Registration and More Battery Placement

7 weeks after buying my little TT from a Dealer in Minnesota, I finally received the title this week.  I had a little dilemma of what to do about the registration since the easiest thing would be to register it as a gas vehicle but there is no gas motor in the car and all the gas parts have been removed.  After doing some research, I went to the county treasurer to register the car and see what my options were.  I arrive at 8:00 as they were opening, hoping the clerk would be in a good mood.  She was but of course she had no idea how to handle an electric conversion.  After asking around, no one else in the office know either, she got on the phone to the head office in Des Monies.  I was expecting to get a response that the car has to be inspected  to verify that it is electric.  Nope, just a written statement from me stating that the gas components had been removed and electric one installed. She even went and got me a piece of paper to write the statement on.  Then came the registration fee, Iowa Code section 321.116 states that electric vehicles older than 12 years have a $15 registration fee.  Of course the computer did not agree right away and required another parameter under the VIN to be manually changed.  Everything agreeing, I walked out 30 minutes later with my Electric Vehicle title.

One note, that someone in Iowa does not like the reduced registration fee for EVs and the legislature is trying get section 321.116 removed so EV's pay the same registration as everyone else.  My registration going up to $50 is not going to impact me but a new Nissan Leaf owner's registration would go from $25 to around $450 every year.  If you in Iowa, write your Representative and ask them to support this fledgling industry.  One of the things I found was a Fiscal Note on the bill, and it states that as of February 2012 there were 13 electric vehicles register in Iowa.  There are 4.1 million cars registered in Iowa, 0.0003% are electric.  The estimated revenue gain from the law change would be $1300 per year.  If they added $0.01 to all the registrations they would have 40 time the revenue.  I'm sure the Fiscal note to look into the revenue gain cost  more than $1300. 

Since the clerk was so helpfully and pleasant to deal with, I let her know that she could now claim that she had registered 5% of all the electric vehicles in Iowa. 

I also got a little work done on the car this week.  Just a little since there was a lot of head scratching on battery placement.  My initial plan was to cut the floor of the back seat out and sink 22 batteries down where the gas tank use to be.  After some more detailed measuring, I found that I would have to cut out the rear suspension to get that many batteries in due to the rear suspension design of the FWD TT.

Since I like a car with 4 wheels, the new plan is for 15 batteries below the rear seat, the remaining 16 will be in the car basically where the rear seat back was and partly in the luggage area.  Of course plans are subject to change as I get more ideas.  The plan for now is to sink the batteries down into the hole about 10" then put a carpeted cover over the top.  This will give me a place to through my computer bag or a place for the dog to sit.

The next step is to build a steel support for the battery box, then I'm going to have to decide on how to make the battery boxes.