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Swap Accord Hybrid Motor into Insight?

7K views 9 replies 8 participants last post by  messie 
#1 ·
2017+ Accord Hybrid share the same i-MMD system with the 2019 Insight No? And it's a hair quicker than Insight for 0-60.

Is it because of the larger ICE? Or does it has a larger electric motor? If it's latter, cost and labor aside, why not swap the motor from Accord onto Insight?
 
#2 ·
The Accord has the same type of system, but the ICE, battery pack and electric motors are different. The Accord also has four regen levels compared to the Insight's three. The downside is that the Accord is bigger and heavier.

I'm not sure swapping components between the two is possible. Even if it were, you'd surely void your warranty. If you could pull it off, your MPG numbers would drop. At that point, you'd realize you should have just gotten the Accord.
 
#4 ·
While it sounds like a great idea, the Accord has a larger HV battery. If you had the Accord electric motor in an Insight, it would get you worse EV range, and much worse gas mileage overall. I'm sure if Honda could, they'd use the same electric motor across their entire line of hybrids to save costs.
 
#8 ·
Any electrical powertrain mod is pointless until you get at least a 10kw battery pack installed. I looked at getting a few cell packs from an accord hybrid to add in the trunk where the spare tire would go but honestly you'd need more capacity and I hadn't checked if the voltages are the same. Ideally a Tesla style cell module would be the best but I can't see adding hundreds of lbs of batteries being worth it unless you were able to ditch the ice engine completely...

One mod I still haven't dug into is getting a volt meter and having a constant measurement of the battery pack voltage...I think that'd be a fun mod so it's more accurate than the battery bars on the gauge cluster...
 
#9 ·
2017+ Accord Hybrid share the same i-MMD system with the 2019 Insight No? And it's a hair quicker than Insight for 0-60.

Is it because of the larger ICE? Or does it has a larger electric motor? If it's latter, cost and labor aside, why not swap the motor from Accord onto Insight?
Swapping an Accord electric motor is not feasible as the motor is built into the drive unit / gearbox / transaxle whatever you call it. It's not a stand alone unit in its own housing where you could bolt on /off.

6273


Second, a hybrid motor swap would be of insane difficulty.. not only is there a motor swap, there would also be a inverters involved and larger cabling and it would have to fit all in. It's easier just gutting the hybrid power train to start with a clean slate and installing pure electric like the Teslonda

A hybrid motor swap isn't like the days where you swap a H series engine from the Accord SiR or Prelude Vtec into a vanilla Accord with an F series engine.
 
#10 ·
If there was one change I could make to the Insight, it would have been the Accord's powertrain. Presumably this would be at a slight detriment to fuel economy even with a light foot, but it's hard to say by how much. I'd imagine the additional cost would be primarily due to the larger battery, as everything else would likely be fairly negligible.

I really would like to know if the "transmission" is actually different between the two. Yeah, I know they're rated differently but this isn't necessarily due to the drive motor and starter/generator being different, but rather based on how much power can be extracted from the engine+generator (rated ~100HP) and the charge/discharge rate of the battery pack. So while the drive motor might technically be good for, say, 200HP, it'll be rated for whatever electrical power could actually be delivered to it.

It's also a possibility (without further info proving otherwise) that the inverter used is the same between the models, with perhaps the Insight not having all the power transistors populated on the PCB (or whatever they're mounted to). I'm hoping that in the future we'll be seeing detailed teardowns online from the various models that are using this system so that we'll know what's what.

I suspect that one day, our most realistic modification will be in the form of a battery pack that supports higher charge/discharge rate (which the drive motor can support), along with requisite mods to other supporting hardware such as the power feed wires and battery-facing power electronics in the inverter. The biggest challenge might just end up being software modification, as it is on pretty much every other car now a days.
 
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