Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
More importantly, why has Honda/Toyota decided not to adopt these as factory options?
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
I'm not trying to bash what these guys have done - but isn't plugging it in and then looking at MPG very decieving?
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how the $/mile stack up to see whether or not a plugged in prius can be more efficient in terms of cost.
This reminds me of the tuner shops like shelby and such setting new standards for then detroit.
well with gas at $2.45 a gallon (southern cali) news like this is welcomed. I can't wait for the day when tuner shops specialize in modifying hybrids for longer range. the new ford cotsworth 80 mpg woot woot
Well, okay, "free" in the sense that I've already paid for the solar setup -- but with oil prices rising, I suspect charging a car from my solar cells would make them pay for themselves a couple years ahead of schedule.
If this was adapted on a larger scale, it would cause revenue havoc for the states.
California is already suggesting taxing by the mile rather by the gallon as there revenue decreases from these energy efficient cars.
Maybe this is why they have the no plug in rule? It would be much more difficult to tax by the mile when you could charge up anywhere.
At approximately 112000 BTU/gallon of gasoline that's about 33kWh/gal. In California where the prices are about $0.12/kWh electric, it costs you about $4.00/gallon saved. With gas prices at about $2.40 in CA that's about $1.60 extra per gallon saved.
For those of you who say "fuel savings at any cost" consider that most of the california electricity is generated by burning natural gas, and that there are considerable losses involved in generating and transmitting the electricity.
Nothing to see here at the moment. Wait until the price of gas goes to $5.00 and then buy some solar panels to charge your car (or at least net-meter your electricity).
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
And your grid electricity consumption goes way, way up.
Tradeoffs.
I saw a French research company that is making cars run off of compressed air. Using a Carbon-fibre based compressed air canister, the PSI in the tank is about around 3500 or 3800. There is enough air in the tank to drive about 130 to 180 km @ 60 KM/H.
This is really interesting. The technology is out now. And, AFAIK, this form of transportation is emmissionless.
Just as a curiosity, though, why type of hybrid technologies do we have for *airplanes*. Our economy relies so heavily on planes that we need to find alternatives. IANA-Engineer, but I doubt a 747 would run on solar.
Which is why the Slashdot headline is misleading. The article is mostly about the mod you mention, not about EngergyCS's improved batteries. The headline makes it sound like they're trying to count plugin time towards mileage, which they certainly are not.
and who do you propose pays for that electricty while you charge up your car?
Seriously though. I'm not trying to sound like I'm flaming you. I do think it would be great to just pull into your spot, attach the wire, and head in. But, ertainly someone has to foot the bill for such a system, which I think would be quite expensive not only to implement but to provide energy for.
So.. Who pays and how? Maybe coin op like parking meters?
Don't Tread on Me
The book "The Bottomless Well" noted that if you get batteries good enough, meaning light enough and small enough volume, able to travel for a normal day's travel (say 250 miles) & inexpensive enough, to fit in a car that you can potentially drop your cost per mile for power to 10% of that using gasoline today.
How? Off peak power now at night (when stationary power plants would love to sell you power) is $.03-$.04 per KWHr, versus about $.40/kwhr for gasoline.
Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) received 2 patents on a way to make Li-ion batteries that charge in minutes and hold 3 times the charge in January 2005, and Fujitsu just announced they will start shipping batteries probably licensed under this patent in 2006.
All-electric cars are FAR FAR closer to practicality than people think because of these dramatic technology breaththroughs.
The problem is that power plants use oil and coal to produce steam. This is a relatively simple, thermodynamically well-understood process. Thus, little benefit is to be derived by cars leveraging improvements in plant efficiency. Also, there is much more room for improvement both in oil refinement to gasoline and in the mileage per gallon that combustion engines achieve (even without resorting to electrical assistance).
I find this "hacking" of the Prius really exciting, and a good protent for the future. If anything, toyota should spin this into a sales pitch:
"Buy a Prius and get 60mpg right out of the gate. But if you would like to save even more on gas, get the Prius Extension Kit for $49.95 and draw electricity form your home to your Prius, doubling the car's mileage."
"But wait - there's MORE! with the Prius Pro Developers Kit, you can swap out the batteries for other even more powerful batteries, and not just doubling your mileage, but TRIPLLING your mileage!"
"Why WAIT? Call Now! Operators Are Standing By!"
Seriously: just like ever punk ass kid can dope up his Honda Civic lifback into a firebreathing psych machine, you should be able to totally juice the crap out of a Prius.
this is the kind of technology that was envisioned years ago by the Rocky Mountian Institute's notions of a hypercar.
I want one of those...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
A lot of the old pure-battery cars were marred by the fact that you couldn't go very far on them.
The hybrid concept is great, but I imagine manufacturers wanted to distance it from the pure-electric cars. A lot of people would have assumed that if a car had a power cord, it would have the same problems as the pure-electric systems.
So instead, you expose people to gasoline-only cars with relatively high gas-milages. Later on, once people have accepted that these new things work well enough, you can add a power cord. And even market it as "New and Improved!"
Basically, you don't want the public to assume that the power cord limits where you can go with it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
This is the same argument I use with my current car - a TDI (Turbo-Direct-Injection) Dieel Jetta.
... in 1 month. At that rate, I'll have paid off the difference in 14.3 months.
It costs about $1,800 more to get the Diesel. I've started keeping track of my KM travelled and how much it costs vs. a gasoline car and so far I've saved myself $126.42 with my diesel
But, even better and more important to me is that I'm using less fuel, and using less fuel more efficiently, which is producing less pollutants and emissions. Not to mention the fact that making diesel uses less energy (less refining needed) than gasoline.
So, even though it costs more money to buy a diesel, I was willing (And continue to be willing) to pay a little more to make a little less pollution.
Reading life after the oil crash really helped change my mentality about fuel and energy use. Shifting my energy use to more electricity and less fossil fuels means that, while I'm still using energy, I'm using a cleaner source of it. A lot of the power in SW Ontario comes from either Hydroelectricty or Nuclear power which is considerably cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I guess it all comes down to how much you'd change your lifestyle to help cut back on energy use, and how much of your own money you'd spend to do it.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
IQ Limit, by definition, is 200.
;-)
Depends on the definition, but generally, no, IQ does not have a definitional upper limit.
Some of the earlier tests couldn't measure above 150, which represented a "perfect" score - That doesn't mean that, given a group of people with perfect scores on such a test, you couldn't measure differences in their level of cognitive ability... You just couldn't do it with that particular test.
Most IQ tests now treat IQ as a distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. So, although you would very rarely see someone ranking seven or more SD from the mean, it can happen.
The Barnes & Noble "Take the MENSA IQ challenge today!" books, however, will not suffice to measure such an exceedingly rare trait. But if you had that "problem", you wouldn't have posted your claim in the first place.
Flywheels might be good for that job, but even then only as a temporary storage medium before putting it into the battery. A large flywheel causes a lot of problems, not the least of which is the fact that it is heavy. If you can come up with batteries that will do the job, it's better to use the motor/generators and batteries that are already in the car, and skip the flywheel. On the other hand, I'm of the mind that a TDI (preferably running an alternative fuel like that water/binder-of-some-sort/naptha stuff) is a better solution, because you only need the ICE and not the batteries, motors, et cetera. If fuel cells were more economical then I'd like to see electric cars with regenerative fuel cells and some capacitors or high-current batteries for short-term storage, because that would be even simpler, and simple is good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
First "Altair Nanotechnologies" basically makes specialty powders for surface chemistry applications. Calling this "nanotechnology" is a stretch. What they actually do, as a business, is make titanium dioxide powder, the pigment used in white paint. Read their 10-K filing, which is more honest than the press releases they put out.
Altair claims to be working with the "Energy Storage Research Group" at Rutgers University. That did exist, and, sadly, it's one of the leftover bits of what was once Bell Labs. But what's left of it, at Rutgers, doesn't seem to be doing anything in this area. They're concentrating on capacitors and on hydrogen storage. The Rutgers articles on battery technology seem to stop around 2003.
If you look really hard, you can finally find the technical paper on this. It's from mPhase. They're actually trying to make the battery. But what they say they're doing is building a battery with a very long shelf life for use as a backup power source in telecom gear. That's useful, especiallly since mPhase makes DSL gear for telecom carriers. There's gear out on poles that needs some backup power capability, and most existing batteries don't last long enough to be useful in that environment.
But this is a long way from Electric Cars Real Soon Now.
On the third hand, if you look at a list of countries we (or anyone else) buy oil from, you'll see quite a few who we don't neccessarily want to be flooding with hard currency. Perhaps it's worth some sacrifice (though not neccessarily $3000) to try reign in that cashflow.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
If anything, the Toyota execs have it exactly backwards. If it's LiIon, it should make no difference, AFAIK. So unless they're using NiCd batteries or something.... :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The large majority of the power in this province comes from Hydroelectric, which (depending on the impact of the dams build) is generally more environmentally friendly than your coal etc.
Well, I think you are underplaying the impact of hydro. One study reported in new scientist looked at the environmental impact of flooding areas to provide electricity. The areas flooded upstream of the generators decompose underwater and release large amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This has not been factored into the "green" calculations for most hydro stations.
Not that I'm against removing our dependence on fossil fuels - the future of humanity will depend on it (its just a question of when).
But the alternatives have to be looked at closely. Much as the current green movement doesn't like it, nuclear power is one of the cleaner short term options for power until we get true large scale renewable power available.
My 2c
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
If you add a second tank, you can run it off vegetable oil once the engine was warmed up. I have a friend who does this -- many restaurants give him their used oil for free, and all he has to do is filter it. If you do much highway driving, you can save quite a bit of money.