With gas prices as high as they are many people are looking into the idea of converting their car to electric. The reason for this is an electric car will only cost about $30 per month in electricity to drive while your car will cost well over $100 a month to drive. Many people are happy to learn that their electric car will pay for itself in about 3 - 4 months.

To begin with you'll need to have selected the car you are going to use in your electric car conversion. Ideally, the car should have a large hood so you can fit all of the batteries underneath it without having to sacrifice any trunk space. You will also need to find a good DC motor for your car. Ideally the motor should be between 8" - 12" in length. Next, you are going to need to find about 12 deep cycle 12 volt batteries. These can be found for free by asking your local golf courses. In addition, you will need some electronics as well as some assorted nuts and bolts.

The first step with your car is to hoist the engine and transmission out of the car. I suggest getting a friend to help and finding a hoist that you can borrow for a day. Getting the engine and transmission out of the car is fairly easy as the engine is only connected to the body by a couple of bolts.

The next step is to mount the electric motor under the hood an attach it to the driveshaft. In most cars you should be able to use some of the existing mounts to mount the electric motor. The driveshaft is mounted to the electric motor by one bolt which you'll need to pick up at your local hardware store.

After you've finished mounting the motor you can now install all of the batteries. If you've got a big enough hood you should be able to roller table motors fit them all under the hood, but if you can't fit them then you're going to have to put a couple in the trunk.

The next step is to hook up the electronics. This isn't really a complicated process. You will need to hook up a charge controller to the batteries to make sure that you don't overcharge them. In addition, you will need to hook up a potentiometer (controls the amount of electricity the motor receives) between the batteries and the motor. The potentiometer will then need to be hooked up to the gas pedal so that you can control the speed of the car.

Make sure to do a final inspection before turning the vehicle on and do a couple tests before heading out on the road. In reality converting your car to electric is a lot less difficult than you think, and once done you'll save at least 75% on fuel costs.