Saturday, April 18, 2009

Researching a Paint Job

One of the downsides of a home-EV conversion is that most of them don't have air conditioning. The AC tends to suck precious power from the battery and adds extra weight to the car while taking up space that could be used for batteries.

Thus, it's often best to get a white (or light colored) donor vehicle to repel the sun's rays during the summer. The conversion vehicle I purchased is dark metallic blue, which get's really hot inside, even on a mild day in the sun.

So I called a bunch of different car painting places to determine the cost of painting the car white. Much to my dismay, the places that got good local reviews wanted at least $3500 to paint the car. The local Maaco paint shop (which got horrible reviews) wanted $550 for their bottom-of-the-line paint option.

In short, I guess I'll be rolling down the windows and using a reflective shield under the glass for the near future. Note to self: purchase a white conversion car next time...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Why not do the famous "$50 paint job"? I did it on my beater civic and looks alot better than my daily driver civic now. I used Brightside Polyurethane Marine Topside paint in white. The paint looks like it was factory sprayed, and this was about 2 years ago. Used high density foam rollers and it looks awesome. Just a suggestion of course.

Andrew said...

I moved to Texas from Seattle and had a white truck with a dark red interior. It got so hot it was unbearable. What really helped was keeping the direct sunlight out.

Beep Boop said...

Tint your windows - something like 60% of heating is due to the sun shining through the window glass. One of the last couple car and driver magazines had mentioned this in an article about California's proposed ban on black cars.