openinverter forum

What is the best inverter for an EV Project? Right now I have a complete Leaf motor with an inverter and charger. Seeing a lot of videos on Youtube (Damien Maguire) talking about Toyota inverters, Leaf, Ford Fusion, and many more.

I am looking for an inverter that will grow with my leaf EV setup, something that will allow me to get more power and torque from the motor in the future. Yes, I know that the inverter is not the only playing factor in getting more power, and I also would need to upgrade my batteries for more voltage as well.

Also, I see a lot of people are going for the Tesla 10Kw chargers, but the Toyota inverter is also a charger in itself.

I really would like to hear everyone's opinions and also if they want to send me links for more reading that would be fine as well.

Thank you in advance.

I think the Leaf stack is a great start. Not sure which generation you have but all of them can be controlled via CAN and will deliver stock power. If you want more power later you can get a replacement logic board. E.g. the Gen2 Leaf inverter gives you 80 kW stock and almost 140 kW with the openinverter board.

For other generations boards exist but aren't readily available.

The charger is controlled with some simple CAN commands that ZombieVerter implements. Only downside: it hardly fits into any car...

Buy a Thunderstruck VCU for $500 and worry about increasing torque after you've put a few thousand miles on the finished conversion. There will be more options in the future.

the (80kw) leaf inverter can be tuned with the openinverter board to about 130kw, both the 110kw and 160 kw inverters can be swapped in place.

the leaf stack makes things very easy and prebuilt, if you can fit the full tower. i think the max the leaf charger is 6.6kwh.