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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.'"
They've secretly replaced the gas with Folgers crystals. Let's see if they notice.
"By modifying a Prius so that it can be plugged in...
;-)
The 180 miles per gallon must be some extremely tough-to-calculate average since a car that's plugged in can only go as far as the power cord (unless they got a really , really, really long power cord
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.
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.
In TFA, it said the price of adding plug-in tech was $3,000 to a hybrid vehicle. However, to recoup that $3,000 would require you to save about 1,300 gallons of gas (at 2.25/gal). If you were getting 50MPG, and bumped it up to 100MPG, you'd have to drive at least 130,000 miles to recoup it - and that doesnt even count the fact that you'd be spending money on electricity, that would only increase the amount of miles driven.
It can help in other ways, perhaps the power plant where you are getting the electricity from is cleaner burning (or nuclear) than your car, and it reduces overall air pollution.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The secret is to only drive downhill.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Still, it's a claim to be approached cautiously. Perhaps improved batteries can improve hybrid milage -- but by a factor of 3? In any case, the "up to" is a hint that this is one of those meaningless "gee whiz" statistics, as with "The IQ of Slashdot users is as high as 300."
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...
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.
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.
How much is a gallon of electricity going for these days?
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...
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.
Excellent example because as everyone knows the bed-and-bucket method is actually how energy is produced.
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.
Well, googling got me this:
"The energy content of a gallon of gasoline ranges from about 109,000 to 125,000 Btu. The average is about 114,000 Btu."
and this:
"1 kW = 3413 BTUs"
so, one gallon of gas (on average) = about 33kW
Electricity ranges from about 5 - 10 cents per kW, so a gallon of gas (more than $2) has as much energy as $1.65 - $3.30 of electricity.
I urge all readers of these lively threads to view our Fact Sheet, found at http://www.priusplus.org/ -- paying special attention to the fact that our MPG results must be combined with the electricity used.
Also look at the new section at our vehicles page where we document the benefits of PHEVs even when they're recharged from a dirty (coal-fueled) grid.
We've added a link to this discussion at http://www.calcars.org/kudos.html
Felix Kramer, Founder, CalCars
Founder, California Cars Initiative and PRIUS+ Campaign
...try keeping a running total of casualties for both cases. Nuclear power is downright harmless.
Replace all instances of kW with kWh. kW are power (1 horsepower ~= .75 kW). kWh are units of energy (1 kWh = 3600 kJ ~= 3412 BTU).
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!
Um, no. The Chernobyl people had turned off most of the safety equipment in order to conduct a test. The reactor was almost at zero power. They were pulling out control rods in an effort to start the reaction up. But they made a fundamental mistake with reactors. The control rods control rate of change, not the absolute power rating. So when the reaction did start up, it rapidly overloaded the reactor. On top of that, the reactor was designed with a positive thermal coefficient. English translation: the hotter it gets, the faster the reaction runs. No wonder the damn thing exploded. Its like Windows, when you see how well it was designed, its no wonder it gets hacked.
But this is old technology. Look at the more recent technologies like pebble reactors. They figured out the maximum temperature a reactor could hit, and then designed the ceramic shell to melt at a higher temperature. It can't melt under its own power. Its passive safety, which I trust a lot more than active safety with all its pumps and valves and moving parts that can fail.
TMI was within a couple of hours of a *total meltdown* before they finally figured out what was going on
According to the Kermey (sp?) report, the reactor actually melted down about 25-50%. The reactor designers were quite conservative. They assumed that steam would not cool the reactor core at all. In reality it cooled about half as effective as water. So in spite of the operators turning off the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) pumps, the absolute wrong thing to do, the reactor didn't completely melt down.
it's not a given that the containment building would have stopped a liquid pool of molten nuclear fuel from eating through down to the water table
Kermey report actually goes into that. TMI-2 had a relatively new reactor load, therefore had few waste products built up. It would not have penetrated the containment building. I think the doc even questions if it would eat through the reactor vessel. Its been years since I've read those docs, so memory fades a bit.