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Redesigned, Bulkier Honda Insight to Challenge Prius
In what probably amounts to good news for consumers eyeing a hybrid for their next vehicle purchase, Honda is resurrecting the "Insight" name, this time in the form of a five-seat, Prius-like hatchback. The automaker's announcement included the tantalizing statement that the cost would be "significantly below [that of] hybrids available today," but provided no further details on pricing. Although Honda may have some trouble unseating Toyota's dominance of this particular hybrid market, hopefully the Insight's reintroduction will help to make hybrid cars even more affordable to consumers. This is also welcome news to folks like myself who, after the initial flurry of excitement when the now-retired original Insight was introduced in '99, were left scratching their heads at Honda's hybrid strategy as Toyota picked up their dropped ball and ran with it.
We need Diesel first. Then maybe double clutched diesel hybrid manuals, I don't know; using a torque converter is a horrible, horrible idea (coupling: 10% efficient. Acceleration: hahahahahahahahaha).
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I almost bought one when it first came out but the test-drive was horrible. The rear-view mirror was unusable due to the design of the rear window/hatch. The main support cross-member completely blocked the view splitting the mirror in half. That left you with trying to look over the top of it (and seeing mostly sky) or under it through a darkly tinted 'lower window' which only left a view of the bumper of the car 5 feet behind you.
I am 5'10" tall so completely 'average' by North American standards, but perhaps this car was designed to 'fit' an average Asian.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
The problem with natural gas is that there's not enough of it. The biggest reason for the rise in electric tariffs in the early part of the 2000's was largely because everyone built natural gas power plants, and, they more or less used up all the natural gas. Now you want to go and build natural gas cars... good luck getting natural gas. Proposed terminals for importing LNG all along the east coast have been killed left and right, there's not enough domestic supply in the lower 48 and the uber pipeline from Alaska faces a storm of environmental protests.
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Very true. I was in the market for a new car 3 months ago. I tabulated vehicles based on gas consumption, monthly cost to own, projected maintenance etc. Hybrids tended to have a minimal savings per month ~80-100 bucks~ but had a massively larger investment upfront were always smaller in size and had weaker engines than the cheaper gas car.(people seem to forget hybrids in addition to higher cost don't have good financing)
Hybrids weren't worth buying even if the price of gas was 8 dollars a gallon. I projected that it would still take a minimum 5 years to break EVEN with a gasoline car. At current gas prices most hybrids averaged out to 11 years before they broke even with gasoline cars.
So yeah, get a hybrid if you're A) planning owning the same car for a minimum of 11 years or B) want to feel that you're helping the environment (a questionable assumption in its own right but a topic for another conversation!), otherwise stick to gasoline. As an aside that 11 year calculation doesn't take into account what happens when you need a new several thousand dollar battery - they supposedly have an 8 year life-cycle; chances are you'll have to replace it and that pushes the break-even point out to 15 years! - OUCH
What it really came down to was equivalent of giving the bank around 10,000 dollars and having the bank pay it back over a 10 year period without interest. Take the difference between hybrid and gas car and put it into a bank at 4% savings the. At the end of 10 years with the same initial investment both individuals own their respective cars, one has now broken even on it while the other has an extra 2000 sitting in the bank (remember the gas-owner was using the interest to subsidize the difference in ownership.)
Hybrids right now only really offer peace of mind, but most people think they save money but never actually bother to do any calculations.
Thanks, but I'll stick with my car that doesn't use 20 pounds of cadmium and which cost only $6000 used.
Also, I'll walk and bike when possible.
And I'm never, ever going to buy a hybrid unless it has a manual transmission.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
http://www.hybridcars.com/compacts-sedans/honda-insight-overview.html
you can get a car that gets better mileage
Gets better mileage?
You need to look into that. The prius gets ~45mpg in the city (fueleconomy.gov has it rated as 48mpg city and 45mpg highway). I won't dispute your other claims, since I haven't driven a civic or a fit (or a prius for that matter), but the mileage certainly favors the prius (and insights get even better mileage than Priuses. My little insight gets 50-55mpg around town) . . .
Chevy did that and is running with it. Go to gm-volt.com some time. Warning, fan boy site, but it's useful.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
New Honda Insight Hybrid Revealed, Expected $18,500 Price Tag To Make It World's Cheapest
Dont know about you, but I would say thats a bit more detail on pricing, $18500, about the price of a standard/econo car these days.
tm
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If you have your car payed off and spend $70 a week for gas, that is a total of $3640 for an entire year.
On the other hand, if you buy a $25000 hybrid, you might only need to buy $30 of gas a week, but unless your car payments are less than $120 a month, you aren't saving any money by buying a hybrid.
Or you just drive your old car more sensibly and spend less than $25 week on gas. Going from driving the way I used to, I got 28 mpg per tank. Slowing down and applying a few mileage enhancing techniques, I have been getting 36 mpg per tank. That didn't cost me a dime, and I paid off my car 4 years ago.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
The EPA changed its fuel economy standards in 2008, and perhaps other times between 1989 and then. The 2007 Prius is rated at 60 mpg city, 51 highway; the 2008, which is really the same car, is rated at 48/45. So you definitely can't compare the 1989 numbers with the 2008.
Are you adequate?
http://www.hybridcars.com/faq.html#battery
How often do hybrid batteries need replacing? Is replacement expensive and disposal an environmental problem?
The hybrid battery packs are designed to last for the lifetime of the vehicle, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, probably a whole lot longer. The warranty covers the batteries for between eight and ten years, depending on the carmaker.
Battery toxicity is a concern, although today's hybrids use NiMH batteries, not the environmentally problematic rechargeable nickel cadmium. "Nickel metal hydride batteries are benign. They can be fully recycled," says Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal. Toyota and Honda say that they will recycle dead batteries and that disposal will pose no toxic hazards. Toyota puts a phone number on each battery, and they pay a $200 "bounty" for each battery to help ensure that it will be properly recycled.
There's no definitive word on replacement costs because they are almost never replaced. According to Toyota, since the Prius first went on sale in 2000, they have not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.
We bought a brand new Camry hybrid last year (a 2008 model). We received a $2000 tax credit for it, which reduced are total tax bill by $2000. When you donate to a charity, you only get a deduction, which means you don't pay taxes on that $2000 (which ends up saving you around $400 in taxes, not the same as a tax credit). We were going to buy a new vehicle anyway, so getting the hybrid was really at no extra cost than a standard Camry with the tax credit. We also average around 55mpg in it, spending no more than $250/month in gas (and we drive around 2000 miles/month).
http://www.hybridcars.com/faq.html#battery
How often do hybrid batteries need replacing? Is replacement expensive and disposal an environmental problem?
The hybrid battery packs are designed to last for the lifetime of the vehicle, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, probably a whole lot longer. The warranty covers the batteries for between eight and ten years, depending on the carmaker.
Battery toxicity is a concern, although today's hybrids use NiMH batteries, not the environmentally problematic rechargeable nickel cadmium. "Nickel metal hydride batteries are benign. They can be fully recycled," says Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal. Toyota and Honda say that they will recycle dead batteries and that disposal will pose no toxic hazards. Toyota puts a phone number on each battery, and they pay a $200 "bounty" for each battery to help ensure that it will be properly recycled.
There's no definitive word on replacement costs because they are almost never replaced. According to Toyota, since the Prius first went on sale in 2000, they have not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.
http://pppad.blogspot.com/2007/05/nimh-held-hostage-by-chevron-texaco.html
It's a moot point though. Li-Ion (or a variation of lithium tech) or EEStor's Ultracaps will have surpassed Ni-MH by 2014.
The problem is that the hybrid costs $3000 more up front and money now is always worth more than money in the future, hence the reason why interest is charged and why money has a time value. so a stream of payments adding up to 3000 six (6) years from now is actually worth less than $3000 right now so you are paying $3000 more upfront for a savings of less than $3000 (i.e. a loss). In order for the investment to really "pay off" it would have to save you more money in gas than you could earn instead by investing the $3000 difference in treasury bills (4.75% yield or thereabouts) or in other words it would have to save you more than $3000 at the end of the 6 years to be worth it. If you are looking at it purely from a financial standpoint hybrids rarely make sense (for now) because there are almost always cheaper non-hybrid alternatives no matter what you are presently driving.
The low weight and the 990 CC engine with electric assist ensure that I am the one pulling away with spinning wheels at the lights leaving muscle cars in the dust.
Bullshit. Unless the other guy was asleep. 0-60 in 10.6s.
This October's Consumer Reports article "Which affordable hybrids save you the most money?" disagrees with you.
Conclusion: "Despite their higher price, many models pay off after only a year" and some models "can save more than $4,000 over five years."
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/news/2008/10/affordable-hybrids/overview/affordable-hybrids-ov.htm
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You also complain that hybrids have "weaker engines than the cheaper gas car," forgetting that electric motors have much better torque than gasoline engines (eg. even diesel locomotives use electric motors) so higher horsepower isn't needed.
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Finally, a reply to your battery FUD: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=954363&cid=24883785
No. I don't. No more than I have to "look" for a station that takes credit cards or has "midgrade" fuel. If you can't find a station with diesel you shouldn't be driving. Every 'neighborhood' station around here carries it.
And no, the higher cost doesn't make up for the mileage. (They don't cancel out). My identical make and model of car gets 30 MPG. Say I get 50 MPG. To 'break even' diesel would have to cost 5/3 as much as gasoline, but it doesn't.
We've been doing it on aircraft for some time. I believe that reliability figures actually improved in that case, because it's far easier to make an electrical system redundant.
Still, yeah. It makes me a bit uneasy, and seems generally unnecessary.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Actually to warm the catalytic converter the Prius will almost always run the engine at startup, this is to make sure that when it IS needed the engine isn't making too much NOX emissions. There is a way to override this behavior and have essentially a plugin hybrid but AFAIK it voids your warranty.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The Insight worked that way because it had a normal transmission. It was not capable of moving without the gasoline engine turning (except when coasting in neutral with the manual transmission model).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
http://www.themotorreport.com.au/6042/prius-taxi-belts-out-half-a-million-klicks/
According to Vic Johnston, Toyotaâ(TM)s manager of hybrid sales and fleet strategy, these are the only two Priusâ(TM) in Australia that have even needed a battery replacement at all, since its arrival on our shores in 2001.
"When you consider that the average car in Australia travels approximately 15,000km per year, the 350,000km Prius has crammed over 23 years of average driving into a couple of years,"
"And the 550,000km Prius has fitted 36 years into three years, which is astonishing.
"The average age of the Australian car population is now around 10 years, so the battery is lasting well over double that in distance terms.
"When you consider that the Prius taxis in Cairns are generating half the fuel and service costs of other vehicles in their fleets, the Prius is significantly cheaper in whole-of-life costs.
What a load of rubbish. Lots of banks are struggling to improve their liquidity at the moment - deposits from general banking customers are a good way to acheieve this. My standard savings account is paying 5.3% at the moment, and I've got money in a 6-month fixed rate bond offered at 6.76%. I had thought that was a good rate but a couple months later other banks were offering 10% to try and entice savers.
The Prius features the raindrop design, which has a lower drag coefficient compared to most other consumer level cars. For example the Honda Civic has a drag coefficient of .36 while the Prius is .26. The Bugatti Veyron is .36 and a Hummer H2 is .57.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficients
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Here is the breakdown of tax credits. As of October 1, 2007 Prius buyers no longer receive any credit.
I wonder how this will work for the Insight. Will they count the vechicles from the original Insight, or will they start the count from zero?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Torque yes, fuel efficient yes, quiet? You must be joking. Even the best diesel still sounds like a tractor compared to a petrol engine.
I see you haven't been to Europe. The last Diesel I rented in France had a problem - I couldn't tell by ear when the engine was on unless I completely turned off the fan. It was quieter than any non-hybrid/electric I've heard in America, too. Not to mention getting 50 mpg for 90 mph driving and 40 mpg for city driving and having a pretty peppy engine.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
You're not really comparing the right cars. The .36 for the civic is for a 2001 model, non-hybrid. The last redesign of the Prius was around 2004 and the last redesign of the Civic was around 2006. Looking closer, 2004 Prius has a drag coefficient of .26 whereas the more normal looking 2006 Civic Hybrid has a drag coefficient of .27. Now if only Honda would just make the same body-tweaks for the non-hybrid Civics...
I bought a 2008 Camry Hybrid in January of this year. My car is eligible for $0 tax credit.
Since the 2008 Camry Hybrid only came out late last year, the maximum possible credit you are eligible for is $650... Not $2000.
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=157557,00.html
I also doubt you get 55 MPG in that thing, I get 43 on occasion, 36 most of the time in city driving. On the highway it gets 35 MPG. 2000/250 = 8 MPG.
Unless there were state tax credits involved, there is FUD at work here and this is NOT an informative post.
You forgot depreciation and federal tax credits. Consumer Reports ran the numbers this month and came up with several hybrid cars that will save money over their non-hybrid equivalents. These were often the same model of car for a true apples-to-apples comparison. They claim that many hybrids will save money after the first year.
There's a nice table of the results, but it's for subscribers. They calculate the total cost of ownership for a five year period, and they come up with $28,250 for the Prius and $29,750 for a Civic LX. The Prius costs $24,170 list and the Civic is $18,430. The Prius has the lowest 5-year total owner cost on the cart.
I think it's fair to assume that gas price inflation will keep pace with the return on a T-Bill, so the interest isn't going to help. It depends a lot on whether we elect another representative from the oil industry as Vice President, but that's a topic for another conversation.
Yep! Also, I want to stress that real diesel engines are actually more efficient than gasoline engines, because the compression ratios are so much higher. So it's not really that diesels are dirtier, but rather that the US looks at different pollutants than European countries do.
The two pollutants that diesels have issues with are (1) sulfur dioxide (SO2), and (2) nitrogen oxides (NOx); both cause acid rain. The SO2 is the result of burning high-sulfur fuels, so switching to ULSD, as Andy noted, will solve this problem. NOx, however, is more problematic: These oxides are created unavoidably from the reaction of atmospheric oxygen with nitrogen in the high pressures and temperatures experienced inside diesel engines (the very same factors that make diesels more efficient).
In contrast, gasoline engines tend to produce little sulfur dioxide since they burn low-sulfur gasoline. And since the pressures and temperatures inside them are lower, there's much less NOx production. But for the same reason (lower pressures and temperatures), combustion is not as complete as in diesels, so they tend to release more unburnt hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. These cause photochemical smog, and are powerful greenhouse gasses.
Now, this is where regulatory differences come in: In European countries, NOx emission requirements are not as strict, but hydrocarbon requirements are stricter, whereas in the US it's the reverse. So it's easier for diesel engines to meet requirements in Europe, and for gasoline engines to meet requirements in the US.
One solution to the NOx problem for diesel engines is to treat exhaust with urea. European companies distribute an aqueous urea solution as "AdBlue" -- presumably to avoid the urinary connotations of the "real" chemical name -- and it is available at gas stations. This is a little problematic in that now you have two chemicals that you consume while driving (fuel and urea) instead of just one, and we don't have an AdBlue distribution network in the US, but it does work.
So, that's it for the practical side of things. But before I finish up I want to throw in one theoretical note... I kept saying that diesels are more efficient -- and they are. But the thermodynamic cycle that they use (the "Diesel cycle," obviously enough) is actually not as efficient, fundamentally, as that used by gasoline engines (the Otto Cycle), for the same compression ratios. But diesel engines use compression ratios that are so much higher that they're more efficient anyway (to achieve the same compression ratios in a spark-ignition engine would require harder-to-ignite fuels, like some sort of hypothetical really-high-octane gasoline). So in practice, diesels are the most efficient internal combustion engines.
"US manufactures don't bring small Diesels to the US because they're just plain evil."
Suicidal is more like it.
US companies had the prestige/image to bring light diesel pickups to market and sell them effectively because they CREATED the diesel pickup market. Instead they let their small pickup lines become boring and atrophy. Ongoing diesel production would have allowed them to refine their product and produce proven engines (just as VW has done with their automobile engines).
The VW strategy when they built their Rabbit engines was to have a common engine block and bottom end, and transmission bell housing pattern for gasoline and diesel engines, slashing diesel production costs. A small common-block pickup truck diesel can be done the same way. The other payoff is that a gasoline engine based on a diesel bottom end will last a very long time.
US buyers tolerated the repair costs on the larger trucks because they were (usually) good designs that were torquey and appealing. As long as big trucks were selling, makers saw no reason to cover their asses by having diesel options in their small pickups. I argue that after getting slammed in the last fuel crisis they should have been prepared and they (obviously) chose not to be. Ceding market after market and relying on a big truck/SUV platform monoculture proved a vulnerability, just as building cars with (essentially, they are so close drivetrain swaps from car to truck are common) pickup truck drivetrains was in the 1970s.
Toyota, OTOH, built its image on small trucks and small gasoline engines. There was probably no reason to risk anything by changing a formula that has worked so well over time no matter what the fuel prices. Toyota is inherently ready for high gas prices because of their product line.
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The Prius features the raindrop design,
The Prius features a modified raindrop design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kammback
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