[Stevenanto]

Good day everyone,

I’m a newbie at this. I recently bought a mustang with smart drive for my son,he does drive it in the house for now but in the summer he will be using this outside. He’s been driving it since he was 16 months old, he’s now 18 months and he actually knows how to steer and control lol.

Anyways back to my original question, I currently have two power wheels 12v batteries. I know that if I wire them in parallel or series it will either increase power or drive time.

Currently I would like to increase the drive time, how would I go about wiring it? If I wire it a certain way would I be able to charge both batteries at once? Is there currently any diagrams online? Has anybody done this to this type of mustang before?

[Bigmac41288b]

Parallel increases AH (Runtime)
Series increases VOLTS (Speed)
Not sure if the smart drive can handle a voltage increase but runtime increase shouldn’t hurt.
I usually just run one battery at a time and keep the others on charge when I’m close to home. I do have one or two with a couple onboard batteries to increase runtime for walks to the park and such when I don’t have extra batteries close by.

[lexx0116]

Currently I would like to increase the drive time, how would I go about wiring it? If I wire it a certain way would I be able to charge both batteries at once? Is there currently any diagrams online? Has anybody done this to this type of mustang before?

For charging, use parallel setup so both batteries will be charged at the same time.

[Stevenanto]

Thank you both so much for your help and advice. Much appreciated.

[Hammer-fm]

In case you hadn't already decided this: based on the experiences posted here with other circuit-board based vehicles, I wouldn't recommend trying series (24V) connection on this (smart ride) one. It's unlikely to be designed to handle that voltage. You've got at least a year or so before you need more speed, hopefully

[Stevenanto]

Thanks hammer.

I’m guessing if I would upgrade to 24v, I would need a new motor

[Hammer-fm]

The concern isn't just the motor -- it's the speed controller board inside. The regular/crude/basic Power Wheels (without SmartDrive) just have switches and wiring, and the main problem with running higher voltage there is that you eventually overload those and they burn out. That is a mechanical failure and won't happen immediately unless you do something really ridiculous. The motors are typically the first thing to go since they're where most of the heat builds up.

However, with the SmartDrive speed controller, the board is likely designed specifically for 12V usage and the semiconductor components inside will fail basically immediately if you apply 24V. I haven't seen any pictures of the actual board (I'd love if someone could post a high-res one), but I would expect the budget-cutters would have squashed any over-engineering. I'd expect 16 or 25V capacitors (24V batteries run ~13.2V at full charge), 20V FETs, etc, for cost reasons. It's possible they're using an off-the-shelf design that IS designed for higher voltages but it isn't very likely.

So I'd expect running 24V on that ride (reliably) would necessitate replacing the motors, but much more as well. There are other options: eg. it will probably work ok with a faster 12V motor (eg. the $3 Nichibo 550-series 23k RPM one I posted in the gearbox/motors section), and that could get you a ~50% speed boost with the same 12V input.