First photo is rather busy.
This is the front of the tray of the ute, viewed from behind. You can see the main battery box before assembly. The section under the window is corrugated, so I cut a section of Formply to cover it. (Formply is a thick, tough plywood). In a crash, batteries would want to move forwards, and the wooden board would help to distribute the force over a large area. The board is covered with a 6mm thick blue foam, for heat insulation. You can see the rear of one of my emergency stop switches on the board, with the red button accessible from inside the cabin.
The floor is also covered with blue foam, for both heat and electric insulation. On top of the foam are two boards, one brown and one black. These support the batteries front and back, leaving a space underneath them. The boards have strips of thin plywood on them, to help key into the particular shape of the batteries. The batteries fit nice and snug, and shouldn’t be able to move at all.
In the space between the boards is my battery heating system. In the middle is an aluminium plate (looks blue because of the reflection) with a heater element inside. This is regulated by a controller out of shot on the right, which runs on 230VAC whenever the car is plugged in. Four copper pipes run underneath the aluminium plate, so that water can be pumped around to take the heat away. The copper pipes are joined to rubber pipes (garden hose), which run underneath the vehicle to the two bottom battery boxes. There is a small 12V water pump in line, which runs from a plug pack transformer, also running whenever there is 230VAC present.
