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Modified Prius gets up to 180 Miles Per Gallon
shupp writes "The NY Times (free reg. required) reports in that some folks are not content with the no-plug-in rule that both Honda and Toyota endorse. By modifying a Prius so that it can be plugged in, Ron Gremban of CalCars states 'I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon'. The article also reports that 'EnergyCS, a small company that has collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 mpg, and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power.'"
anyone think that the oil companies might have something to do with this not being adopted on a larger scale?
This is misleading. Is it 180mpg sustained? On a 10gal tank of gas, will it go 1800 miles??
Obviously not. Adding extra batteries and charging them up will let the car initially give better "mileage"; heck, in the first 20-30 miles it may give infinite mpg because it is not burning any fuel. But the true measure of mpg is sustained travel over a long distance under somewhat realistic conditions (like city driving or highway driving).
it's about time. you'll be seeing more Bio-Diesel / Hybrids on the road very soon.
When something like this happens it becomes amazingly clear that an industry can die. This type of car shows how quickly a hybrid car could kill the the heavy dependence on gas, but the electric companies go crazy. It's a fine line of balance, but it all comes down to politics and everyone knows it.
It's idiotic to give a "miles per gallon" figure when you don't include the cost of producing the electricity you use to recharge the battery.
Has anyone noticed the date at the top of the article? This should've been Slashdotted yesterday.
And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit. We need real numbers to know if it is, and they are not given.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What is the cost of the energy required to charge the batteries?
What is the cost of disposing of the batteries once they have become unusable (which they will)?
How much additional energy (regardless of source) is consumed by hauling the substantial extra weight of the batteries?
Are the people who are doing this also pressing for more nuclear energy plants?
So? You have limited emissions to a very few sources, instead of having to worry about tens of thousands of catalytic converters and pollution control systems. It is a lot easier to deal with one or very few sources.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Why are these people so ecstatic that they've reduced gasoline consumption at the pump? Electric power by and large comes from oil and coal. I wouldn't be surprised if the oil->electricity->car battery charging pathway through the wall socket consumes more total oil than the oil->gasoline->hybrid car pathway does.
Get over it. The market does not provide what you actually want and it doesn't provide things which are safe or effecient. It produces things which are effecient to the market and nothing else.
isn't plugging it in and then looking at MPG very decieving?
Exactly. They're taking advantage of a second energy supply and only claiming the cost of the first.
In order to normalize the figures, you need a common divisor. As you suggested, money sounds like a good idea to me. I use 91 octane from the station around the corner in my Honda Nighthawk motorcycle. I get about 45mpg. The price I pay is $2.61/gal (California!), which comes to about 6 cents spent on fuel per mile travelled. If you're getting 60mpg, you're at about 4.5 cents per mile.
We need one other number to compare these modified Prius's: the change in size of the energy bill. We could get by with off-peak rates from the CPUC and a miles/kWh figure for the Prius when only using battery power.
Anyone?
Regards,
Ross
Even though these cars are using more electrical, they're still getting electricity from a grid largely powered by filthy coal and gas power plants, and through a system that's most likely less efficient than the car's internal power grid. They might be using less gasoline in the car, but in the grander scheme they're creating more pollution by making the power plants burn even more for them.
Yes, they are leaving us behind. When shall we hear of GMs, Chevys, Fords and other American companies making news as firsts in their respective fields? As our CEOs, CFOs and their cronies struggle with corruption allegations, the Japanese and Russians are slowly dominating us. One can hardly find an American music/video system now...next will be the automobile. We may fall just like the once great Romans did. Remember the Roman Empire?
If they can be charged more rapidly you can store a lot more of the power rather than just dumping it into a resistor when you do regenerative braking - or, of course, by engaging the friction brake. This last has to be done at the end of the braking process regardless, but the point is that if you can charge the battery faster you save a lot of otherwise-wasted energy. Haven't RTFA though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course I didn't RTFA, that's cheating.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Does anyone else have a father who likes to tell the story about how Detroit's had cars that get 80 mpg since the late 1970s, but never release it for $CONSPIRACY_THEORY reasons? I remember randomly thinking about it one day, how all of a sudden I just didn't believe him, that it didnt make sense, and I think that was the first day I felt like an adult...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Or better. It is a definite improvement to replace thousands (millions) of smokestacks, one on every car, with just a few (the ones on the power plants).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Plugging in might not be the advantage everyone thinks. How much electricity does it take to charge the car? Are electricity rates cheap enough so that it makes more sense to plug in the car, versus just fill up?
So if it costs $20 worth of electricity to get all that extra 'mileage per gallon', but only $15 worth of gasoline to get the extra distance, wouldn't it make more sense just to fuel?
The point of a hybrid is simply to get more out of the energy we put in. The problem isn't combustion engines; its that the engines are notoriously inefficient as far as how much useable energy you get. The regenerative braking and electric motor from the alternator are ways to capture unused energy from the combustion. Then we up the efficiency.
The eventual goal, regardless of the source of the energy, is to put to use a greater percentage of the energy. So if we use a gallon of gas or a gallon of hydrogen, we want to get as much of the potential energy that exists in the materials as possible. That's what hybrids do. Adding two different fuel sources and just filling them seperately doesn't bring us any closer to that goal.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Can any techie out there explain whether it is more efficient to use a gallon of oil to make gasoline, or to use half a gallon to make gas, use the other 1/2 gallon to make power, transfer this power to the prius, and then drive? I mean even electricity must come from somewhere; for all I know energy dispersion might burn all of the (potential) savings.
Are hybrid cars saving anything to society? Are they saving any money to the driver?
That's a beautiful theory, unfortunately not borne out in practice. A Prius engine is 37% efficient at its optimum operating point and better than 30% for almost its entire operating range.
A coal fired plant is typically 27% efficient, and there are distribution inefficiencies on top of that. (There are also distribution inefficiencies for gasoline, admittedly).
You need to examine what is known as 'well to wheel' efficiency to make a rational comparison, overall I think you'll find there is very little in it.
The NYT claim that plug-in technology would add $2000 to $3000 to the cost of a hybrid car is pure BS. We're talking about a battery charger here, only slightly more sophisticated than the $60 charger available retail at places like AutoZone. Figure another $30 for beefier components and a heatsink, $10 for an easily accessed connector, and you're done.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Too bad coal dust and carbon isn't the only thing that comes out of a coal powerplant's chimney... add in silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small but not insignificant quantities of uranium and thorium.
Then put it in the air.
If you live next to a coal powerplant, you're getting much more radiation exposure than if you lived next to a nuclear plant (assuming both are in compliance with regulations)
=Smidge=
"I'll tell you what. I'll set up two cabins. One will have a bucket of nuclear waste under the bed. The other will have a bucket coal dust and carbon under the bed. Which bed do you choose to sleep in?"
Wow. That's a great argument.
Of course, in the REAL WORLD, we don't sleep over nuclear waste. Oh, and in the REAL WORLD, coal emissions end up in the air we breathe.
So, here's a choice: we produce a small amount of nuclear waste - waste that is disposed of away from humans and in a safe manner - or - we produce a large quantity of pollution and dump it into the atmosphere.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but there are regulations and procedures in place to ensure its safe disposal.
With coal power, production by-products are simply dumped into the air. Yes, there are regulations, but as long as we are burning fossil fuels, there will always be substantial emissions.
Strawman. Unlike coal dust (which settles onto people property and into their lungs), Nuclear waste does not sit 'under peoples beds'. It's kept contained in the reactor or the cooling ponds, then sent to a remote (100miles to nearest town) location, and buried deep in the ground in an area that is geologically stable. ...or it would be if the f'ing anti-nuke people would stop opposing Yucca mountain and similar plans.
That $3000 figure for the cost of the batteries is also a bit misleading--TFA took some effort to point out that the cost of both the batteries and the hybrid engine declines rapidly with mass production. If the car companies and consumers got behind this technology it could become quite affordable
The relative lack of innovation in car power plant and energy technology over the last 100 years is really a dark spot on the auto industry IMHO--that we're still burning that much fossil fuel to get individuals from point A to point B, with consequences to our health and national security increasing with each barrel of oil we import, shows how skewed our priorities have been as a nation and world. A little money and foresight decades ago could have made today's world much better. And some money and effort today can make tomorrow's world more sustainable as well, let's not forget that.
sig my booty, check my website
...except they really haven't found a safe place for it yet, so much of it just sits around.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The biggest surprise was how BAD the original fuel consumption on the Prius was before the modification. 40-45mpg? That's the same as a typical small car would get - and the Prius *is* a small car. So why pay so much money for all this technology which amounts to a car that's LESS fuel efficient than a lot of normal petrol cars at half the price which can easily get 65+mpg? (Yank Tanks excluded of course, but most environmentally concious countries have many cars that can achieve these levels of efficiency).
..and I don't even think the review took into account the enormous additional environmental damage and costs of disposing of the car at each end of it's lifetime (mainly due to the batteries).
The Prius was featured on the BBC's Top Gear program recently here in the UK and the general gist of the review as far as I remember was "why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?".
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
As for radiation, coal fired power plants typically emit more radiation than nuclear power plants. For that matter, some sources of uranium are actually coal. (note: might be thorium, its been a few years since I was active in nuclear energy). In addition you have heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. Not only are they in the coal ash, they get into the air. On top of this are the sulfer dioxides, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, fly ash, etc, etc. Nuclear waste is no day at the beach, but coal is no picnic either. And remember, in between 300 and 1200 years the radioactive waste will be less toxic than the ore it came from (depending on which way you measure toxicity). A million years from now the arsnic and mercury in coal ash will be just as toxic.
No. Every advanced driving course I have attended has pointed out that the tyre pressure recommended by the vehicle manufcaturer is significantly less than the optimum for cornering and braking (and for fuel economy, no doubt). Typically we'd put 4-10 psi more into a tyre than the placard.
So, you seem to be writing complete rubbish in an authoritative style.
The power that comes from your electrical outlet isn't magical. It is coming from some other source through the power-grid, so the gas (or worse, it could be coal where they are) is still being burned up and released into the atmosphere and you're probably being even more wasteful than you would if you just put oil in the car because of power leakages at a distance.
I dislike the oil industry quite a lot, but this sort of thing isn't a solution to our problems at all. Thanks for nothing, fellas!
...try keeping a running total of casualties for both cases. Nuclear power is downright harmless.
Nuclear waste will last up to 100,000 years. And after the fallout from Yucca Mountain, nobody wants in 'their' backyard. The NRC and DOE have to figure out how to warn people long after the USA no longer exists.
And with wind, spoiled rich people don't wind turbines spoiling their view.
And with Solar, cuurent panels lose 50% of their effectiveness after 20 to 25 years. And then there will be disposal issues.
And Hydrogen harms the Ozone.
And..And..
What the heck ever happend to Fusion, I heard that the experiments done by those Utah fellows have actually been reproduced and there might something to it after all.
You might want to read up on what actually happened before you start spouting Chernobyl as an example.
Not only are US nuclear reactors are significantly safer than Chernobyl could have even dreamt of being, but the majority of fault with Chernobyl was because of human stupidy.
I say stupidity instead of error because there was a lot more than one problem and many of them were done intentionally. They were doing things they shouldn't have been doing to the reactor and when things went wrong they didn't do what they were supposed to do to fix the problem. A lot of the casualties were caused because they didn't follow the clean up procedures we would be following today.
Claiming US nuclear power plants are unsafe because of what happened in Chernobyl is foolish at best.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
No one cares. Power is not priced based on how much of the original product that could have been turned into electricity was turned into electricity. It's based on, duh, how much it costs to make and get it to you.
In addition to cost, we should also look at 'pollution', which also is completely unrelated to efficiency, and isn't even scalar...it's a bunch of different things. Coal and nuclear result in total different byproducts that are handled in different ways.
And to further confuse the issue, some things don't pollute, like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but they can have an effect on the nearby enviroment, by, for example, stopping fish movements. These effects tend to be extremely limited in range, but people need to know of them.
In additions, there are a relative dangers of different kinds of power productions. Coal mining accidents, for example.
In the real world, 'efficiency' is vaguely useful when you need to know the maximum amount of energy a new process can produce. That's about it. Gasoline engines might be more efficient than coal power plants, (I'm honestly confused as to why anyone would compare it just to coal, we're hydroelectric throughout most of Georgia.), but that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I hear this argument all the time. But what the people that say it fail to realize is that it is much easier to increase the efficiency and lower the pollutants of 1 large power plant, than to do the same to 1000s of mini power plants(cars).
Yes, it's more economical to generate centrally. Otherwise we'd all have private petrol-run generators to power our homes.
Even better if you can get permission to use "off peak" (if they have that in your part of the world).
Starting up and shutting down coal-fired generators is quite expensive/uneconomical, so to reduce starts and stops you can have hot water, and perhaps heat banks, running "off peak"; the electric company can turn it on when it suits them to manage their load.
Further, some hydro schemes generate in peak times and pump the water back again off-peak; the losses involved are less than the cost of firing the coal plants up and down.
If you're going to carry power in batteries, you may as well plug them in when you can.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Not to raise issue with the gist of what you said, but the whole "Nuclear waste lasts X years" is a big fallacy. The danger of nuclear waste falls off over time, but it will always have *some* radiation over the background level. The issue is simply "how dangerous is it?"
That's a tough question. There are multiple types of radiation and multiple types of exposure, and multiple factors in determining risk for each of those types of exposure.
The worst types of exposure are when the radioactive elements end up locked in your body (such as iodine, strontium, etc). When the quantities of the elements that stay in your body for long periods are essentially gone, the risk of the waste is greatly reduced. Alpha emitters are rarely a problem (U238, for example) unless consumed in significant quantity. Beta, gamma, and neutron emitters are worse.
Then, there is the issue of how you get exposed. Some things are at greatest risk of being kicked up as dust and inhaled. Others are at risk for being ingested from water, or locally grown plants. In the area around Chernobyl, for example, the radiation level is many times higher off of the roads than on the roads; rain has cleaned most material off the roads, but it has become locked up in the soil and plants nearby.
In short, there's no easy answer for how much risk there is after a given amount of time. The best you can do is "rough estimates". The "rough estimates" I've seen for Chernobyl, for example, range from 200 to 500 years. What about an accident at Yucca Mountain? Well, if someone set off an atomic bomb in there and blew everything into the atmosphere (once it is filled), the damage would make Chernobyl look like a transmission fluid leak by comparison. Chernobyl had one plant's worth of partially spent fuel; this is to be the completely spent fuel, of many cycles, from every plant in the US. On the other hand, if the accident is, say, slow leaching into the groundwater, it's hard to say exactly what the effects on people, if any, there would be. It all depends on the type of exposure.
You don't exist. Go away.
Well, wouldn't it be a combination?
If you've got a battery that can get you 30 miles on a charge... you can still get pretty far by going with mixed gas/battery power. If you plug it in, well you can go 30 miles...
If you plug it in, you get better "milage" as it were because you're depending on gas less to charge the battery, but you're limited to 30 miles range before you start hitting the ol' fossil fuel again
Now, if you get a better battery in the future that can get you, say 100 miles.... you could probably go farther or get better milage mixing gas/battery driving yes, or you could get excellent milage with a change+go strategy so long as your target is within the 100 mile range.
So really, your milage depends on 3 factors:
a) How far you need to go between charges
b) How far a battery charge will take you
c) Whether you mix 'n match battery/gas power, or just plug 'er in at stops.
OUR only nuclear bunker buster apparently can't get more than 3m deep into alaskan tundra, and self destructs if shot at hard rock, much less a reinforced bunker a kilometer deep.
The fact is, not making a decision on nuclear waste IS making a decision - to leave the waste sitting distributed throughout cooling ponds all over the country, building up continuously as they wait for the federal government to build them the containment vessel that was promised to them years ago.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
-Utilties are highly efficient at the Plant.
But, what about the transmission losses thru the power lines?
We,d need those figures as well.
The thing is, is that nature does not have a natural cleaning mechanism for nuclear waste. The environment does however have a natural cleaning mechanism for the majority of polutants resulting from fossil fuels. This is because combustion of hydrocarbons has been going on since the dawn of the earth, and the earth has learned to deal with it. Provided we can make fossil fuels work very efficiently, and trap contaminants that probably shouldn't be released into the air, we don't have to worry too much about fossil fuels. The major problem with fossil fuels is that they are being used inefficiently, or in ways that more pollutants than necessary are being released into the environment.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Erm, that's worse than a car with three passengers. Now granted most cars are not full, but then neither are most jets.
I am trolling
Do you mean to say "only large SUV"? Small ones like jeeps are not that much heavier than cars: and might in fact be lighter.
Also, how much more damage do the big ones cause compared to cars? If it is twice as much damage, then the SUV owner might very well already be paying for it: if it gets half the gas mileage of the car, the SUV owner is paying twice as much in taxes.
"If SUVs paid tax according to the damage they caused, it would be over $10 a gallon to fuel one."
You really need to look up what subsidy means. A subsidy is a cash grant. When the government robs you less, it is not a gift of money. It is your money in the first place. Not a single cent of money earned is a subsidy; a gift from someone else. Even if the government decided "no taxes on SUV owners", not a single cent would have been given to them in the form of a subsidy.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.