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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.'"
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 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.
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?
Could it be that us Americans LOVE a nice beefy engine loaded with top end horse power?? I mean, you need to keep it fed with fuel right. And thus, we consume oil knowingly
So what's wrong if the oil companies what to sell us their product in a free market?
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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
Of course I didn't RTFA, that's cheating.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Don't be silly. Just because it's not using gas doesn't mean that it's not using oil, or some worse form of energy conversion (it's noookular). How do you think the electricity gets made when you plug it into the wall? Just because you can plug it in, doesn't mean it's better than burning gasoline.
You'll have that sometimes...
I don't understand this argument. If this were the case, why are big, heavy, and above all else *slow* SUVs selling so well? I'd say it's a 'bigger is better' syndrome more so than having anything to do with real power.
A MazdaSpeed Protege will sprint to 60 in 6.9 seconds, gets 30 miles to the gallon on the highway, and does this with a 2.0L engine. It's hard to say that's not relatively 'beefy.'
It's a bit of an extreme example, sure, but the H2 which seems to be selling like mad is just as extreme in the other direction - you'd be amazingly lucky to see 60 inside of 9 seconds, while burning up over twice as much fuel.
I think saying that Americans have an obsession with power is a bit of a cop out. It's an obsession with size, plain and simple.
I beg to differ, while oil is still a significant power source, that outlet could still be powered by solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, or even nuclear power.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
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.
"I beg to differ, while oil is still a significant power source, that outlet could still be powered by solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, or even nuclear power."
Sure, it COULD be, but in most cases isn't. In fact, there's a pretty solid percentage of North America that still runs on coal, while is not as bad as it used to be but still pretty dirty.
As far as nuclear power goes, I wonder what's better, relying on oil or nuclear power? My point was: The 100MPG they claimed did not take into account that they were using utility power which needs to be converted in some way and more likely than not is not solar or geothermal.
You'll have that sometimes...
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.
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.
...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.
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.
"When something like this happens it becomes amazingly clear that an industry can die."
Boo-hoo.
What really irks me about industries dying is when radical changes occur because of it. In Oregon, for example, you have to pay more to register your hybrid car. Why? Because they tax the shit out of gas. More hybrids means less tax revenue.
Okay, that's not the oil industry's fault, but it still bugs me. Frankly, I do think that it's not going anywhere anytime soon. They'll lower prices when demand goes down. They'll shrink. They'll find new ways to make their oil interesting. But I doubt it'll actually die quickly. Heck, they'll probably try to get legislation in place to secure their business.
"Derp de derp."
...try keeping a running total of casualties for both cases. Nuclear power is downright harmless.
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!
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.