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Japanese Mileage Maniacs
WY writes "Bloomberg reports on the quirky world of Japanese hybrid car hackers: 'Toyota Motor Corp. says its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car gets about 55 miles to the gallon, making it one of the most fuel-efficient cars on the road. That's not good enough for Takashi Toya.' He managed to reach as high as 115 MPG. He is one of about 100 nenpimania, Japanese for mileage maniacs."
Cutting down on fuel bills AND bragging rights? Where do I sign!?
he just won that multimillion dollar xprize for 100+ mpg from a practical car!
damn he's lucky.. if he knows about it and turns it in that is.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
We have people who do the same thing here.. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiling
It is good to see people getting "real" good mileage. The Prius gets 55 MPG, the Geo metro and Honda civic in the late 80's and early 90 got mid 50's. I heard some GM exec on the radio yesterday talking about the new 50 MPG small cars they were bringing to market, what, "used Honda's"? If a regular engine can get 50+ MPG it shouldn't be hard for a Hybrid to get 70 or 80+, if not 100+.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Well, on the way up, the fuel efficiency drops. But you build up potential energy, so you hardly use any energy when the car goes down. Any braking power is passed to the batteries. Driving with my dad's petrol car in mountainous regions in France and Italy, I was always surprised that I managed to get a mileage better than regular (probably helped by the fact that the average speed was lower). The first rule of fuel efficiency is: BREAKING IS FOR LOSERS. If you have to brake, you're not good at anticipating very well. Cross-road or round-about coming up: lift you foot from the peddle. Second rule: KEEP ROLLING. You must make sure you keep on roling. If a traffic light is coming up, I may brake well before the traffic light, then roll along. In all likelihood, the light is green when I reach it, and I may have left a speed of 15 miles per hour. If I had stopped, I would have been slower too, because I'd have to start from zero. It is one of those things people fail to understand (just like: the fastest way to overtake another car is to keep a distance from him (much safer too), instead of tailgating. You can see the opportunity for taking over earlier, you can start making speed, if it doesn't work you break, if it does work you're having a first speed difference in comparison to a tail gater). Lastly, I may drive behind a truck (we have laws here that forbid them to pollute too much so it is OK). Saves up to 10% (more if I were closer, but as long as we don't have a connection between braking and distance control, that is out).
Bert
Don't they use kilometers there?
Well if you want to get that technical, yes we use kilometers here. But even in English speaking countries, mileage is commonly used because "kilometrage" would just sound silly. Mileage or simply "fuel efficiency" is acceptable.
But just for the pedantic, the japanese characters for "nenpi" (I'd type them here but Slashdot doesn't seem to accept Japanese characters) are literally translated as the character for "burn" (On reading of 'nen') and the character for "cost" or "consumption" (On reading of 'hi' or in this case, 'pi'). Mileage is just the (American) English equivalent. Fuel consumption would probably be more widely accepted.
If a regular engine can get 50+ MPG it shouldn't be hard for a Hybrid to get 70 or 80+, if not 100+.
Highway mileage has nothing to do with hybrid vs. non-hybrid. You're still getting energy from the same fuel, in the same way. Even with a hybrid's electric motor helping with acceleration for passing, guess where energy to charge the battery back up again comes from? Ding, the gasoline motor (some regenerative braking, but most of the hybrids don't wait that long before they start charging the pack.)
Take a look at the Insight. It gets noticeably more mileage than any of its hybrid siblings- I think it's in the high 60's or low 70's. Why? It's super-streamlined, complete with wheel skirts over the rear wheels. Now, notice that the shape is quite reminiscent of the Honda CRX, a car that got 50MPG, in the early 80's?
If you completely switched off the hybrid system in a Prius or Honda Civic or (snicker) that hybrid Lexus SUV, guess what- highway gas mileage wouldn't change. The overwhelming factors for highway mileage are aerodynamics and rolling friction (tires, bearings, drivetrain components.) Lowering weight helps too; less energy required to accelerate and go up hills- and hybrids have that working against them because the battery packs, extra electronics+wiring, and traction motor all add weight.
Diesels like the VW TDIs get 45-50MPG on the highway, and they do it with the same aerodynamics as standard VW's AND the extra weight of the heavier diesel engine, because diesels are more efficient. Put a diesel engine in a Insight, and you'd probably get a similar boost in mileage as between an gasoline Jetta and a TDI Jetta. Heck, you might crack 100mpg without breaking a sweat.
Please help metamoderate.
Nihon deha, kuruma ga anata wo untensuru! (i know, its bad :p)
I guess you were trying to make a Soviet Russia joke? "In Japan, car drives you", maybe? I guess it loses its funny when it's not relevant to the article, is translated into another language and written in romaji.
The first rule of fuel efficiency is: BRAKING IS FOR LOSERS.
Absolutely, and that's still important in vehicles with regenerative braking.
The Prius has a bar graph of your MPG per five minute interval. It overlays cute little green car icons to show how much energy you recaptured through braking during that interval as well. But you shouldn't think of those car icons as part of your score. They're more like the bonus you get when the ball drains out of the pinball machine.
Consider this: when you step on the brakes in a Prius, you convert kinetic energy to electrical energy, which is then stored in a battery, which you then use to regain kinetic energy.
But oddly enough, the most efficient way to store kinetic energy is as....kinetic energy. Regenerative braking is a consolation prize for when you had to step on the brakes. Better not to do that in the first place, if you can manage it while being safe and courteous.
And yes gasoline is so cheap for the most part that we can and do by bigger cars that do poor mpg. They sell gas at 25-30p a liter and 9p of that is road tax, so we don't have the extra payments like you do. At that price it just doesn't make much of a dent in the pocket book even when you have to commute more than 30 miles each direction everyday. The other thing we have is wide roads, lot's of parking, and big garages (you can actually get a full sized SUV into most and have the people on both sides of the vehicle and be able to get out fairly easy). The newer houses typically have room for 3 vehicles and easily fit 2 SUVs and a car. (Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, a Landrover Defender 110 station wagon is what I mean by an SUV.) Those things seems to have a bigger damper on large vehicle sales here in the UK than the price of gas. I cannot get my "tiny", a behemoth by British standards, regular cab Toyota Tacoma (like a hi-lux but bigger) through the door of my garage, and have to park it in the street. Of course as you know most houses in town don't even have garages. People in the states regularly drive pick-up trucks large enough to haul around the typical British car in the back and rarely ever have a problem finding an easy spot to park in.
Hope that puts things in perspective for you. Of course my dreams of buying a new Tacoma or an FJ cruiser, both larger than I have now, are on the back burner, so I have been eye-balling one of the new Mini's. (The sad thing is it won't fit in my garage either.) It get's a respectable 35-40 mpg better than the 20 I get with the Tacoma. Of course the one I want is the S model rather the eco model. :)
Some people have converted the Prius to a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV) and there's at least one company doing the conversions commercially. It does not become 100% electric, but it does allow you to plug into a wall socket and charge up the battery, then drive some distance (maybe 40 miles) on the battery power before the gasoline engine ever fires up. If you don't drive more than 40 miles in a day -- which would cover most days for me -- then you don't use gasoline. Yet, if you need to take a long trip, you can do that too.
:)
Toyota have announced they want to build a PHEV, but they haven't said when or shown any more information about it. General Motors have shown the Chevy Volt "concept car" which is a PHEV, and they want to put it into production by about 2010-2012 depending on how batteries develop.
The winners in fuel efficiency are always the pure battery-electric vehicles like the Tesla Roadster; it's rated 135 MPG equivalent efficiency on the EPA highway cycle, no funky "hypermiling" techniques required. First deliveries to customers scheduled for late this year.