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New Speed Record For Hybrid Cars
prostoalex writes "According to CarPages, Toyota Prius set a new world record for hybrid vehicles. It 'set the mark at 130.794 mph on the three-mile short course using a standard Hybrid Synergy Drive power-train - a mixture of 1.5 litre petrol engine and an electric motor.'"
actually, it's the only hybrid ever entered. In fact, they had to convince the people to open a new category in order to allow the vehicle, because it has more than one 'engine'. IIRC, it may also have been because the other 'engine' (elec. motor) doesn't 'use conventional fuel'.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
This car was not exactly "standard", as the summary claims.
"An engineering group from Toyota Motorsport in the USA prepared the car by changing the gear ratios (4.32:1 to 3.2:1) and increasing the inverter voltage from 500 to 550 volts. A transmission cooling system was added to decrease the temperature of the inverter and electric motor to maximise efficiency. Ambient temperature on the salt flats was nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit with nearly 100 degrees humidity. Ice was added between runs to keep the system cool.
The interior of the car was stripped to save weight, a roll cage added for safety and the whole car lowered by five inches to improve the aerodynamics for this highly specialised record attempt. Even the 26 in front and 25 in rear tyres were made especially by Goodyear."
With that in mind, hybrids have a long way to go.
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An engineering group from Toyota Motorsport in the USA prepared the car by changing the gear ratios (4.32:1 to 3.2:1) and increasing the inverter voltage from 500 to 550 volts. A transmission cooling system was added to decrease the temperature of the inverter and electric motor to maximise efficiency. Ambient temperature on the salt flats was nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit with nearly 100 degrees humidity. Ice was added between runs to keep the system cool.
The interior of the car was stripped to save weight, a roll cage added for safety and the whole car lowered by five inches to improve the aerodynamics for this highly specialised record attempt. Even the 26 in front and 25 in rear tyres were made especially by Goodyear.
This can help crush myths (and not-so-myths) about Hybrids being slow and laggy.
Though they are not built for speed, most people would like to know that their car can easily go 80. Further, Hybrid racing is an interesting idea. Virtually all types of races are about getting good speed under certain limiting conditions... what an interesting limit to be up against.
What, did it go off a cliff?
Unknown host pong.
Where hybrid and pure electric cars really need to improve is the all important ability to get up to speed quickly and smoothly, and it doesn't appear that this car really addressed this critical issue.
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Thank you.
The fantastic acceleration that in line wheel electric drive can potentialy deliver would make for some very exciting racing.
Let's face it, cool car ideas come from people who love cars the way most /.ers love processor overclocking, water-cooling, and case mods. Convincing a wider audience that tweaking a hybrid will make it jump up and dance is never a bad idea.
Of course, as a side note, the industry's approach to hybrid autos is flat out wrong. Railroad trains are very efficient, well-proven hybrid designs: their diesel engines are always running at the most efficient level, and their momentum is provided entirely by electric motors. Tres spiffy.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
...will probably not have a problem meeting or beating this record when it hits the streets. Its got a 255hp V6 that gets 37/29 mpg (highway/city). 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid info
The car at the starting point, gas engine reved up and getting louder, charging up the electric system...
A slight yellow glow enveloping the car...
Rocks and dirt flying up in a whirlwind around it...
Driver screaming SUPER HYBRID SPEED WAVE!!! and darting off in a cloud of dust...
Um... this car was Japanese right?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Actually, that myth will likely be futher crushed with the release of a retrofittable hybrid electric vehicle kit, such as the one being developed by Ecolectric Technology (www.ecolectrictechnology.com). Then, you can take any vehicle, retrofit it to be hybrid electric, race it, and claim a new world record. The inherent increase in low-end torque (and thus acceleration) will probably make it as desirable a modification as turbochargers or superchargers on any performance vehicle.
A hybrid McLaren might be pretty nice if you as me...
You seem to be forgetting a very basic marketting effect: look at rally racing cars in europe these days: most cars entered are mom-and-pop 4-door sedans, or bargain basement 2-door econoboxes that are strategically souped up and modified for racing by the manufacturers themselves (if not simply a racing chassis with a fake body of the model in question).
That way, mom and pop's teenage son fresh out of getting the driver's license, and young adults, associate the shite econobox with the powerful race cars they see on TV and they buy it.
So guess what? hybrid manufacturers are doing the same. The least thing they want is for their vehicles to be associated with being a mature person's choice for economy and savings. So they race hybrids, even if it makes no sense, to make them sexy to young male drivers. Plain and simple.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
130.794 mph should be more than enough for everybody.
(ooops....did I say that?)
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
You should check these guys out...
The drag race pure electric cars/motorcycles...
http://www.nedra.com/
For Honda's hybrid systems, yes.
For Toyota's, no.
1. The powertrain is more efficient, and lighter, than a normal cars. (No complex transmission, just a simple Planetary gear.)
2. I know when I'm going down the freeway, I'm not going a perfectly constant 55 mph, nor am I travelling on a perfectly level road. (Only if your power load NEVER changes does the battery system not matter.) Quite often, I'm running on battery power alone, in fact, even at 60+ mph. (My record is going down a very slight incline, I accelerated from 61 to 63 mph on battery power alone. In my gas-only car, 'coasting' in neutral on the exact same stretch, the car settles at 56 mph.)
3. The entire 'hybrid' system adds less than 100 pounds of weight to the car, and from what I've read, the simpler transmission and engine (no alternator, no starter) actually saves about 100 pounds, so it ends up even.
I agree that setting a speed record in a hybrid is silly. But the hybrid components don't cause HARM, either.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It's either a typo , actually referring to 100% humdity (crikey!) or they mean the wet bulb temperature was nearly 100 degrees.
For those who say "WTF is wet bulb temp?" it goes like this:
You have two thermometers.
One has (typically) a sock/tube of cloth over it's sensing bulb that has the bottom of the tube in a bit of water, so that it's wet. It's the "wet bulb"
You also have a dry bulb. (i.e. a normal thermometer hanging out in the air)
Now, at 100% humidity, the wet bulb will be at the same temperature as the dry bulb, as the water on the wet bulb does not evaporate (as the air is already saturated). As the humidity decreases towards zero percent, the wet bulb will have a progressively lower temperature compared to the dry bulb, due to the cooling effect of the evaporating water. Look the two (wet and dry) temperatures up in a handy chart that someone has already calculated, and ta-da! Humidity in percent.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
If you still think diesels stink, think again. In my country, even BMW sales are over 80% diesel.
A nice example of modern Diesel engineering is the VW Phaeton V10 Tdi. It has 313 HP and, while officially electronically limited to 250 kph (155 mph), was tested at over 290 kph (180 mph) when it was released one year ago. It does 0-100 kph (0-62 mph) in 6.9 seconds (not too shabby for a 3 metric ton car). And yet, it still gets 27.7 mpg.
To put it in a nutshell, I don't quite get what this hybrid frenzy is about. Soot emissions used to be a problem, but the latest cars get a soot filter that tackles it. On the other hand, batteries are an additional weight, and once at the end of their lives, are an environmental nightmare.
Or could it be all about oil companies being too lazy to invest into cleaner gas-oil (like they sell in Europe)?
If you're an American looking for a new car, I strongly suggest you gave the few imported diesel VWs, Audis or Mercedeses a try before you go the gasoline route.
...I'm sure this record will easily be crushed by the new Honda Accord hybrid. 240 hp 3.0L engine, plus electric motor, does 0-60 in under 7 seconds IIRC. With the speed limiter removed (and no other mods like ice cooling, ferchrissake), I'll bet it does 150 mph easy.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Hybrids aren't all about pure fuel economy. They're also about pollution. If you do a lot of city driving, you will pollute less. In your roommate's example, the 38 mpg city compares to between 55 and 60 mpg city. So for the driving that most people do(city driving) the Prius gets about 1.5 times the mpg and pollutes less as well. The EPA rates the Prius at 60 mpg. The 55 was from a blog.
The rest of your comments sound an awful lot like fud.
My Insight can go 115 mph. And this is stock without being stripped, having a roll cage, or any other modifications.
It has a 995 cc 3 cylinder gas engine putting out about 63 hp. In series it has a 13 hp electric engine. Because the 2 engines have different hp/rpm curves, it puts out 68 hp. But it only weighs 1850 pounds.
The car goes 0-60 in 10.5 seconds, has really good handling, and drives kind of like a go kart. The only real bad thing is there isn't much sound insulation, so there is a fair amount of road noise.
But even going 90 mph, it can still click off about 50 mpg. At 45 mph, you can get it into 'lean burn' mode and get a bit over 100 mpg.
It's a really good commuter car, has a lifetime mileage of 56 mpg (would be a lot higher if I drove a bit more conservatively and didn't live in a hilly area).
Also, there are some electric cars that go 0-60 in 3.6 seconds IIRC.
As for the amount of energy to dispose of a car, my previous citation says
The 120 GJ for manufacture includes all manufacturing costs. I'd say that implictly includes delivery to the customer. In the case of the 800kg car I drive most frequently, it was shipped by sea about 8 or 10 000 miles and then delivered by vehicle transporter about 200 miles. I'd say that's pretty negligible (sea transport uses orders of magnitude less energy per mile than road transport).I stand by my original observation that it's wrong to say that it costs more energy to replace a light truck with a hybrid car than it saves in using a hybrid car, but would still point out that that seems to me to be a straw man. In terms of actual choice when replacing a vehicle, then from an energy efficiency point of view, the hybrid wins. Whether it wins as compared to a high efficiency diesel is a moot point. As 9 million cars are replaced each year, along with 8 million trucks (SUVs & minivans are counted in this category), it seems that concentrating on halving the energy emissions of approximately 1/13th of the fleet would make a significant impact, along with encouraging end of life cars to be taken out of the economy slightly faster. When you consider that new cars are likely to be driven much higher mileages, then the figures look better still.
In short, it's not a magic bullet, but it's a good start.
One of the things that always has me kinda scratching my head is why nobody's making a diesel hybrid.
It would seem that with diesel's natual tendancy towards lower engine RPMs (and with most diesel engines delivering peak torque around 2500 RPM), it would make a natural fit towards a design like Toyota's (generating power which is applied to the wheels by electric motors).
In fact, that is how railroad locomotives work.
Plus, there are all kinds of advantages to using a diesel engine, including the fact that the raw materials for diesel fuel need not just be petroleum.. diesel fuel has been engineered from coal and vegetable oil, and can theoretically (although I personally haven't seen practicle examples) be made from methane.
If VW can make a turbodiesel New Beetle that can average 40-50MPG out of just swapping the gasoline engine for a diesel one, what could they do if they engineered a smaller diesel + electric motor combo?