This Maruti Suzuki 800 Electric Conversion Has More Torque Than a Ford F-150
Northway Motorsport's work shows how a successful and relatively inexpensive electric conversion can be performed.
The Maruti 800, manufactured by India’s Maruti Suzuki from 1983 until 2014, is one of India’s most popular cars with more than 2.6 million sold over the course of its production run. The only car with a longer production run in India is the iconic Hindustan Ambassador, which was manufactured for a whopping 56 years. The Maruti 800 is popular for its practicality and affordability — not performance. Northway Motorsports, an Indian company specializing in electric vehicle conversions, built an electric Maruti 800 that has more torque than a modern base model Ford F-150.
The engine used in the 2014 Maruti 800 was a 796 cc (0.8 L) inline three cylinder gasoline engine that could only put out 37 BHP and 59 Nm (43.5 ft-lb) of torque. The car weighs less than 1,500 pounds, but that engine can still only push the Maruti 800 to 90 mph and takes about 14 seconds to reach 60 mph. It is, to put things lightly, a very slow car. Northway Motorsports doesn’t say how much horsepower their conversion’s electric motor produces or how fast the car is after the conversion, but they have said that it has 378 Nm of torque. For comparison, a current base model Ford F-150 in the United States comes with a Cyclone V6 gasoline engine that puts out 359 Nm of torque.
The complete this conversion, Northway Motorsports started by stripping the car’s interior, engine, and transmission. The engine was replaced by a high torque AC induction motor that receives power from a bank of nine lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, each with a capacity of 200 Ah. Those batteries store enough power to give the Maruti 800 EV a range of 150 km (93 miles). The car’s backseats were left out, and the front seats were replaced with lightweight and supportive racing seats.
A custom touchscreen control center was built using a Raspberry Pi. That provides status information and even a special hill start function that uses the torque of the electric motor to keep the car from rolling backwards down hills. Those of us living in Western countries likely won’t ever see a Maruti 800 on our roads, but Northway Motorsport’s work illustrates how a successful and relatively inexpensive electric conversion can be performed.