Future Proofing a Classic 80mpg Hybrid

5 Speed manual, aluminum chassis hatchback that gets 80mpg?! Honda quietly made that happen from 2000-2006 with this beloved dork-mobile.

Earlier this year I accepted a job offer with a 30 mile highway commute. Since my only street legal vehicle was a 1/2 ton pickup, I had a great excuse to get myself an Insight! It's a 2001 with a worn out 5 speed manual transmission and an Arduino bypass in place of a hybrid battery. These two issues eventually plague every Honda Insight. Poorly designed synchros cause these transmissions to grind gears as early as 100,000 miles, and by this point the original batteries held no real charge. Mine had both problems.

I set about to solve both problems and resurrect this car from its impending death sentence.

Transmission Rebuild

Even after just 100,000 miles the gearbox was grinding on downshifts. Unless I double clutched and nailed the shift it would grind going to 2nd over 20mph. I removed the transmission, rebuilt it with new bearings, seals, and modified its synchronizers to solve the 2nd gear grind. While in there I replaced all three motor mounts, frayed shifter cables, valve cover gasket... Overall, it was about a 3 day job. I removed the transmission on day 1, rebuilt it the 2nd, and installed on the 3rd. Nothing about the job was exceptionally hard, just took attention to detail for the rebuild. There's a lot of opportunity to make mistakes. Thankfully I managed to get it together without any major ones. Woot!

Lithium Conversion

Following the transmission rebuild, I drove the car for about a month with no hybrid battery before I just couldn't take it anymore. I broke down and bought a Linsight.org setup.

This kit allows you to piece together lithium batteries from late model Hondas, mount them in your battery caddie with some modifications, and control them from an Arduino Mega mounted on their custom PCB. It makes the car faster, more reliable, and more efficient than ever before.

Much like the transmission, this isn't a particularly difficult job but it's high stakes and requires attention to detail. Many hours were spent triple checking wiring diagrams so I didn't blow myself up.

Once assembled, I grid charged the pack off of 110V house power and let the cells balance for a while just to be safe.

The introduction of a battery brought this car back to life. It has auto stop/start, lightning fast engine starts on the IMA motor, decent regenerative braking, loads more torque to help the tiny ICE out, and can be charged from a household outlet.

I've done many odds and ends such as a sound system, dashboard fixes from a junkyard car, HVAC panel lcd replacement, instrument cluster replacement, window tint, hard wired dash cam & radar detector (hah).

This car is slow, noisy, rides like garbage, won't impress anybody, and by many accounts is a turd - but it's MY turd <3