Solar Powered Go Kart

In this project we took a go kart frame designed to take a gas engine and made it electric and solar powered. It uses a 48V SLA battery pack with a EMC-ME0909 Brushed DC motor, 0-5k Ohm Pot Box throttle, Alltrax 4834 controller and an Astronergy 5612M 190W solar panel to charge the pack. Runs great with a top speed of ~20-25mph, and because of the solar panel a potentially infinite range!

A full description of this project can be seen at www.therenewableyou.com.

A description of all of the parts, the cost of the parts and where we go the parts from is available as a PDF at this link here. The PDF also includes some notes about the electrical design. The entire project cost about $2500, including shipping on the parts. Some welding and machine work was required.

The baseline of the electrical system is from the Alltrax electrical diagram for EVs, at this link here. It has wall chargers but the primary source of energy is the solar panel on the roof of the kart, which is always on and always charging.

I hope this inspires others to realize that there is no need to wait, the time is now to build solar powered EVs that run off the sun!

This project was sponsored by The Brian Robertson Foundation and Quickgit.com.

Engineers Who Built It:

Will Bagienski , Adam Plesniak , Luis Torres