Venus Motors: Custom Electric Vehicles

I'm talking today to Jay Bower from Venus Motors about their Custom Electric Vehicles, or CEVs. These CEVs are beautiful NEW hand-crafted electric cars, not conversions, with LiFePO4 inside, and Venus Motors is the first woman-founded US auto maker in history.

Venus Motors is offering a business opportunity for conversion shops across the country to build new electric cars using fiberglass kits, good electric drive trains, and lithium batteries...for competitive prices. You can contact them here for more information.

Custom Electric Vehicles: A New Category?

Lynne: Hi, Jay. Can you tell me a little about the custom car industry? I'm not familiar with the term.

Customizing cars has been around as long as cars have been and that is what an electric car conversion actually is - a customized electric vehicle. With EVs we choose a different motor and energy system to propel a vehicle, but it's still a vehicle just like a jet propelled car is still a vehicle, no different.

So the team at Venus Motors started building the electric pan (EP) to accommodate the hundreds of cars out there already designed to fit on a Volkswagen pan. Our EP replaces the VW pan with a chassis engineered to meet the demands of the torque and weight of an electrical drive system. When the VW Beetle went out of production in the late 1970s, many after market parts companies started making all of the VW parts except the pan and a few others.

So we buy new suspension parts, put them on a new EP, install an electric drive system to meet the needs of the user (high speed or low speed), install a ESS...

Sorry, what does ESS mean?

That means Energy Storage System. Batteries, Battery Management System, Charging System. So ESS kind of covers the whole battery side of the car.

So we install an ESS to meet their daily commute demands or other criteria and then add a body style the user likes/loves/can't live without.

See kitcarlist.com for a listing of some car body manufacturers and assemblers.

As you will discover, it's a very large combination of small companies, each building their own special designs and we have made an avenue to make them all electric. We now have relationships with the builders of over 20 car bodies.

This Meyers Manx Manxter Can Be Electric!

Pricing of the Custom Electric Vehicles

Most of the fiberglass bodies and interiors sell anywhere from:

• about $2,000 for buggies and jeeps;
• around $6,000 for intermediate Porsches, MGs and other 2 seaters;
• $8,000 to $20,000 for Grade A Porsches and other very nice custom electric vehicles.

That means we can build:

• very nice custom electric vehicles with high speeds, 100 mile+ range beginning at about $24,000;
• electric Porsches for around $30,000;
• really nice custom electric vehicles for $35,000 to $40,000 and up depending on all the accessories.

We build these CEVs - Custom Electric Vehicles - with American components, and work with regional assembly facilities in the United States. This may sound like an expensive way to build an EV but it is actually less expensive.

So what would the finished price of a Veepster be?

The e-Veepster standard model is 60 to 65 mph, 100 mile range, LiFePO4 battery pack with 110 or 220 charging and starts at $24,500. It's available in low speed also with 40 to 45 mph and 40 mile range at $15,000.

Batteries and Components

That price sounds quite reasonable. Are you using the Chinese prismatic LiFePO4 cells in these custom electric vehicles? If so, which ones? And I'm curious about your BMS as well. Can you tell me a little more about that?

We are using LiFePO4 - lithium batteries assembled by a company in Arizona, but it is owned by a Chinese company. Our ESS comes with the BMS and charging system.

Can you tell me what motor you're using? I suppose the HPEVS AC-50, right?

We have several options for motors depending on high or low speed. The AC-50 is one of the options.

Contact Venus Motors

If you're interesting in purchasing one of these Custom Electric Vehicles, or would like to build and assemble these Venus Motors custom electric vehicles for sale in your own EV shop, you can contact Venus Motors by filling in the form below.