2000 Honda Insight. Whatever.

Yeah, really hard to argue with that logic. Looks like you have a new project car? I say turbo. Ford says those are "Eco", right?

K swap. Or Ecoboost swap.

Or LS swap.

Rotary swap?

Sell it to me for cheap? Company car went away..

I don't actually mind the tiny motor in there now, I just wish there was a way to yank all of the hybrid stuff and have it pass emissions. My gut feeling is that this motor is odd enough that I can't just swap in a different transmission and ECU and have it pass emissions.

In reply to Dusterbd13:

Sent you a PM.

I think there is a way to get it to 'pass' emissions with the IMA bypassed. IIRC it involves use of an arduino to fake some bcm & mcm signals.

Edit: found the info but haven't watched it all the way through youtube how to

Just watched that, thanks. I'm not familiar at all with Arduino, if I could find something that could walk me through it I could do it, but the YouTube video isn't enough. Need to do more searching.

If you end up doing any kind of swap or de-hybridization of it i will buy your take-off parts back.

I'm all for whatever. It's a cool enough shell that it doesn't matter what goes in it.

If this forum can swap a J32 into a Fit, I'm pretty sure we can put it in an Insight.

A swap is possible, but that means the car continues to sit while I get other things done first. I'm getting to the point where I don't want to store a pile of 'someday' projects. I still have to fix the R63, build the kitchen, get more things done on the Grosh and get Fergus back on the road. It's all a little overwhelming.

Are people swapping hybrid drivetrains into older chassis yet? It would be neat to see 1st-gen Insight stuff inside of a CVCC, N600, or similar...

You did an amazing job cleaning it up and getting it running again. Sounds like it might not even require that much more work to be 100% (new batteries?).

I think you should sell it, honestly. Do you think you can at least get your money back out of it?

If this forum can swap a J32 into a Fit, I'm pretty sure we can put it in an Insight.

Already been done.. Mid-mounted, too.

I know all about too many someday projects. My Insight has sadly become one of them as well.

"Are people swapping hybrid drivetrains into older chassis yet? It would be neat to see 1st-gen Insight stuff inside of a CVCC, N600, or similar..."

One of the things i thought about doing when i had this car (and thus two Insights) was swapping the gearing from a normal Civic trans in and making the car actually decent to drive without the hybrid bits. The only thing really keeping an Insight from being a 'normal' car with the hybrid bits off/broken/missing is the insanely tall gearing. You would have to leave enough hardware in place for the DC-DC converter to work, though, or you'd need to fab up an alternator for the 12v system.

My friend and I just bought one of these and flipped it! The car was great, but it threw a battery code about 3 months into ownership. We ended up pulling the pack and replacing the bad batteries. If you decide to replace yours, it really isn't that hard or costly. We used a crappy R/C car li-ion/ni-cad battery charger discharger from Fry's and tested each battery. It took about 2 weeks to go through all of them, but was pretty low effort (just hook one up and wait 4 hours). In the end, only 4 sticks were bad, and we replaced them with cheapy used that someone had tested on ebay. Total cost was about 200 including charger, but we returned it ;). You could also just try wiring up a grid charger and seeing if the pack comes back to life.

In reply to bavery:

I really should attack it with a charger and diagnose things before I quit on it. If noting else it's worth quite a lot more if I get it working properly again.

bavery wrote: We used a crappy R/C car li-ion/ni-cad battery charger discharger from Fry's and tested each battery. It took about 2 weeks to go through all of them, but was pretty low effort (just hook one up and wait 4 hours). In the end, only 4 sticks were bad, and we replaced them with cheapy used that someone had tested on ebay. Total cost was about 200 including charger, but we returned it ;).

Did I understand that correctly ? You bought a charger at Fry's, used it two weeks and returned it ?

There are some $20 RC battery analyzers on Amazon i've heard of people using. The cost of DIY'ing battery analysis is coming WAY down from the time my first Insight started failing. There are 20 sticks. If you want to spend $100 you can buy 5 analyzers and get through the stick testing process much quicker.

I think doing your own testing is the only decent way without paying a ton for someone else's labor. I bought a whole pack worth of 'tested/known good' sticks for fairly cheap from some guy, balance charged them, and it still only worked briefly. I have two packs worth of sticks left so i'm fairly certain that when i buy the analyzers and do the legwork i'll be able to slap something functional together. Eventually.

This car is officially for sale. $1200. FS post in the $2017 Classifieds here.

I can't make up my mind. The title has been transferred and is on the way, so the sale is halted. It seemed a shame to not even try to fix the battery.
Out it comes! Lots of screws. 20 big ones and 20 little ones. One end of the batteries. Take this off the other end. And another 40 screws.

The sticks slide right out. But be careful because a couple of them have thermocouples stuck to them. I messed up and pulled one out of the shrink-wrap. I'll have to fix that.
Different color sticks are the first indication this isn't a stock pack, these stickers are the next indication. 20 sticks. All of them have voltage, which is good? 2.1V to 3.8V. now to get a charger/discharger and see what I can do.

And we're charging. This is a totally different world from what I usually deal with automotively. Charging at 5.5A, discharging at 2.0A, we'll see how the charger reads capacity after a charge/discharge/charge cycle for all of the sticks. In theory they're all deep discharged at 2.5-3.5V for all of the sticks. Very big table of numbers incoming. This is going to take a while.

I did not at all expect those cell packs to be tubes. I figured they would be boxy chunks with a big connector like the Fusion hybrid ones. Big cells, I guess.

cool seeing this... let me know if you need any help with the spreadsheet

In reply to ssswitch:

The car is a 2000, so the tech is maybe 1997 at best. Remember, Honda build their motor assist system the way they did because the batteries required for a car to run more than a very short distance on battery alone didn't exist. Well, it kind of did, but not within the weight/size requirements for the project. The whole thing is kind of crude and fascinating compared to modern plug in hybrids.

Thanks for sharing. I am watching this just out of pure curiosity.