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Hybrid Cars to Get New Mileage Ratings
Skidge writes "Wired is running a piece showing the drastically reduced mileage ratings for hybrids after the upcoming changes in gas mileage calculations by the EPA. While the cars themselves aren't changing, plugging these new numbers in to the equation makes a hybrid much less cost effective: "The two top-selling hybrid vehicles, the Prius and Honda's Civic Hybrid, will lose 12 and 11 miles per gallon respectively from their city driving estimates." The new values come from more realistic testing; the old, over-inflated ratings were higher in part because the cars idled a lot, allowing the hybrids to completely turn off their engines. The new ratings should be more in line with what hybrid drivers are actually seeing."
Catch-22. They like to have a "real" number before the car starts selling, but via your method they'd need to sell enough to get an accurate sample.
It's sad how every article about hybrids always focuses on how many years it takes to save enough gas to pay fro the added cost of the car. That's not what it is about! Especially not if you use the gas prices in a country where said price is held artificially low!
It's about how much more we could do by using technology in a sensible way rather than spending it on finding ways to allow every Joe to accelerate a 7 ton monster truck 0-60 in under 4 seconds!
AC remarked: They are shit 'cars' for a sick society. If you 'drive' a Hummer, you are - almost by definition - a total asshole with no aesthetic taste, no interest in cars, no basic grasp of physics and no financial sense. You are, for all intets and purposes, an American idiot.
I doubt it has anything to do with Americans being the way they are. Hummer driving, like driving V12 Benzes and BWMs 200kph on the autobahn, is conspicuous consumption. This is a species-wide phenomenon which proves they have the resources to burn & some like Freud would say, proves their fitness for reproduction in attracting the female of the species.
It's too damn big. You youngsters probably don't remember this, but there was a time when you could actually see what's going on ahead of you in traffic.
True. Buy you also see significant gains in mileage vs. gas-only vehicles when not driving conservatively all the time.
#2 The batteries are more toxic than those in a normal car- and with each hybrid carrying between 5 and 7 of those batteries, they are not better for the environment.False. The batteries in a Prius are no more toxic than any other battery. Also, they can be **completely** recycled at end of life.
#3 The total energy used to manufacter a hybrid vehicle is higher than what it is for a regular vehilce of same size. Perhaps slightly. But luckily that energy is most likely electricty which is being generated at a plant with strict emissions control in Japan. That extra energy used offsets the petroleum energy that would be used by a gas-only vehicle, as well as the pollution said gas-only vehicle would cause (you have to take into account that the Prius is a SULEV vehicle). #4 The depreciation rate is held up by popular opinion. This is true in all vehicles, but the steep cliff at year 6 is going to make most people unhappy, and the battery replacement at year 8 will be a very large cost to shoulder and may drive many people out of this market all togeather.Can you prove this steep drop off in value at year 6? If not, than why state it? Let's assume for a moment that this year 6 valuation drop-off occurs. How much is that going to matter to someone who has held the car for 6 years? Probably little at that point.
#5 There is currently no plan for the recycling of these batteries.Now you're simply sputtering off nonsense. Don't spout bullshit unless you know someone isn't going to catch you:
http://www.toyota.com/about/environment/technology /2004/hybrid.html
Is there a recycling plan in place for nickel-metal hydride batteries?Toyota has a comprehensive battery recycling program in place and has been recycling nickel-metal hydride batteries since the RAV4 Electric Vehicle was introduced in 1998. Every part of the battery, from the precious metals to the plastic, plates, steel case and the wiring, is recycled. To ensure that batteries come back to Toyota, each battery has a phone number on it to call for recycling information and dealers are paid a $200 "bounty" for each battery.
Alright, time for a reality check here. The Prius is doing such a damn good job on mileage not because it's a hybrid, but because it's an exceptionally well-designed car. Your own experiences with highway driving demonstrate that. Hybrid vehicles should actually get worse highway mileage because of their design. But the Prius doesn't. Why?
The answer lies in more than just its batteries. There are plenty of auto manufacturers jumping on the bandwagon by battery-backing their existing engine designs. That won't do much. Toyota took a different approach. For one, the engine of the Prius was replaced with a more efficient Atkinson Cycle engine. This engine would normally not be viable in a car, as its peak output is quite poor. However, the Prius uses stored battery power to provide maximum torque when accelerating. This makes up for the engine's poor peak power output. Furthermore, the torque delivered by electrical power is more fuel efficient than driving an Otto-cycle engine to sudden, peak power-output conditions.
But the engineers didn't stop there. They used the research behind Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVT) to develop a transmission that can evenly split the power between the electrical and gasoline powered components of the car. This transmission can smoothly transfer power between different sources and outputs, avoiding the limitations and excess power consumption of the traditional geared transmission. This transmission (which Toyota calls a "Power Split Transmission") is only workable in a small car like the Prius, due to the torque limitations of most CVT designs.
Finally, Toyota further hedged the car's bets with computer control and tuning over the entire power system, a low air-resistance body design, lightweight aluminum construction, and vacuum flask coolant storage for fast warm-up times.
What you're looking at is the modern equivalent of a Chevy Sprint. Those three bangers got great mileage at the expense of power and comfort. (My mother had one and managed to get 58 MPG on the highway!) The Prius uses modern technology to provide similar returns, but without the drawbacks that made the Sprint so unpopular in the first place.
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I hate these people who run the numbers and leave out other numbers.
And I can't stand it when people talk as if getting tax credits reduces costs. It transfers costs to someone else. Ironically, even the guy who takes his bicycle or public transportation to work is going to have to shoulder some of the federal income tax burden that you - as a driver of your own personal vehicle - are able to shrug off because of the flavor of engine you bought. Unless you can demonstrate how your purchase of that vehicle is going to reduce the federal government's cost of doing business by the amount of your tax credit, you're just asking everyone else in the country to write you a rebate check out of their own income.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Although not perfectly accurate, computing your mileage using the reading from the gas pump and the odometer doesn't rely on running the gas tank "bone dry." All that it relies on, is that you fill the gas tank back up to the same level as you did the previous fillup. Since gas nozzles are basically standardized and tend to click off at the same point, this isn't a terrible assumption. It's probably accurate at least to a few tenths of a gallon, in my experience of doing it in a small car.
Basically you fill the tank until the pump shuts it off, and reset the odo. This is your start point. You drive for a while, generally until you need gas again, and then you refill the gas tank until it again shuts off automatically, and note the amount of fuel added. You look at the odometer, and simply take the mileage there, and divide by the reading on the pump.
As long as you never fill your tank halfway, and you don't top off or otherwise force the gas pump to keep going after it shuts off automatically, and you reset the odo every time you fill up, you can get pretty good mileage estimates this way.
It's a different method than what I assume the car's computer is using (I'd think it's using some sort of reading from the engine's sensors) but it's not an inherently terrible methodology. If you use the same gas pump/nozzle to fill up each time, I'd imagine it could probably be quite accurate. At no time does it require you to run your car out of gas.
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Manual or Stick? Driving habits effect the ratings. Do you drive 65mph on a 65mph freeway or do you drive 75mph-80mph? Do you accelerate fast? Do you find yourself braking often? Think about it the next time you approach a stop-sign. Does your foot move from the accelerator directly to the brake when you want to stop? Or are you 'coasting' and letting your momentum slow you down before you start to brake? Do you speed quickly the the next red light just to stop, or do you slowly coast to it, even if all the other cars are 'rushing' to the red? Do you drive with your windows down or the air-conditioner on a lot (it creates more drag or needs more energy to use)?
I bought a 2006 Pontiac Vibe (new) and just recently a 2007 Toyota Corolla (both awesome cars, though, I do wish the Vibe had a little more 'pep'). The Vibe was rated at 28-36 MPG if I remember right. I'm currently getting ~35MPG (mostly) highway (though it was closer to 31 MPG in the winter). The Corolla (while only having it for about a month now) is getting about 38 MPG (mostly) highway.
Both of these are manual "stick" transitions. The fiancee drives the Corolla, I drive the Vibe. While I don't usually drive aggressively, I don't pussy-foot the cars when accelerating to highway speeds (winding out the RPMs pretty high). However, I do kick in the cruise control at speed limit speeds, occasionally 5-over. What I do try to do, and what I'm getting better at recognizing, is that I try not to 'waist' energy by having the car do more than it needs to do, particularly in braking. Lets put it this way, the more you use your brakes, the more energy you're waisting. (which is the theory behind Hybrids, to turn the brake heat/energy back into car energy). Better braking habits will not only help save some gas but also extend the life of your breaks.
If your car is significantly getting much lower MPG than the rated amount, I would 1st) get it checked out by the dealership. 2nd) look at your own driving habits. If you're getting 26 MPG and you do pretty much all city driving, then I would say you're right on schedule (You can usually take off 1-2 MPG from the rating for 'real' estimates). If you want to raise your MPG, take a longer route in the city that makes you stop much less frequently. Stop/Go is the hardest on an engine and your millage efficiency.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell