In this video we are out with the old and in with the new and hopefully not damaged battery cells for the Space Vanan. It took about 6 weeks but they're finally here. So we're going to install them in this module and and maybe some more modules. I Don't know yet.

we're going to see if we can finally actually drive this Spaceman on its own. EV Power Or the thing's going to burst into flames. One of the two. Okay, well I just destroyed a brand new battery cell.

This thing is. Yeah, that's not good. but I have many, many more, many more in this box as well. And because I figured I'll never find these again.

I just I bought the whole lot of them. Uh, honestly, I think we might want to leave this one outside just in case it goes thermonuclear. Okay, I'll take that all right, we'll put it in the DeLorean junkyard for now. There you go little buddy.

Don't light my van on fire and we have Josh here back again to help us with the space van. So he's already removed a few more of these bad cells and they are going into the bad cell pile. And something that's very interesting with these bad cells is that some of them are like this and some of them are stiff like this. Yeah, it's very likely you know I Was talking last time about the puffiness.

Um, the puffiness is caused by uh, dendrites growing within the Lithium Matrix and that can cause a dead short between them. and so the puffiness actually pushes out on both sides of the cells and makes this feel mushy on the inside instead of solid like the new ones. Okay, so another way we can tell if we have bad cells. so some of these are good, but a lot of them are mushy.

I End up buying this spot welder right here and you can see the leads there. So when those two leads touch, it's going to weld. so we have to keep them far far away from each other. So we're charging this thing up right now.

It has to get up to about 5 volts. It has two large capacitors inside of it, so once that's charged up, we can get one wed in. That initial charge takes about 20 minutes and then we can go much quicker from there. But this is brand new out of the box so right now we have a lot of this gutted.

We just have a few more cells to remove and I haven't touched this space. Band I Haven't trickled charged any of the cells since the last time. Uh, this one's at 29 so this should be at 3.2 And yeah, this one is just totally dead. Here's another one.

3.2 That's a good cell and this is a bad cell. About half the cells in this module were totally dead and a few other ones were at like half a volt. So this was definitely the big problem with the high voltage battery. We're going to fix it.

So yeah, basically I'm just breaking down the pack one one cell at a time. Um, got a positive a negative for each one. cut those off and then I want to roll off all the material I can try and clean these up before we Bond the new cells to them and you can see here we've got a temperature thermister that sits in the middle of the pack just in case things get too hot. If things get too hot.

what's the idea? The the battery management system shuts it everything down? Yeah, exactly. So these have basically a temperature variable resistor in them and it measures the temperature based on the resistance and if it gets too high, it just shuts down because this pack is not super sophisticated. I'd say it probably just shuts down the whole thing instead of one one pack. Safety First Yay Yay! Bright Idea Van So if you guys remember in the last video, we're just using a razor knife to cut right through like butter.

Just want to make sure you go. don't go too far down and hit the pouch. There we go, we just pop these apart so down here you can see the design of these were actually pretty nice. They they clip into each next cell, but they also clip close the individual cells.

It's pretty neat. Hey, Josh that's that's quite the bright idea. What do you call a uh, hair metal band that can really tell the temperature of the room? I Don't know? Hold on comment down below. if you know the answer to this all they Mis that's like a dorky dad joke.

You got to be an extra dork dad for that nerd. Dad Yeah, it's good thing I don't have any kids there. you go. Have you ever seen this type of pack like with with these plastic pieces in there? No.

Usually for the modern packs with uh, these These are called Prismatic cells. So with the modern packs with Prismatic cells, they'll just put a a thin sheet in between each of these cuz it takes up a lot less space. Okay, and I think they've kind of learned that if there's a thermal runaway event, this plastic isn't really going to stop it. So yeah, it just takes up extra space.

All right. So now we tape off both of the terminals to make sure that we don't cause any fires and then they'll go to a recycling facility. Any squishy cells? Yeah, a little. I think this was oh no, No, this is kind of Squishy look at.

oh yeah, that one's pretty. Yeah, that might have been one of the Dead ones. All right. So what we have to do is remove the other end of the pouch that we just cut off.

So I'm rolling the edge here and we'll do the same on this side. All right there we go and we're just going to roll this up like a burrito. There we go. Not like anything else, you're thinking of this family channel.

it's a burrito or a quesadilla or a C. It's enough food talk. I'm getting hungry now. Okay, got most of it off.

Little straggler here. we'll get off off too. There we go now. I'm going to cut this one out.

We'll go right below the copper bus bar and Jos made this look easy. Oh, there you go. There's that spark you warned me about. Okay, yeah, it's okay, but I mean what, we're not.

We're just talking about a few bolts here. So yeah, exactly. It's not a big deal. This part's not not that dangerous.

All right, it's just fun. It's Christmas time there we go. I'm getting through. that's the ticket.

I did it. Yay! it's cut all right. I used a knife I should run to the store right now to get new ones but these are so dull now. I Hate going to the store for car parts or tools if I can get something delivered.

I am all about it. and soon my family and I are going to get a cute little puppy like Ellie here and so we've already been shopping around for dog food. Healthy dog food that can be delivered and so I'm super excited to show you guys! Sundays for dogs! Sundays is 100% human human grade from start to finish and only uses real food without any fillers. They gently air dry their foods to preserve their nutrition and flavor so that means no Frozen mess and no high temperature cooking.

Now Sunday's is vet founded and vet. Run Come here. Come here. There you go and Tori Waxman The co-founder still has her own dogs, test out the foods and it took her 3 years and 17 formulations to get the recipe down right and look at Ellie She loves it! Sunday knows that switching to a new dog food is a big deal so they offer you guys samples and all you have to do is pay for shipping and handling.

But no doubt your dog is going to love it. Look at that, she wants more. Now if you guys want to get started, you can click on my link down below or go to Sundays Fords.org one that can really spark I'm I'm going knife. This worked way better than our D box cutter here.

Oh, look at that cutting right through. All right, that's one we're cutting through. two pouches. There we go, that was that was that was painful.

All right. Couple more cells coming out squishy. No, these are good. These are probably the good ones.

M Yeah, okay, easy. I'm back back in the space van just going around rechecking all of the cells and I've checked all the other modules, but this one had a problem cell. If we're in the spirit of changing out battery cells, we should Swap this one out. Is it this one? Yeah.

So 34 33 That's good here. Yeah, one volt. this cell is bad. I can trickle charge that one back up.

but yeah, we should switch it out. We'll just check over the rest of these. 3334 is good and let's just hope we're good on this one. Okay, Perfect.

All right. this module is coming out. We have our lineman gloves and and since we had the module out right next to it, we got kind of lucky we already had part of this disconnected couple. t30s.

Oh, we got smoke. Why do we have smoke? Okay, hang on. hang on. hang on.

Where is the smoke coming from? Hey Josh we got smoke. Yeah. I was serious about the fire tempature. Is it continuing to smoke? No.

no more smoke right now. and I didn't touch anything. You're not sure where it came from I mean it definitely was coming from this area and it was right after I loosened up the T30s. you could have had just a quick short, not short, but a quick spark would have caused a tiny puff of smoke.

Okay, so that that should be okay. All right, go ahead and keep keep working on it. Okay, oh the space. Manan people.

Oh yeah, when I noticed the smoke was when I was going to pull it out. Let's get these T30s out of here. We'll pull this terminal out. Okay, now this one.

I Kind of got to start wrestling the battery out. Okay, that one slid out. there. we go.

Yep, Okay. I got this connector off any smoke. No smoke there. we go.

Okay, let's get this Smoky module out of here. Okay, that was a little scary. All right. Let's uh, let's take this one apart too while I work on that module.

Josh is over here cleaning up our bus bar with a file. That way we get a good connection once we fire up the old welder. and by old I mean brand new. We're using the tin snips to cut away these straps.

there's one and two. I Think on the bottom there are clips that you can. oh never mind, it just came off when I P on it. Yeah, Okay, so we got these end caps off.

Okay, so this is the cell we're going after right here. So let's get safe here and isolate these guys. Okay, everything is isolated and now we just slice a room. Oh yeah, I'm getting better.

little practice I can do it I think I'm all the way through. Yep and now we have this one here. Oh, these wires are right in my way going to move these wires out. So I don't cut them those our heat sensor wires.

We need those. Oh good. cut, good cut. Alex My mom always wanted me to be a doctor a surgeon if you will and I think today.

I've accomplished that. Be proud Manom! So we're replacing this cell right here which should be this pouch right here and we'll separate these There we go. This side of the pouch is taped so we'll flip this over and now we can pry this apart. There we go.

There's one and there's the other nice and Squishy so we know they're nice and bad. Oh I Really Cut that one. Oh my gosh Yeah. all right now I'm removing the remnants of the cells from the bus bar.

We have a nice little pile here of Bright Idea remnants. but if you look in here 2010 Bright Automotive They made these boards. They made it all. Okay so we discovered that this does nothing at all.

We tried it and it it straight up doesn't work. but you know what does work a spot welder from Harbor Freight Check this out. These things are welded on there perfectly and we're good to go. So in case you're wondering, we can't use solder in this case because it gets too hot.

it will melt. So what we need is a spot welder that will weld the base materials together and and that's what we got. That being said, don't try this at home. Kids definitely do not try this at home like we didn't even record the first one just out of fear.

But uh. I Got my gloves on and honestly it's working great. Let me show you now, these have normal solder but those are just the sense leads. They don't actually have current running through them so that's why those are okay.

All right. So this is how we're doing it: I'm holding it right here and then Dr goes down and then I look away. All right and now I have to break apart the bottom well gently so we don't pull this thing apart. So I just kind of rock it back and then we go down the line.

Good, that's how you do it. Oh, this is a definitely a DIY type of project. I Mean it originally was kind of a DIY type of project. you guys, You guys have seen the videos, but we do have to wait in between a little bit because it does introduce a ton of heat into here and it will melt the solder in these joints.

Right now, let's keep on going down the line. I Feel like we're like a factory assembly line here Josh I'm pretty sure we have to come up with some kind of song to sing while we do this for the next like two hours. I've been working on the line. Well done my boards.

I Don't know what rhymes with boards Lords Yeah, I like it. So right now Josh is straightening out the leads here at the end of the new battery cells. Yeah, unfortunately they came with these tabs on them and the old ones did not and so we have to make them work for our application. It's nothing a pair of crusty pliers can't take care of, you know, but that's one thing you got to be really careful about.

So if you go this way, don't touch those two together. And so after measuring, we know that if you're staring at the numbers, to the left is positive, to the right is negative and that is very important. So these are going to get sandwiched in like this: we have positive to positive, negative to negative. We found these to work much much better to straighten these out so this will go a little bit quicker.

but these two cells are ready to go into their pouch. So once we we've got two of them together, put them into the holder. One side has tape on it, so I'm trying to keep that aligned on all the pouches and then we can snap it together. Some of these snaps didn't quite make it through the disassembly process, but that's what we've got taped for.

So once that's together, it's important to Mark positive and negative on here so that we line them up negative to positive and negative to positive and negative to positive all the way up. So in this case, in order to line it up with this one, have to flip it over installed that way. Okay, so kind of have to angle these in Ah That's much better. There we go.

Nice. All right. So these are through. Now we got to figure out how to get our spot welder in there.

It's going to be fun. All right. Pouches are going in, so negative Positive: Get in there. Yeah, got it.

It's almost there. It's almost there. We need a little helping hand. There we go.

Little helping multimeter lead and now we've learned it's best to pull these out like that. There we go. All right. We've learned that having the proper tension that's got to be pushing it down quite a bit is the ticket.

If these two are loose on there, it'll spark an arc and it doesn't make a good Bond And then we'll do the corners. So we're doing a total of four those Corners like to Glow Right away. Perfect. Okay, now for the good stuff.

We were using a piece of Hose but it was just getting in the way too much. So now we're covering it with electrical tape and then a little double-sided tape just for good measure. Again, do not do this at home. We are trained professionals I'm just kidding just.

but seriously, don't do this in a little little gooey. It's okay. All right, that's how you do it. We're just going to keep repeating that process and we'll be good.

You guys know. I Love adding legit street car stickers in places that no one will. We'll ever find them There we go. Let's keep that between us.

we're getting there. we're getting there and every time we put in a new pouch, we test it and it keeps on going up in voltage. So we're at 32 so far and we should have a total of about what? 43 44 We calculated something like that. Yeah, going in the right direction.

All right, we're done. We are done with this module. I still have to put in these cells from that module but it is very very late Josh is going to take off. Thank you so much I appreciate all of your help.

thank you! It's been fun time and I hope it works me too! I'll keep you posted Thanks brother! It's a couple of days later and I let this module sit over the weekend so that the cells could balance themselves. and we did have an issue with one of the cells. It was self-induced because we accidentally arked a little bit when we were connecting the new cells. so they're supposed to be at like 3.2 3.3 and this one dropped down to 2.7 in that Split Second that we Zapped it.

So anyway, we got to bring it back up which is what I'm doing with our individual power source and I've learned that if these cells go below 2 volts, they're pretty much considered junk at that point. You have to replace them. So since we shocked ours down to 2.7 we're good to try and recover it back up. Otherwise I Got to swap cells right in the middle of the pack.

so we have 3299 3298. so these have all balanced out and are pretty much the same. They just need to be within 0.1 volt of each other. Yeah, we're looking pretty good.

Perfect. Okay. and then on this guy. it was at 27 this morning.

We got it up to 3174 right now. so we'll bring that up to about what the other ones are. And then we're good to put the module back in the van and start just charging them all together. But first, I have one more to do on the other module.

So while this is baking, we're over there. we're being efficient. Like the right idea was supposed to be. All right.

You guys know the drill. We're going to slide these guys in like so ready. Yeah, something like that. All right.

cool. All right here we go. One two three. Whoa.

Okay, what did we touch? It's form fitting. Okay, looks pretty good. Let's check voltage on our new cells. 3.3 We're good now.

I can put this thing back together. You know, with its wood base makes sense. The wood is very eco-friendly Let me tell you there we go. All right, it's looking like a module again.

This used to have big metal straps holding it together. but I don't have big metal straps so we're going with big zip ties, big plastic straps, plastic strap. sounds like more professional the plastic securing devices and I don't have plastic securing devices long enough. So I'm putting two of the securing devices together for extra security.

Plastic security. Okay, that'll definitely do the job. We are sandwiched together, don't feel like get my side Cutters Tin snips are right here. so we'll tin snip the plastic securing device.

This one could be one one more click secure. This module's ready ready for its return. All right. First module going back home.

Lunar Module just watched P 13 recently so that's where that came from. All right now you'd think this is where this came from and it would just slide right back in. but oh, there we go. That is the case.

No smoke this time please. I Do not like smoke. No smoke in here. Come on Lunar Module land.

I Must be the first to land the moon. Get in there now. We have one connector to plug in here and then we have our terminals. I Think we just just need to slide this down.

Okay, I think this is what smoked last time. We need to get this terminal right in here. Slide in. This thing is a beast to get back in properly.

There we go. All right now we're connecting the modules via this one. T30 and I'm just going to do this all by hand. I'll come back and give that a good Titan After charging the individual cells and letting them sit overnight, we have 3298 3284.

This one here was a little bit lower where we at. Yeah, Perfect. Okay, it's ready to go back in. Then we get to plug, get in and charge and see the screen and see what the state of charge is.

Oh man guys, this could be it. This could be it. Or it could be total disaster. One of the two.

All right. going back in. this is so impossible. Come on, go to your home battery.

Oh my gosh Oh there we go. Okay, thank you yay it's in Next We have to connect these two with this. This is. this is what they're using.

just going to go with it. Okay, one in, tighten this leg up before we try to feed it into the other side. Okay, now we have to make this connection here perfect. and I'm switching off between gloves and no gloves because some things are more dangerous to do with the gloves because you can't get a good grip on it.

kind like this. But there we go. Okay, all right, we have one more connection to make over here. I Don't know what happened to my other white cover I Got to go find it Here we go.

Don't do any Sparky Weird stuff. Ah, working with these gloves is horrible guys. You need to do it. But it stinks.

We are connected people. There we go. we did it. Cells replaced, modules restored.

Let's check full pack voltage right now and then we will plug in this guy and see what the state of charge is on the screen. Oh nervous, excited. It's been a long time coming all right, so we are definitely low. We're only at 301 right now, but I haven't charged any of these other ones in a long time.

So let's go plug it in. Safety loop going in. All right, Safety loop connected all right. We'll connect the 12vt.

Oh man. I'm always so nervous with this car guys. Okay, nothing horrible has happened yet. This takes a little while to boot up.

Here we go heard a little beep there. so while that's booting up, let's just look at our batteries. I Pulled all the covers off just so we can see if there's any smoke coming out of these. which one it's coming out of.

But we're looking good. All right there we go. This is booting up. This touch screen is not working at all.

Windows XP And yes I'm using a mouse. The touch screen is so bad on here I Couldn't find anything in settings to really mess with it to adjust the touchcreen. but mouse works. All right Here we are: energy.

Uh oh, this is reading 319 volts. state of charge is zero. Let's plug it in. All right here we go.

I Heard it click over. All right, no smoke. That's good. We got 40 40 40 40 almost 40 40 40 Man 40 All right, we're looking really good guys.

325 We are definitely charging. It's going up as we speak. Look at that. Woo! look this.

we're watching a charge that is so cool I Don't know if I've ever gotten it up. it was about to hit 326 I don't know if I've ever gotten it up that High I mean it makes sense. We had like you know, 10 dead cells? 326 volts. Oh stay of charge.

Get out of here. Look at that. No way we're at a 54% state of charge. I Mean it's been plugged in for like 5 minutes? Not even yeah? I wonder if we just pull the plug right now if it goes to zero I Don't know guys.

I'm going to leave it I'm going to leave it for a few hours. We're going to see if we can get that up. You know, maybe to like a 100 or something. That'd be nice.

It's at 52 now so it's kind of like going down 51 just went down again I Don't know. All right. Yeah, there we go. 50 Okay, Oh now it's back to 51.

It could be balancing right now. I'm going to leave it plugged in for like four or 5 hours and and we'll come back with the battery showing a decent state of charge I need to reverse a couple of those cables. A few videos ago I switched two of them thinking that the polarity was wrong because it was labeled wrong. but it didn't do anything.

So I'm going to put those back so fireman safety loop is out and then we can just pull this connector off. This is a very good quality, gigantic connector I wonder how much this was? Well, I've never depinned one of these before, but that looks like something. This collar pops up so we'll have to do this on this side. I'm literally watching my own video to figure out how to do this because I forgot and then I got to see which ones I switched.

Oh, that's a nice click. That was a pretty good click. Okay, so we just did the outer ones. Okay, that's what I thought.

Thanks YouTuber guy. there's one and according to that nice gentleman on the internet I have to take that out and spread these guys. Oh, there's that good click. He was right.

It is a nice click. There we go. Okay, all right now. this one is going right into here.

Clicked in nicely and it's got a nice weather pack seal. As you would expect from something this high quality, this thing is running away inside of a glove. There's that do are gray locking tabs. Now we're reversed back the way that the bright Engineers wanted it to be.

All right. I'm going to go plug this in and then we're going to see if it moves again. but like for longer than one block this time something. I Definitely want to do before we go on any kind of driving in.

This video is clean up this look at this ground. so oh my gosh, it's not even tight. Are you kidding me? This is this is just horrible. Okay so this goes to this.

which we found out is a headlight switch I don't know I don't know what to say there. and then we have one that goes into a main harness. It looks like and this looks like an engine ground. something like that.

Yep and let go into the engine I Think yep, it's going to the engine. So look at all this look at this rust that's not good. We're not going to bother with the headlight one. They did such a nice job with the body.

Like the interior layout's nice but I mean what is this? Come on. Who knows how many issues that fixed? Maybe none. All right. I'm going to try and move the space van right now.

Keys in mouse is ready. Let's hope we don't get a violent shake from the motor. Oh my gosh. Okay, we're in reverse and we are off.

It's moving guys. it's moving I didn't really think too far ahead I didn't even move the table out. that's how much confidence I have. but we're good I'm going to rearrange so I can actually get it out now.

Oh my gosh, Park off. Oh, this thing is a functioning vehicle. All right. Table's out of the way.

Please don't shake. Please don't shake. Please don't shake. Please don't shake I get my body like in a position in case it shakes.

It's so violent you want to get whiplash. Oh, we're moving. We are moving. Don't hit the TA Not the best visibility in this van.

I'll tell you that much. Drive All right. Here we go. We're off.

All right. I'm going to put it right around here. actually. you know what? Let's put it in the building.

we'll go reverse again. Oh, and check this out. Remember before we'd have to go into drive to get reverse and vice versa. Now Drive is actually going forward and reverse is actually going backwards and it just simply goes into Park This is great.

Yeah, this thing is just not calibrated the best 53% state of charge. It's staying right there. 318 volts though. that's that's not that good.

All right, let's shut this thing down all right. I Want to see where this thing is at? as far as amperage. this is why this is so slow. We're only getting half an amp right now.

That is crazy I have the van plugged into a 15 amp outlet right now and I wouldn't imagine this would make all that big of a difference. but um I have an Evse that'll charge up to 20 amps. so we're going to try that and this is something I was going to install anyway. So we're going to put a new Inlet in the car that will accept a standard J1772 connector.

so let's go do that now. I Got this from Evsc adapters. Comom. And what's great is that the logic is built into this right here in order to plug into a J1772.

because our car doesn't actually have the two smaller wires that talks back to the wall charger. so it wouldn't work with any other wall charger unless we have this. Um, so just looking over the instructions they sent me, I'm literally to chop off this end. We're not going to be using this 220 volt end.

We're using some side cutters here. Okay, it's a nice plug in anyway. So now we just have three gigantic wires that we're going to connect to the three wires on the car for AC power. We need to peel back this instulation.

What better place to make Cuts than on our rubber floor in the space van? Oh there she is and let's get these out a little bit more perfect. See if we can strip these gigantic wires. Yeah, did it. These wire strippers Are Awesome Sonic Tools People A lot of this stuff is made in Germany It's fantastic.

I'll leave a link down below for 10% off all the tools here at Legits 3/ quars are from Sonic All right looking good. Let's go connect these up. I have everything disconnected. but before we cut into these wires, we're making sure we have zero amps right now.

so these things are dead cuz I don't want to be dead. All right. So we're going to cut off our Home Depot extension cord and I'm going to utilize some of the wiring because the van doesn't give us a lot of wiring. It would end right here and we already spliced into these nicely.

so we're good to go. We're going to connect our white to white and slide over our solder joint. and now we're just going to heat this up and you can see the solder is Now Melting into the wires, joining the two as one together. forever.

All right, one down. All right. Here's our last wire. the power wire.

There's that solder. three weather pack seals complete. completed. Now we just need to run this to the outside of the car and we're like a real electric car again.

All right. Well, I'm an idiot I should have fed that in before I you know, soldered the wires together. so I had to take the little cap off. No big deal.

Now we get to see the inner workings of this plug and the two signal wires. One is just tapped into the ground and then this one this red one. it goes into a loop with the ground. Maybe there's a resistor in there? I Don't know how they're tricking the system into thinking it's connected to a wall charger, but supposedly it is all right.

So anyway, going to put this back together and we'll have a J1772 and there you have it, our new charger Inlet is installed. Now we can use standardized charging cables like this and We're Off to the Races it's it's like a real EV Again, all right. It's a few days later and I removed the electric motor bracket and sent it over to Fluid Motor Union to have it welded. this head cracked because that motor goes really crazy when the battery voltage gets low apparently so we shouldn't have that problem anymore.

Fingers crossed. I'm being really confident, but anyway, they welded this up and they even installed a reinforcement plate right here. so hopefully this won't crack again. But anyway, you guys have seen me take this out and in and out and in before.

so let me go put this in and then we'll check on the charge and and drive it. I've continued to let the battery charge while I put the bracket back in. so let's see what our state of charge is. 100% Look at that.

100% 344 volts. The most I was ever able to get was like 325 volts before. so we are good. We are good.

This thing was at 0% state of charge. before we're at 100. We have a good bracket. we are ready to go.

It's a beautiful day. let's see how far we make it. Fingers crossed. Space band is all put back together with its covers and I am bringing the new charger and a really long extension cord just in case last time I made it a grand total of one block.

I Don't know what's going to happen right now, but we got a fully charged battery. We got a good motor mounting bracket system. Let's just do this. This is awesome.

The backup camera works here. We go here we go. Got to say the electric power steering's really nice in the space man. All right I'm out.

Oh, it's beautiful with the motor bracket all welded up. fully charged battery. What could possibly go wrong here in the SPAC Man I don't know I think that's vibration with everything we have in the back of those big aluminum shelves? actually? No. I don't know what that is.

I'm not going to worry about it, it's kind of gone now. All right? great. Okay, so we are now approaching where this thing broke down the last time. We're almost there and and we're still going strong.

This is about right where it started to shutter on me. We're going 40 mph right now. This this is great I don't have any way of counting mileage but I know the area well so I'll I'll let you guys know how far I get. But yeah, here we are.

This is where we broke down last time. Oh no no no no, no stop and we're rolling. All right, let's do some wide open throttle. That's literally wide open throttle.

Wow! Guys like I don't even know how you would get on the highway I'm going 35 literally that's floored all the way. It accelerates but like that's Dangerously slow. That makes no sense like I mean according to our battery voltages and everything this is. This is how the Space Van was intended to be used.

I mean we're we're cruising along here. Yeah, that is not good I don't see how you could get on the highway that way. Then again, I don't have any literature on how fast the thing was supposed to go. I mean honestly, we don't even know if this thing ever really went very far with the company.

Brite We don't really know much I mean there's just some old YouTube videos of this thing supposedly cruising down the highway. So we've gone about a mile and we're at 91 1% state of charge. Wow, that is not good. Again, we don't really know exactly how this thing was supposed to function originally, but from what I could find on the internet, it's supposed to go like 30 Mish on EV Power I Mean according to my uh, to my math, that doesn't seem very possible right now cuz we've gone down 10% now we're at 90 I Got to be careful when I pull out because this thing doesn't have it's just weak.

It's very slow and it moves. It gets up there, but it's just it's slow. But yeah I mean 10% and we've gone I mean a little over a mile at this point. Oh jeez, Okay, that is floored all the way.

Wow. All right. I mean yeah, sorry buddy, we're not going that slow. Jeez.

Ah, we're at 88% state of charge right now and the voltage is at 295. Oh there we go. When I let off the gas goes up to like 310. There we go.

310. 87% Jeez. Okay, well anyway, we're in it. This is it.

This was the goal. My goal was to get this thing back together to refurbish the battery or whatever it needed to be refurbished, get the screen to work, and and simply get it to drive pretty much as intended or as the engineers of from Bright intended it to drive. This is how they were displaying the vehicle. Uh, this thing was in front of Congress supposedly and this drawer keeps on coming out I'd heard that it went to Sweden uh or something to test out there again.

don't know if that's really true, but supposedly it was tested out there I don't understand really how it's got no climate control or anything. So I guess they were just testing the drivetrain. which I mean honestly, it drives great. Like outside of just being really slow I mean you know we're getting up to like 40ish.

Yeah, so we're cruising very uneventful. I Don't trust it. like at all. It drives pretty straight.

The brakes are okay. yeah we're at 83% We've gone maybe like 2 miles at this point. There we go, there is wide open throttle for you and it gets up and goes. I'm just kidding it, it's very slow, but we're sort of keeping up with traffic.

I mean the Subaru Outback just kind of took me out there but it doesn't look nearly as cool. I Can't believe I'm driving the Space man. this is awesome! Woo! she handles Yeah, we got UPS right here. This was supposed to be for you or was it FedEx The head of marketing when I had her on the zoom call said she had like I don't know $30 million worth of pre-orders I forget which delivery company it was.

maybe it was the USPS I I don't remember. but uh, that obviously never never went through because I have the only bright bright idea. All right. Well I'm going to go put some gas in this I only put uh I don't know like a gallon in a few months ago at this point for the gasoline engine I don't know when that is ever going to kick in.

I mean we're still at a pretty high state of charge, but let's get some fuel. This is kind of cool pulling this thing into a gas station. All right? Well, I'm going to now, put this in park and turn it off. That's the scary thing to do.

You never know if it's going to start up again. All right. This thing keeps on. Okay.

wow, it's spewing fuel out of here I Only put a couple gallons in here before so there's no way this thing is full. Uh okay. Okay, yeah, we're done. We got, uh, half a gallon in there That makes absolutely no sense.

Could be something wrong with it. but what else is new? It's a Space Man. Okay, was uh, just how it was designed. There we go.

I get my Chrysler product key. Someone named it the fancy van. I call it the Space Van but okay. the screen still takes time to turn on, but I think it'll let us go on a drive regardless and driveway just like a normal vehicle.

This is really cool. Like use it just we're using the Space van. This is a supposed to be a government delivery van or some kind of delivery van. Here we go.

I I mean it's slow. but I mean it's it works. We're cruising all right. We drove around for a little bit longer.

Everything's going great. Um, but I really want to get some gas in this tank and I don't know if there was something wrong with the pump because it's going in fine now. So I'm putting in like 3 gallons and I'm just curious to see if the gas engine will kick on when it's supposed to because it's supposed to turn on when the state of charge gets low and then the gas engine will Propel the vehicle with the front wheels. It's front wheeel drive in that case.

So anyway, get some gas in here. We're Off to the Races again. all right. we're going to keep driving and I'm going to see if the gas engine kicks on I don't know this drawer.

Yeah, it's fine, it doesn't. There's no real latch. it's fake. So I charged it up for a little bit while we were there.

Man, it feels peier Now it's kind of cool. All right. I've been driving around for a little while. we are at 50 7% state of charge and let's see.

do we get Regen? Oh look at that. We got Regen see the top amps. we're getting a couple amps of Regen Cool. Then I hit the gas and it pulls amps.

Okay, nice. Regen works. Oh man, this is awesome guys! This is so much fun! I Know this thing is slow and it could break at any moment, but this thing cost over $2 million to build. It's a concept vehicle.

it's one of one. I mean the history behind it is really cool, especially if you're into EVS at all. but even if you're not, it's interesting to say the least. I've never owned anything even close to a concept car.

Well, except for my old Pontiac Banshee concept replica. But yeah, man, this is the real thing 65 people worked for Brite to create this. It's crazy for those of you who missed the Reveal video. I Got this thing for $1,500 so you really can't go wrong.

Some people asked Alex why did you buy this thing? How do you pass up this this concept vehicle for $1,500 and the adventure of getting it to drive again? which which we did. We are just driving along and it is. It is good. It's regening, the motor isn't shaking anymore.

Oh, this is so cool. Whatever that noise was in the back is gone. We did have this thing jacked up when we were doing the bracket, so we might have unloaded the suspension or something. who knows.

But that's good. It's smooth, the alignment is good, it drives straight. This is legit guys. The only thing is I do think it is electronically governed at 40 mph.

I've gone through some menus to see if I can find anything with that and I can't That's one thing I don't really understand I don't know if I ever will understand it, but it doesn't seem like it's out of power or anything. It just stops like right at 40. you know, coincidentally like it doesn't go much faster. So I don't know.

I might be like crazy right now, but it feels like way peier now, after I brought it back to the shop and just charged it a little bit. wasn't even really charging for very long. So I don't know. This thing is definitely peppier guys.

like it was so slow before and now it's we're we're going. Okay, so here we're at 40. Oh wait, no, we are going faster than 40. Okay, we're at like 45.

All right, that's cool. but yeah, that's about it. We hit a new Max Speed 45. Oh and we're regening.

This is so cool. This is like EV history right here. Oh my gosh. Get out of here Diesel.

You don't want none of this. I can go 45. It is starting to get dark I apologize for the video quality, but I'm going to keep on driving it I Want to see uh, if we ever get the gas engine to kick on if it goes to a low enough state of charge I Don't know what that state of charge is, but we're at like 48 or something right now so it's getting kind of lower I don't know. All right guys.

So I've driven this probably about 10 miles or so we're at 41% state of charge. This thing was supposed to get like I think 30 Mi of eeve range. The batter is obviously degraded after sitting for so long. so this this kind of makes sense.

Like we might be able to get another 10 mil out of it. So down to 20 with a battery that's you know, 12 or 13 years old? I'm pretty happy with that. I Wish I had enough cells to rebuild the whole thing, but I only have enough cells to rebuild maybe two of the modules and I rather just hang on to them as spare bullets, especially for the next guy. maybe the CEO who buys this thing because if there cells that actually go bad, these can be used to replace those instead of just refurbishing the pack by replacing cells that aren't really all that bad.

All right guys. So I'm continuing to drive around. This is a pretty cool display. You can see the power is coming from the battery just to the rear motor and then we do have gas before it was completely out.

It stays red for some reason even though I put like six gallons or seven gallons in at this point. but it seems to be right around half and it is in hybrid mode and we can switch this to just EV mode, hybrid mode and engine. but I haven't had it really change how this vehicle functions at all. but we also never had gas.

Uh-oh oh no. now it's kicking in and out. the gas engine's not kicking on. but yeah now now we're just in EV mode and it's it's not.

It's not good. Oh, we're at 0% state of charge. Oh no, We are so close to the shop. Oh, there we go a little bit.

I shouldn't have pushed it. We got to find a spot to pull over. Ooh this garage door is open. Oh man, there's a shop right here with a door open.

I Just need a little charge people. Luckily, the the space F's not that hard to push. Okay, it's kind of hard to push. Totally normal people.

It's about dinner time right now. the family's chowing down on something really good that my wife made and I'm here pushing my space van again. but we did drive it like I don't know 15 or 17 miles something like that. I wasn't looking at the state of charge for the last bit of the drive and it went down.

Man, that stinks I Locked out again. a shop here is letting me use their electricity. so we've plugged in with a long extension cord and we've set this to 13 amps. but the van only accepts about 6 or seven.

Max But yeah, 0% state of charge. I think at the end of the day, each module simply just needs new cells. That's all. and if they were available, I would do it.

but I looked everywhere and so did you guys. I got hundreds of emails of people sending me listings for what they thought were the right cells and they all weren't I only found one guy in California that was selling them and I bought as many as I could. So it's unfortunate. but they discontinued these cells a long time ago.

All right, we're at 4% I'm just going to Okay, yeah, just unplugged it. He unplugged it from inside. We're just going to take off now. All right here we go people.

Come on. Space fan Oh it is so slow now. come on dude, don't do this to me I Just want to go go home. I've been here so many times before.

39 years old and a broke down Space van just trying to make it home. Hope no one's behind me. we're going 15 I think that's the max speed I was able to get the very first time I drove it like four videos ago in the summer before it died. Okay, so now I have to get a running start cuz I don't think it'll make it up this hill.

Here we go. Okay, come on baby. I don't want to push you. we're going to make it I didn't hit anything.

we made it. Thank you Space Van! It's been a fun 20ish miles today. I'm done All right guys. It's a few days later and I have some phenomenal news.

So I have been text messaging with the old CEO from Bright and I'd mentioned this before I'd only sent maybe two messages with him months ago when I first got the van and he just basically said when does the van go to its rightful owner and I and I told him the truth which is I don't really plan on keeping this much past me getting it to function the way that they had it functioning when they created it. So now that it's driving I sent him a message I sent him a picture of this thing driving down the road and now we're texting back and forth a lot. He wants it back like really bad. I'm just going to like paraphrase a little bit here, but basically he refers to the bright idea as one of his children.

He said he had a ton of emotion watching my program. He's happy to tell me the full story, but that the vehicle represents over 30 years of technology and development, a$2 billion business plan, and the Heart and Soul of about 50 pioneers of the EV industry and I don't know how much he wants me to get into this, but basically he talks about who sold it from under him like someone stabbed him in the heart and thankfully it got into your hands where you at least respected it. He finishes this one text with how can we get the idea back into the history books and honor the ones who created it So of course I sent him a picture of my white turbo Trans Am and I said this is this is like one of my children I've had it for 20 years. It means a lot to me, the memories and everything.

So I I get it. and then I just said I love for the van to go back to. you have no interest in doing anything other than restoring it back to how you guys left off and I'm almost there. So then he agreed to do a zoom call.

so we're going to do a zoom call in the next video. but I don't want to get rid I'm almost done with it. The only thing I have to do is get this gas engine to kick on because a fully functional Bright Idea van has a gas engine that would kick on so that it could drive further. So the idea here is that it's an EV similar to a Chevy Volt where it runs on EV Power for about 30.

Mi He said about 30 Mi is what the range would have been new and then when it runs low the gas engine kicks on. it turns into front wheeel d drive and you can go much further and he also said that in EV mode as well or hybrid mode I think it was when you mash the accelerator pedal, the gas engine will kick in to get you going a little bit faster. so it should go faster than 45. so it's it's limited I don't know but I got to figure that out I Can't sleep at night knowing that I got this gas engine to run in the first video where I first got this van and I've never been able to get it to run ever again and this is when I need it the most.

So I have told the old CEO that as soon as I'm done and I figured out why this gas engine won't run and I fix it and I'm driving this thing and I'm I'm going to go to Like Home Depot and pick stuff up and treat it like a delivery van. as soon as I'm done. Done Done! we're going to hop on a zoom call and we're going to talk about him buying it. So I got to come up with what I want for it I mean it cost a couple million dollars to build 13 years ago I think I'm going to ask for a million dollar I paid ,500 I have probably 1,500 into it I'm just going to shoot for the stars here.

We're going to ask for a million and see what he says on that Zoom call. so definitely stay tuned for that. We're going to fix it. We're going to try and sell it I Don't know what's going to happen, but either way, thank you guys so much so far for watching this crazy space.

Van series I Know this is definitely a weird one, but it's been a ton of fun. It's been a little scary with all the batteries and smoke and stuff like that, but either way, if you enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up. Share the video with your friends, subscribe if you haven't already and I will see all of you in the next video which is actually going to be on the DeLorean that that thing is it's getting close and because I figured I'd never and because I fig and because I never figured on this module like half the cells were totally dead and the other ones were at like this mod. we're using our tin Stps.

but yeah, if you look in here 2010 Bright Idea no If you look in here on here to give us a little protection. Oh I didn't plug it in oh after charging after charging the my plan was to install this anyway so this is going to accept H Well I have this plugged I have this plugged into a 15 amp AC current yeah I have this plugged into a 15 amp a I have this plugged into a I have the I have the van plugged into a 15 amp uh outlet and there you have it. j7 and there you have it. j7 te.