Abstract The initial findings and performance of a prototype electric vehicle conversion of a famous Malaysian city car; the perodual kancil, is presented in this paper. The 660cc, three cylinder carbureted engine rated at 31Hp (22.1KW) was replaced with a 48-72V series wound DC motor rated at 8KW continuous and 20KW peak. The battery pack consists of eight T105 Trojan 6V, 225Ah deep cycle lead acid battery which builds up a voltage of 48V. In addition to this, an ultracapacitor module (165F, 48V) is connected in parallel using high power contactors in order to investigate the increase in performance criteria such as acceleration, range, battery life etc which have been proven in various literatures via simulation studies. A data acquisition system is setup in order to collect real world driving data from the electric vehicle on the fly along a fixed route. Analysis of collected driving data is done using MATLAB software and comparison of performance of the electric vehicle with and without ultracapacitor module is made.