Corbin Sparrow 1

This was my first Corbin Sparrow, purchased relatively cheap off Ebay.  I had to replace the batteries (of course) when I got it, but it did work quite well.  I used it to commute 27 miles each way to work.  (I could charge at work.)  That's when I found that 27 miles each way at highway speeds "uses up" a battery pack pretty fast.  It was only about 3 months before the batteries could no longer get me to work.

I then bought $5000 of LiIon batteries from ThunderSky corp as part of a group buy.  I did a LOT of work building a Battery Management System for them before I used them in the Sparrow.  Turns out that ThunderSky sent us garbage cells, and would not replace them.  They lost capacity quickly, and never did meet their specs.

Next experiment was trying to use BB600 NiCd batteries.  I ended up building a Battery Monitoring (not Management) system just to warn me if any cells were going dead.  This version of the car worked ok, but really didn't have any more range that using the original Optima Yellowtops for the Sparrow.  It was about this time my shop building burned down with the Sparrow inside.

More photos of the Sparrow and my work on it are in my Gallery.