Fakta till elmotordriven off-road kart

A Harbor Freight 6.5HP gas motor might be fun, but a 6.5HP electric motor is nearly 5000 watts (746W =
1HP) and will rip your face off and melt your batteries. Sweet. You can use much smaller HP rated electric
motor than you would a gas motor, and have the same amount of fun.

Batterier
use a sealed lead acid battery (SLA). These are great, and probably what I'd use. You'll be tempted to buy
the small ones- they come in tiny, affordable sizes that are complete crap for kart use. You want the big
ones. At minimum, 12Ah for a small scooter-motor kart ridden by your eight year old, and 18-30Ah or
more for bigger karts. More battery is better 99% of the time. Until you get to the point that your kart has
so much battery that it weighs the same as a brontosaurus, more batteries are going to help.
There are two kind of batteries here- starting batteries and deep-discharge batteries. A car battery has to
supply an enormous amount of current for about three seconds when you start the car, then spends the
rest of its life either being charged by the alternator, or supplying a microscopic amount of current to
keep your car radio presets in memory. Car batteries are built for this duty, and if you try to use them on
a kart, you'll have fun for about ten minutes, then the batteries will die- and not just being discharged,
they'll be permanently damaged. Don't try this unless you want to be disappointed or will be happy with a
short-lived, expensive project. If you've got a stack of car batteries you could use them for testing, but
that's about it. Also, car batteries contain liquid sulfuric acid, which can spill out more easily than you
think.
The only car batteries that are good for this are Optima Yellowtop or Bluetop batteries, or similar. They
don't have liquid acid inside and are made for deep discharge. These are great batteries to use if you can
afford them. You can find other lead-acid batteries called AGM, or Absorbed Glass Mat.

Okay, what are Ah? Ah stands for Amp-hours. If a battery is rated at 18Ah, it can put out one
amp for 18 hours, or if you ignore the Peukert effect I just explained, 18 amps for one hour. Or
9 amps for 2 hours.

Some basic stuff to round it out:

Wiring something in parallel means + to +, - to -. You'll get the same voltage, but more current and
capacity. Wiring something in series mean + to -, and then you take your power off of the other + and -.
You get more voltage (it adds) but no extra current or capacity.

Power is measured in watts, and volts times amps equals watts. You can also go backwards- a 500 watt
motor at 24v will need 500W divided by 24V = 20.8A theoretically but in practice will need more, due to
efficiency losses. 70% is a fair estimate for motor efficiency, so really it'd be around 20.8 divided 70%
(0.70) = 29.7A.

Here's your recipe, pre-overkilled:

Get an electric golf cart motor, it will probably be 36v rated and lots of power. Get a 48v-rated golf cart
controller and four Optima Yellowtop batteries. Strap this all to a frame of your preferred format and go
have fun.
Want to make a fun little electric kart for your kid that's outgrown his powerwheels? (Or are you skinny?)
Get one of those 900W scooter motors and run it at 36V instead of 24V, and use the 18Ah SLAs that are
common for wheelchairs.