After draining the ETX18L, I decided to get a more dedicated battery solution. Antigravity’s new automotive batteries have huge cold cranking amps while also being significantly lighter than most batteries. I opted for the 24ah battery at 8.5lbs, but wound up with the 30ah battery at 11.7lbs instead. The Deka ETX18L it replaces weighs about 18lbs, so this is a marginal 5-7lb weight savings off a great location in the car.

The best feature of this battery is its restart technology. The battery will detect if it has been drained to a point just before it wouldn’t be able to turn the engine on and shuts off – until you push the restart button. The battery will release the rest of the juice for you to turn over the car. This means I never need to worry about getting stranded or draining the battery again. While home, I will still obviously connect to the trickle, as it will be months between drives for the Evo. These cars require a special trickle charger designed for their batteries, which I also picked up.

One other thing on the electrical side – I finally had the amplifiers removed from the car – since the car has an aftermarket stereo, all the sound system stuff still works. I may get to a point of wanting to remove sound from the car one day, but I doubt it and for now, all the sound still works well. The amplifiers removed from the car weighed 2.8lbs each, so including wiring I dropped about 6lbs from that area of the car