Give me that insane power.... hp Hack

Is there a way to increase horsepower? being electric i think it should be easier than replacing an intake, cam and exhaust system....but i don't know anything about software hack...



i saw the Japan Nismo Upgrade and i can't believe nobody hacked the system to get more juice out of their car....

The way i see it, my leaf doesn't have enough range to get far... a 20% increase wouldn't do much for me...but when i get to my shop and back, i only use 30% of my power......so i could use 50 or 70% and have some fun....

Yes that car was sad.

Haven't seen anything, but it should be possible.

The first step is someone has to crack the encryption on the VCM firmware and reverse engineer the code. Or at least figure out the memory locations of key parameters. That's a big job, and usually requires significant demand to make it worth the time of someone with the skills to pull it off. On top of that there's a lot of unknowns in this case regarding just how much more performance can be coaxed out.

There could be other approaches, short of that.

For example, it might be possible to scale up the output drivers on the inverter causing more current to be delivered to the motor (current = torque) for the same commanded power from the VCM. Unless of course there's a closed loop control there that would just dial it back.

It also might be feasible to bypass the VCM control of the inverter and drive the motor or inverter output stages directly with a custom controller. There are some interesting projects going on in this realm in the custom EV conversion crowd:

One example of the quest to build a "universal" motor/inverter controller:
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/any-ac-motor-any-inverter-umc-152234.html

Using above to (slowly) spin a ~310kW Tesla motor / inverter.
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/fun-tesla-motor-152890.html

A similar project to develop a controller that can "auto tune" to learn a new motor type, shown here turning a Leaf motor.
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=168618

You could go as far as an "engine swap" to go with a more powerful inverter/motor combo.

All of this is greatly complicated by the high level of integration in the control systems. Just keeping the car from shutting down when modded is a challenge, let alone getting it to do what you want. None of it is easy, but there are a lot of possibilities. Some of it can build on the experience of ICE tuners and EV hobbyists, but there's a lot of pioneering work to be done to develop the potential for production EV tuning.

Then of course there's the approach I'm trying. Cut the weight and drag of the Leaf roughly in half by transplanting the complete drive system into a much smaller, sportier chassis

Rob