVCON unit beneath the seat. This takes DC power and converts it to three phase AC to feed to the AC motor. In broad terms the frequency of the AC is what dictates the motor RPM, the controller interprets the load , the motor speed (it has a thing called an encoder on the motor that gives data you can work out RPM from), throttle input and hey presto you get the power and speed your right foot is wanting. It has inbuilt data specifically for the motor telling it how to deliver power through the rev range, how the phases interact to give the acceleration you are asking for etc etc. Do ask a question on EV related things and I will answer if I can.

Its quite stunning how much better the E1 is with Li ion. But I think the forthcoming Factory Li ion will be a lot more expensive. I guess the choice to go Li Ion depends on how long you intend to keep it. The rangers I have done are from 2012 right up to a brandnew 2019 model that had done two weeks use. Most Ranger owners seem to hang onto them and be farmers or land owners (although one customer has 4, all used for virtually silent Camera tracking work) So for them the upfront investment pays off. It is possible to do a smaller pack, but I think thats less good option. The under load voltage on Li ion , with a decent size pack, is so much more stable. These particular cells dont drop much at all under load right through the charge cycle, which means the performance does not drop off as the pack goes down. I have to re programme the Sevcon motor controller so that it cuts back in a series of steps as you get near to the lowest voltage I want to take the pack down to. So its not an all or nothing setup. You do get some warning. Getting up to the pack size of the Ranger conversion just isnt possible within the space there is under the seats. (Ranger uses 8 cell blocks so 240ah rather than 180ah) . Im sure the Hisun is lighter than than the Ranger, so its probably not significantly different in overall range. I do know people who have tried off the shelf Li ion Battery replacements, but they are not so successful requiring separate battery chargers for each 12v block. They also tend to be Lifepo4, which doesnt burn if all goes horribly wrong, but in use the voltage sag under load is much greater. Lifepo4 can deliver huge currents, but they do voltage drop a lot. A lot of the Ranger owners despite doing proper battery watering are seeing them last under 2 years of regular daily usage. They have an approximate 500 cycles life so thats not far off the two years. A few do / have replaced the odd battery, but on a n older pack once they start to go they will all go, a bit like triggers broom, my pack is 6 years old and none of the batteries are original. My biggest surprise was on first going out in the Hisun, just how good the ride is. The shocks are an expensive item, but are worth every penny over rougher ground.

The conversion installed inc VAT is under £4500. So more than a set of lead, but probably less than two sets. A significant problem with the Gel batteries is that many users do not run them in, These need something like 10 to 20 charge cycles of charge gently discharge to nowhere near empty, and recharge. That seems to help in life no end. Not easy but really important. Even the ranger Trojans dont reach full capacity until about 50 charges in.

Hi. Im new here. I am located in the UK and have been doing Li Ion conversions on Rangers for about 7 years. These are now in a new generation of installation. to help reduce costs I have recently done a similar version for the Hisun E1 . This uses the standard DeltaQ charger with a new algorithm, the original Dc To Dc converter, and the original Sevcon Motor controller is re programmed . I have added a 16a power inlet under the front cover, where the better mains cable can also be stored. To reduce the crud getting under the seats the small floor holes at the front are covered, and the rear wheel arch is partially closed off with a new polycarbonate shields mounted under the antiroll bar mounts. It a smoky grey green and you can just see it in the photo. The battery pack is built from 6 nominally 60 V 30ah cell blocks in parallel so giving 180ah . This gives a over 10 kwh of storage . Higher current discharge than the lead, and at least 50% greater range. The big advantage is the range wont reduce for many years. These are lightly used cell blocks I get direct from a UK vehicle manufacturer, and we have reversed engineered a way of using the OEM data system built into the cell blocks (I use these on a lot of EV conversions). Most have done little or no significant use and generally no greater than 17000km of use. None are from crash tested vehicles. We confidently expect over 10 years of reliable use from these stupidly high quality parts. In tests with a number of users of the E1 they are finding the weight reduction is useful (over 150kg) the range increase very noticeable and the swifter performance (slightly higher voltage) better. I am currently doing the first batch of 5 sets of parts. And will be offering these in the next few months. All of this batch will, be installed at my workshop to iron out any more issues we may find during the installs. These cost a bit over the price of two replacement lead battery sets, but as with Rangers in constant use that could be in under 18 months/ set. So long term ovnership costs are significantly reduced. Jeremy Bloomfield EV Support.