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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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Consider that regular hybrids already convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, and then into electrical energy, chemical (battery) energy, and then back into electrical and finally mechanical energy. Obviously, this complicated series of thermodynamic conversions must make them less efficient than conventional gasoline cars, right?
No, because there are all sorts of mitigating factors. For hybrids, this comes from the fact that they use regenerative braking. There are other factors at work in power plants.
The specifics of thermodynamics are best worked out in practice, not theory.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.