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Toyota Unveils Plug-in Hybrid Prius
phlack writes "Toyota has announced a plug-in hybrid vehicle, based on their popular Prius. So far, it will only have a range of 8 miles on the battery (13km). They are going to test this vehicle on the public roads, apparently a first for the industry. From the article: 'Unlike earlier gasoline-electric hybrids, which run on a parallel system twinning battery power and a combustion engine, plug-in cars are designed to enable short trips powered entirely by the electric motor, using a battery that can be charged through an electric socket at home. Many environmental advocates see them as the best available technology to reduce gasoline consumption and global-warming greenhouse gas emissions, but engineers say battery technology is still insufficient to store enough energy for long-distance travel.'"
How much electricity is needed to charge the sucker?
Since electricity is produced in stationary plants, it's easier to make it more efficient, pollute less, etc. That's awfully difficult to do when you have tons and tons of little gasoline engines all over the place.
8 miles? under ideal conditions, flat road, no a/c ... very disappointing. Toyota's engineering is very good. If this is all such great engineers can manage, it shows that batteries have a long way to go.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeah, but there are several ways to get electricity that doesn't require a fossil fuel (or at least much less of a fossil fuel), be it solar, wind, etc. You don't just abandon an entire idea because of one configuration where coal or oil might still be burned. This isn't going to be completely resolved in one step.
Only 8 miles??? http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectricca r/
Sorry, it just doesn't make sense.
Do you buy a household generator for your electricity generating needs?
Exact same reasoning applies, both pro and con. The determents to an all-electric car are battery weight and battery cost, not electricity generation.
Power Plants are a great deal more efficient than cars
Disclaimer: Disregard the above post.
Most comments so far have dismissed the short battery-only range as mediocre; this article was even tagged "toy". The Toyota Plug-in HV isn't an electric only car. It's a hybrid. It can still go hundreds of miles a day like a regular car. Most of the miles on American's cars are from short day to day trips, not vacations. A plug in hybrid would mean that all those trips wouldn't require drivers to burn any gas (but would still allow them to take the occasional interstate drive).
Even if your daily commute is too significant to be made in electric-only mode (mine totals 40 miles and my employer won't let me recharge an EV at work), cutting some portion of the gas burning miles is still a major breakthrough. Running few power plants is more efficient than running millions of small engines to generate the same amount of energy. They physics of scale makes ICE cars look insanely wasteful. Electric cars aren't tied to any single fuel source--energy can come from coal, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. This makes EVs a great way to transition from a fossil fuel economy to any future power source. An all-electric car with lithium ion batteries and a several hundred mile range (at working class prices) would blow my mind. But I'm not going to complain if I can't have one yet. Plug-in hybrids may not be ideal, but they're a step in the right direction.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
It isn't all about the environmental gain. Oil is in short supply, at least oil that can be acquired as cheaply as the oil we are burning now is. Coal on the other hand we have plenty of and wouldn't involve any foreign dependence.
From an environmental standpoint, no this isn't a one stop solution. But it does centralize the problems. First, with electric cars many will have the choice to live fossil fuel free because there are already solutions available to live off the grid on renewable energy sources. Second, this eliminates oil as an enemy and allows everyone to consolidate their efforts on energy generation from renewable sources.
Wow, what a deal. All you need to do to drive for one cent per mile is spend $98,000 for a Tesla roadster.
I wonder, how many Teslas have ever been sold, and how many Toyotas were sold.... -last month?....
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Here's a fun comparison:
The Tesla costs $98,000, does zero-60 in 4 seconds, and the battery pack lasts 100,000 miles.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
The EPA mileage is 16/26 city/highway (let's use an average of 20 mpg, in use?)....
And to drive 100,000 miles at 20 mpg will take about 5000 gallons of gas. At $3/gallon, that's $15,000 in fuel costs.
So for $20,000 less, a 2006 Corvette has a faster zero-60 time, a faster top speed, better resale value, and,,,,,, with an 18-gallon tank, it has a range of 360 miles, and can be refueled at any gas station.
Hmmmm,,,,, decisions, decisions.....
~
You remind me of the people who said cars would never be practical, explaining that there were no gas stations, and that you didn't have to crank a horse to start it.
The Tesla is a carefully crafted, rare, high-tech, high performance ride, very early into the market, and it is priced accordingly. A corvette is an assembly line commodity produced in comparatively huge volume after literally decades of absorbing engineering costs and marketing costs. When the automakers get around to putting a comparable electric car into mass production, the niche the Tesla occupies will close (and the cachet of having a high performance, non-polluting car will go away because they will no longer be rare.) If you think the Tesla's price represents an accurate measure of the price in a competitive market, you're not paying enough attention to how industry works.
My point was that electric cars don't need to be either slow, or have an 8 mile range. The price is what, maybe 5x that of a Prius? That's not so far off, frankly. This is the beginning of the curve. Some of us see that clearly and are all about waiting a little; but others... are still looking at Corvettes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Even the dirtiest coal-fired power plant is far more efficient (read: cheaper, less polluting) a power source than your car engine is. Plus, using grid energy has the added benefit that, as grid power becomes more efficient/less polluting, your car is automatically "upgraded" along with it. While car engines will always be inefficient - grid power need not be.
As for hybrids - I agree that they are not the long term solution, but they can be a positive force. I get 60mpg in mine, and have since 2000. Tripling the national average isn't too shabby...
South Park is pretty funny, but probably not a very good database of information for this type of subject.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
No need for your beast. Just use gasoline in the Plugin Prius if you need to go further.
That's the beauty of this.
You know, not everyone is as much of a tool as you think. It doesn't sound like you've thought much about the relative merits of various energy sources or transport systems if you're just lumping them all together like that. There are many motivations for using different approaches; political, environmental, economical, and yes, even fashion. Everyone buys cars for an assortment of logical and illogical reasons, too. Even you.
I can't reduce my environmental impact or foreign fuel usage to zero, but I try to lessen it, and I buy products like the Prius to vote with my dollars for technology that can lead in that direction. I don't expect anyone else to follow suit unless they want to.
Could it be that some people just like to insult other people's actions without understanding them?
I saw the South Park episode, by the way, and it's great. It even recognizes, unlike you, that hybrids can be a good thing if people aren't assholes about it. The show wasn't about hybrids, it was about people thinking their better than others without cause, kind of like you're doing with your post here.
Cheers.
It isn't money. And it isn't discipline or operating skills. Or the designs. It's politics. Getting any kind of nuclear plant built at this point in time is like trying to wrestle the midgard serpent. Immovable, stupid, and mythical.
There are new designs that are much safer than the 1960s era stuff by their very nature. They still can't be built, because "nuclear" (sorry, "newk-you-lar") is a boogyman word to the unwashed hordes. Never mind that we lose more people and property to almost any minor cause you can name; just say "radiation" and people will scatter.
As far as I'm concerned, they can put a nuke plant right in my pasture, where I can see it right out the back window. Just give me free power; that seems fair. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This story is total corporate BS!!! As anyone who has seen the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" can attest. http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectricca r/
It's the assumption of a "reasonable dielectric" that knocked you off your horse. That's where ultracaps have left the building. They're using altogether unreasonable dielectrics, and there is stuff on lab benches that is approaching battery levels right now.
Making hydrogen results in a significant net loss of energy. After you've made it, transporting it is a huge problem because hydrogen likes to leak right through most "solid" materials. It has a very low energy density at one aatmosphere, so it has to be compressed to insane degrees to get any decent portability out of it. Both in tankers and/or pipelines and in the target vehicle. That also means fueling presents some serious issues.
Ethanol has already caused corn prices to tweak all kinds of ways; not a good thing. At least at this point, that's a really bad side effect. Corn is a mega-important food crop. Ethanol is like gasoline, in that it must be delivered via tanker, at a hidden energy and pollution cost. It is carbon neutral, in that the carbon in the plant came from the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere as exhaust. Better than gasoline, which takes carbon from the ground and sends it to the atmosphere. However, electrical vehicles can be 100% carbon negative, as a hydro plant, nuke plant, wind plant, tidal plant, geothermal plant, solar plant... none of them produce carbon at all. Better yet. And then corn prices will come back down, too. And we won't need tankers.
The last thing - but not the least - is that to get the most power to the ground, at the least cost, electric wins hands down. Electric motors today are easily manufactured to be lighter and provide better torque and power curves than any internal combustion engine ever made in even a slightly comparable size class. That's why railroads use electric engines everywhere. When torque and power are the issue, electric is the answer. The really cool thing is you can have torque, power, and braking/recovery and efficiency.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Running few power plants is more efficient than running millions of small engines to generate the same amount of energy.
I doubt it, unless the power plant is nuclear or solar etc. If you're burning fossil fuels to make the electricity, which do you think is more efficient: a car which turns chemical energy directly into kinetic energy, or a car which starts by converting that same fuel first to electricty at the power plant, then transmitting it many miles, then converting it to chemical energy in the battery, then converting that back to electricity, and then using that electricity to produce kinetic energy? Don't forget to factor in the increased weight you have to lug around, and all the energy consumed in manufacturing the car itself.
I'm all for reducing pollution, but if electric cars are running off the power grid, aren't they _worse_ than gas cars?
So - where is your previous 13 gallons? Let's go back to where it came from, the oil it was refined from. Considerably more than 13 gallons, by the way - it may be as much as 26 gallons of oil, presuming 87 octane. You've used that up. It is gone now. It isn't, as far as we know, being replaced by any process. There's a finite amount. What you did was use a good portion of it up and make a bunch of pollution. When you got "more", you just made the situation worse - it's still not being replaced.
With electricity, we can make more. Indefinitely. And by indefinitely, I mean forever. We don't have to make any pollution in the process. And cars like your civic can have a lot more power and torque. This is why gasoline - and really, anything that you burn with the exception of hydrogen, which produces water instead of pollutants - is a distant tail-chaser as compared to 100% electrical systems.
So don't snark. Educate yourself and get with the program. Don't follow the corn/farmers lobby into a second rate technology, and certainly don't encourage the hydrogen types. Electric is the one to bet on, not just because it performs better (and it surely does) but because it is better for everyone.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I just don't get this at all. "Carbon neutral" is a bad term, and bad science. I first saw this when reading about thermal depolymerization. (I don't see it in this article)
You have plants removing X per time amount of carbon from the atmosphere. You have cars and stuff emitting carbon at Y per time. If Y > X, then we are spewing more carbon into the atmosphere than is being scrubbed, period.
It doesn't matter if the carbon in Y came from recent plants or from plants a million years ago; it doesn't matter if the carbon was harvested from the surface or 500 feet down. If carbon emissions are harmful (not debating that here) then we have to stop burning carbon. It doesn't matter if it's oil or ethanol or coal or any other form of carbon.
Up front, they are less expensive (not "infinitely cheaper") right now, yes. However, batteries have a very short lifetime compared to ultracaps. This makes total cost of ownership of ultracaps lower. Even right now. Certainly this will be so if and when the power/weight ratios equalize.
No, not a net plus. They have to be transported two ways each time, and they are heavy. They have to be transported a lot, because they don't last long. They are dangerous - sulfuric acid is not anyone's friend, and randomly exploding lithium batteries aren't exactly anyone's cup of tea, either. Ultracaps contain no such toxic materials, and typical lifetimes in a once-a-day recharge situation are such that you could conceivably use the same ones through many generations of your family, in vehicle after vehicle or other high power applications.
A typical car battery might be able to deliver a few thousand amps for a few seconds. Cranking amps, this is called; it's marked right on your battery, usually. 800 CA might be a typical rating; big ones can do better. In the process, the output voltage drops precipitously, because the battery's internal series resistance is very high. You can't do this for long, because the battery will fail due to overheating. Power dissipation is high because of that high series resistance. But that's OK, because the only time this load is placed on the battery is when the starter is turning over the engine. This is not a motor application as we are discussing here. Various battery technologies skew these numbers various ways from lead-acid batteries, but they're really not hugely different.
Ultracaps, however, are different. They have extremely low series resistance; so they can dump current at any rate you like, for as long as you like (as long as they have any left, of course) without in any way compromising the physical integrity or lifespan of the ultracap. They can take charge just as fast, very important with things like regenerative braking; that current must be absorbed when it is generated, or it is lost (usually as heat.) Charge times being faster mean that at an hypothetical service station, a car based on ultracaps can be recharged and on its way in just a couple minutes. As fast, or faster, than filling your tank with gasoline. Batteries can't do this - even your quoted 1/2 hour is a hugely optimistic claim. Drive 300 miles, wait 1/2 hour to charge, drive 300 miles, wait another 1/2 hour? That sounds annoying to me, frankly. If you're going 60 MPH for three hours, you make 180 miles, then lose 30 miles to your charging. With ultracaps, you lose maybe 5 miles. That's assuming your claim of 30 minutes to charge, which really isn't practical at all.
Um. Well. Lets poke some numbers. One horsepower is about 746 watts. A 2007 Corvette cranks 505 HP, or about 376.5 kilowatts. A car battery that can put out 1000 amps, if it can hold at 12.6 volts (unlikely, but anyway) is putting out 12.6 kilowatts. So to match that Vette, you're going to need thirty batteries, assuming 100% conversion efficiency to the motor drive requirements.
Of course, the Vette can put out 505 HP repeatedly without damage. The batteries can't. So really, you'd need maybe 60 batteries to reduce the load to 500 amps, or 120 to get it down to 250 amps. Think of that. 120 full size car batteries. Man. And 250 amps? How long do you think those batterie
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We also have plenty of uranium and plutonium. Time to start building some modern nuclear reactors!
OK, first off: why is a purely electric vehicle being described as a hybrid?
Second: Why are we still hyping the hybrid cars?
I have had a Prius for a little over two years, and driven over 40k miles. The fuel economy is considerably less than that of a comparable diesel (Audi A3 estate). Yes, the car is safe, and fairly economical for a petrol car, but it's not fantastic. It is exempt from congestion charging as the government are trying to encourage fuel efficiency, but I rarely drive into London. The annual car tax is minimal. However, all in all, it would have been far cheaper to buy a diesel car, whose manufacture would have had less environmental impact, and whose fuel efficiency would be better.