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Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says
mattnyc99 writes "Honda's challenger to the Prius — the Insight hybrid that we discussed so lividly a month ago — got its official unveiling today at the Paris auto show, with insiders confirming it would be cheaper than the world's most popular 'green' car while still hitting the same fuel-efficiency range. But the hybrid-electric showdown comes in the midst of a sudden rethink by Toyota about plug-in hybrids. Apparently all the recent hype — over the production version of the Chevy Volt, plus Chrysler's new electric trio and even the cool new Pininfarina EV also unveiled today — has execs from the world's number one automaker, and alt-fuel experts, questioning how many people will really buy electric cars, whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear, whether batteries will make them too expensive and more. "
What is the electric equivalent of a gas can? When my batteries go flat a couple miles from home, what will I do?
The grid can handle this. Millions of cars aren't going to be plugged in overnight. Yes, it takes years for a large power plant projects and big high-voltage lines to be planned, designed, and installed. It also takes years for a new car to become a significant percentage of cars on the road. When you consider that the economy is starting to squeeze people, its pretty clear that millions of people aren't going to run out and buy a new car just because its shiny.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
These same american car companies seemed all too eager to give us bigger, less fuel efficient tanks while demand was high. Obviously, that was a fad that was unsustainable, but they kept churning them out. Here we have clear proof that people want more efficiency and at least to feel like they're driving green, yet car companies aren't convinced they should give us them? Why is that stopping them now? Surely they haven't learned their lesson to think long-term rather than "Everyone is buying this right now, if these trends continue forever, and they will, then WOO HOO!"
The reason these vehicles will never get adopted to the extent they should doesn't have anything to do with having to plug them in overnight, hell I'd venture to say many find that less of a nuissance than having to make a trip to the petrol pump.
The real reason we won't be seeing a large scale adoption of these is that they're ugly. Why can't somebody just give us a green car that actually looks good?
Toyota is doing well (business wise) with its regular hybrids. It just does not make sense to try sell something that is self-competitive and confuses the market.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If Toyota don't build an plug in hybrid, someone else will. Like it or not, electric cars are the future. The combustion engines are not going to go away any time soon, but as soon as EV's become mainstream (in the next 5 years I think), two car households will have one ICE and one EV.
One has to wonder what Toyota is thinking. The RAV4 EV which they discontinued and even tried to have destroyed was a perfectly fine vehicle, and many are still running today. I wish they would just re-introduce that vehicle, perhaps with modern batteries.
I'm wondering if the vaporware of cars like the Volt and other plug-ins are starting to eat at the sales of current cars. I can think of a few well-off lefty people (yes, a tweed jacket wearing university dean among them) who used to be new-every-two people. But, now, they're staying tight in their 1st-gen Priuses, waiting for the next... something. CNG? Fuel-cell? Volt? Who knows.
Everybody is starting to sense "the gasoline car has to go". All the automakers are working to get to the next option, and trying to assure the public that it's right around the corner if they just keep getting tax breaks and government loans. But it isn't, unfortunately.
99% of my driving is within the range covered by a regular charge, and hell, I live in the sort of climate where I could throw a single solar panel on my roof and break even on the electricity for the year.
It's all about the batteries though. The guy who invents a workable next-gen source of electricity (be it battery, capacitor, or fuel cell) is going to make Bill Gates look like a poor relative.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
why are automakers so irrationally risk averse! I understand making sound decisions, but damnit...the market was ready for electric plug-ins in the late 70's...today it's a no brainer!
yes
yes
no
If you build it, they will come...in my podunk former GM factory town, everyone would own a prius if they could afford to get a new car (many working and middle class people can't afford ANY kind of new car, no matter what make/model)
The people that can afford to buy a new car are buying Prius's in record numbers...a friend at the Toyota dealership (who helped my parents get their Prius) says they always order the maximum from Toyota and sell out before they hit the lot...for almost two years that's been the case
Plugging in at night is just a logical progression, and from an automaker's perspective, a simple engineering isssue (professional engineers can easily handle redesigning a Prius to have plug-in capability)
As far as added cost of batteries, the Prius my parents own now has more than sufficient battery power, all it needs is a plug-in...
Thank you Dave Raggett
When fuel prices got too high, interest in electric vehicles and alternative energy sources boomed, but simultaneously demand weakened. Now oil prices have come off ~30% from their highs, and suddenly EVs are not a totally obvious solution anymore? Duh... this is how the market it supposed to work. This means that electric vehicle companies are going to have to start competing on real merits and not just squishy fuzzy green feelings. And I hope that makes them stronger! But it's not the worst thing in the world if conventional gas-burning cars remain an acceptable/affordable thing for the time being.
--
Learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
As long as the charger comes with a simple timer I don't see why people wouldn't be willing to charge the car at night, especially if you're in an area that has different rates for different times of day. As for batteries being too expensive, that's probably true right now, but do they really think we'll still be using today's lithium ion batteries ten years from now?
The cars being showcased today aren't the ones that are going to solve our energy problems. They are little more than prototype, proof of concept vehicles. That's why GM is only producing 10,000 volts the first year they are in production. Lets start producing them now and work out the issues that are bound to come up so that in 5 years we can begin producing them seriously. Or we can think like we always have and look one year out at a time, never bothering to invest in the future.
"whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear"
I'd charge it at night rather than the day if they make it easy for me. I want to be able to plug it in whenever I get home, and have a timer set up to make it kick in during offpeak hours.
Of course, at the moment, I don't have a power outlet near my parking spot, so I can't take advantage of these cars.
A while ago Dodge announced they would sell the Viper division. many people expected it was due only to weak sales (the Corvette crushes it in sales every year).
But could it be that Dodge wanted to cleanse it from their palette to start on a new sports car? That Dodge EV is certainly nothing like the old General Motors EV1 that was so loved by its lessees when it was available as a plug-in electric vehicle.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One of the main reasons I am wary of 100% electric plug-in vehicles is the consequences of forgetting to charge it. I forget to charge my ipod and cell phone all the time. This construes a minor inconvenience, as I can charge them in the car or at work. But forgetting to charge your car means you will be late for work, or miss it altogether if you live in a rural area and do not have access to public transportation. This is a much more dire consequence.
However, with a hybrid, you have a lot more flexibility, and it's more forgiving to absent-minded people like me. I have plenty of friends and family members that also chronically forget to charge things and I see full electric plug-in vehicles as a potential nightmare for us. What if after work you and your coworkers decide to drive to a faraway bar for an impromptu party? Do you have enough charge in your batteries? No, you're pretty much screwed. With a hybrid, you just fill it up at the next gas station.
to make an electric outlet with a timer so that it'll only turn on its power at night. That way you could come home and plug in your car, and it would be automagically charged during off peak times. I smell a patent!!!
I think a lot of people won't be able to get a plugin hybrid for a simple reason: they have nowhere to plug them in. Think about all the people who live in apartments or who have on-street parking.
Unless we string parking-meter style outlets all over the place I just don't see how this will work for city dwellers.
A lot of electric providers allow a system where electricity is charged at a higher rate in the day, and a dirt-cheap rate at night. Plug in the car when it's in the driveway, use a timer on the plug. Tada.
SIG: HUP
Perhaps I'm missing it. Was there something livid about their discussion?
Maybe the discussion was lively? Maybe they discussed it longingly? Did they describe it vividly?
/...
Brand loyalty is fleeting in the automotive industry.
Toyota doesn't want to build a plug-in hybrid? Fine.
My dad got invited to see the Jaguar Plug-in hybrid, which will run off the battery for 50 miles before burning any gas.
Considering my dad has a 22 mile commute, he can't wait for this thing to hit the road.
He doesn't know when it will become available, but he's already on the wait list. (Estimated price ~$80,000, by the way)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
...there are serious issues with the pollution output from a diesel engine, even if you're using biodiesel fuel. Reducing the higher NOx gas output and the diesel particulates is a very expensive proposition, and just to make a diesel engine meet the EPA Tier 2 Bin 5 standard is expensive enough that you might as well buy a Toyota Prius or the new Honda Insight instead at pretty much the same price.
These same american car companies seemed all too eager to give us bigger, less fuel efficient tanks while demand was high.
Toyota is a Japanese company. Just an FYI.
When they find out that their monies they get from gas Taxes is going down they are gonna be pissed. Are the state tax collectors going to be sent door to door breaking the legs of Hybrid owners that don't pay as much fuel tax because they use so little fuel.
Probably not, the mafia slime balls will probably just put a "road' tax on electricity so they get gas tax plus electricity tax on people who don't even own hybrids.
Thank you government!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Calling the car an electric w/range extender, rather than simply hybrid (or series-hybrid) is marketing speak.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The Volt is supposed to answer that issue by having a combustion engine as a backup -- it runs and generates electricity that is used to run the car. So, in theory, you should never be in the situation you describe. You would also just fill up at the next gas station.
My wife and I might not buy a Volt immediately because so many companies are entering the market, but we'll buy the best EV or PIH we can afford sometime around 2010-2011. Most of our trips are 10 miles round. Rarely do we go more than 40 round. In the future, we'll make those once or twice a week at most.
So give me an EV for most of my trips, a PIH for the rest, and a Lotus Elise (30mph highway) for weekend blasts through the canyon.
What's so green about running your car on coal - which is what you'd be doing here in Queensland with a plug-in electric vehicle. Our government has even outlawed small gasoline motors on bicycles, but permits plug-in electric bicycles and large gas-guzzling cars. Who really gives a damn about the planet?
You can also use inductive or capacitive charging. Just park the car over a "grid" on the floor of your garage, and you don't have to remember to plug the damn thing in! (You could do the same thing for your phone and MP3 player if you put it in the exact same place every night.) That being said, I'm convinced plug-in hybrid and not full-time electric is the way to go. I already own 2 hybrids, and I'm ready and willing to buy a plug-in hybrid just as soon as they make one available that I can afford. (I'm anxiously awaiting Aptera availability in my area.) Of course, few people will be buying new cars of any sort until we get off this economic roller-coaster we've been on lately.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Around the turn of the century, electric cars had a range of about forty miles... the same as the Chevy Volt. All the improvements in battery technology have been able to do no more than keep up with our expectations of automotive comfort and speed.
Electric cars have, for a century, been waiting for the big breakthrough in battery technology that has yet to occur. The brilliance of the basic TRW design--the one they could never get U. S. carmakers interested in, the design that is fundamentally the same that Toyota uses in the Prius--is that it only relies on the battery as a short-term buffering device, a "torquer" as TRW called it, to make up the difference between the torque that can be provided by a little economical gas engine and the torque that's needed in normal driving.
So, a Prius provides a very meaningful increase in fuel efficiency without demanding a battery made of unobtainium. The Prius battery in fact only stores about enough energy to drive the car for about a mile.
Despite the possibility that Toyota is putting a spin on things, what they are saying makes sense. As hobbyists have confirmed, a Prius is virtually ready to be a plug-in hybrid, needing only a bigger battery. It would seemingly be so easy for Toyota to compete in the plug-in hybrid market that I have to believe they have sound reasons for skepticism.
Another possibility is that Toyota has encountered some serious snags that they're not talking about in trying to produce a plug-in version of the Prius. Perhaps GM knows about these snags and has some trade-secret ways of overcoming them... or perhaps GM hasn't discovered them yet, or is ignoring them because the Volt isn't really intended to succeed and is just a very elaborate "image" ploy.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Car dealer #1: Will people actually BUY a hybrid car, saving them hundreds/thousands in fuel costs? /me wants "+1 Sad But True" ...
Car dealer #2: No, they just want GPS and a phat system, yo.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In suburbia, at least, I predict a charge robot. I get home at night, I get out of my car, I walk into the house, hitting the garage door closer button on the way in. A few minutes later, the robot (which is nothing but a simple arm attached to the wall), reaches out and plugs into the car. The car has some method for helping the robot locate the plug integrated into it, which means the robot can find the plug without having to get silly with natural vision expert systems, making it quite cheap and simple. In the morning, I walk into the garage, hitting the door opener button, and the robot disengages its plug and retracts before I hit the driver's seat. I drive out with a 100% charge every morning. What could be easier?
Going to a gas station to have to climb out of your car, fiddle with your credit card at the pump, get the nozzle into the car, begin fueling, then get the nozzle back to the pump, and fiddle with the pump some more to get your receipt, and make sure to put your gas cap back on... all of it will just feel primitive, after a few months of literally never having to think about it. Sure you've got a charge indicator, but most of the time you don't even care what it says. You've got enough charge to go anywhere you're likely to go in a day, and you ALWAYS do. Every day.
I'd buy a Tesla Roadster in a heartbeat, if I could afford it. As many other posters have pointed out, whoever can meet or beat "standard" new car prices of $20k or so won't be able to keep one on the lot for a decade.
You are living in some weird cynical fantasyland. Plug in hybrid cars are expensive because they are new technology. The factories to build them have to be built, we haven't spent enough time figuring out ways to keep individual unit costs down, and R&D costs haven't been amortized over long periods of selling millions of units as with standard ICE.
The first electric cars will be expensive. Probably the only ones that will sell well will be expensive luxury cars, because the people who can afford to spend $38,000 on a plug-in hybrid car that looks like crap & has no features probably prefer to spend $50,000 on a plug-in hybrid car that looks nice and is fun to be in.
Then we'll get better at making individual units cheaply, the manufacturing infrastructure will become more established, and car companies will get more comfortable about how many PIH cars will sell. And then they'll get cheap.
Car companies would gladly sell us cars that never required fuel if they could figure out how to make them at prices people would pay. If 90% of car companies elected not to sell cars that don't use petroleum (or use less petroleum) which everyone could afford simply because the people making decisions have a stake in petroleum sales, the other 10% of car companies would put them out of business.
I hate that the "No karma bonus" flag is persistent now.
I think for short hauls compressed air might be better than electricity. Deakin University just won an award for "the Model T for the 21st" or some such (JFGI).
Their car was a three wheeler with no steering gear. Front wheels are fixed, rear wheel a freewheeling caster, steering by pressure differential in hub-mounted turbines. There's no chemical reaction involved in power transfer -- the sucker doesn't even emit ozone.
Given that many folks prefer air over electric for power tools (myself included) the better & cheaper control over power delivery could leap past the electric hybrid altogether. For long drives you'd still need auxiliary power, the difference being you'd replace engine + generator + battery with engine + compressor + air tank. No battery at all -- no lithium, no nickel, no cadmium, no lead.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I will buy an electric car. I will charge it at night. I will. I promise. Start fucking building them.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
There is a real demand for plug-in hybrids despite whatever concerns Toyota management sees with the adoption of the technology.
As with Diesel Hybrids - Toyota may not want to make them but if there is a demand - and there is, for economy & ecology reasons in both cases - they will be made and sold. But Toyota wont get the profit from making them. That'll go to a more enterprising car company that makes what people want.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I daresay a 50cc lightweight diesel or petrol (gasoline) engine connected to a generator and set up to run at its most efficient speed will become commonplace.. mounted underfloor in most electric vehicles
If it produces say 20% of the power needed to run the vehicle in normal use, that would provide a limp-home facility or the ability to charge the battery by leaving the vehicle parked with the internal generator running for an hour or so... or alternatively the ability to extend the range by that proportion by starting it as you start your journey.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
A Prius battery is normally on a 100% down to 80% charge discharge cycle
When they start getting down to 50%ish residual capacity most batteries will be replaced. The discarded 50%-capable Prius batteries can then be used for solar power storage in homes. Then your solar cell gets much more useful...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I don't believe auto makers' statements about hybrids and EVs needing the same range as ordinary cars to be able to sell. Why not design purely electric vehicles where the amount of battery cells can be tailored for each customers commute (an amount reasonably simple to increase when needs change or batteries lose capacity)? Millions of families already have two or more cars, and could easily live with one of them being severely range restricted. I commute 45 kilometers (one way) so a 55 kilometer range would suffice for me. Also, EV/hybrid car makers should forget the US as a market and focus on the EU. EU countries typically have more than twice as high gas prices, so EVs will probably make sense a decade earlier here.
If the price of electricity goes up in the summer just due to the demand from AC, what would current rates do if everyone started plugging in their cars? Maybe gas will drop to $0.50/gal and the cost of electricity will jump to the equivelant of $5.00 gas.
I thought about this very same idea (grid in garage floor). I did lunch with an EE to determine if it's feasible. It isn't yet with the losses you'd get from current "wireless" charging systems, but future systems may be able to handle it.
The car has some method for helping the robot locate the plug
Three or four LED's or reflective spots in a pattern around the socket would do it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Sounds like Toyota is trying to create some bad press since it's no longer the only game in town.
FYI, hybrids like Honda is creating cost a lot less to own and maintain, especially for the 2nd and 3rd owners. EVs are even more cost-effective, at pennies per mile. They just normally lack the range and top-end speed. 30 miles at 50mph doesn't do a thing. But 200 miles and 120mph top speed is potentially viable.
The real litmus test, though, will be if the new EVs that Chrysler and the others are making will be available to purchase or whether they will be yet again the same "lease only" song and dance.
Wow, an inductive charger powerful enough to charge a car. Wouldn't that fry my nuts if I sat in the car too long after pulling into the garage?
The problem no one considers is water vapor. You ever see those giant cooling towers at power plants? We used to call them cloud makers when I was a kid. While CO2 contributes less than 2% to the greenhouse effect, water vapor is 96%. So when we're all driving around in hydrogen cars and electric cars charged by coal and nuclear power plants we'll all be so proud of ourselves for getting rid of that evil carbon dioxide we won't notice the earth is turning into a sauna. Is the cure worse than the disease?
I live in an apartment which doesn't have power in the [shared secured] garage for obvious reasons, so plug-in cars are not for me and anyone else in my situation.
For everyone else, utility companies need to come up with a way to vary their rates generally according to load on the system - by introducing smarter metering systems.
Well, there's the Tesla, with 200 mile range on a charge. The price, at $100,000+, is excessive, although not by supercar standards. The energy density of batteries is at last good enough. Price, though...
I've seen a Tesla being driven on the road past my house. It was a rather dirty car, so it was actually being used. I live in the northern part of Silicon Valley, near the Tesla dealership, and am on a scenic route to Woodside, so it's not that surprising to see an exotic. The number of Teslas on the road is still under 100, though.
Even the resonant coupled system the MIT guys have been showing off and that Intel improved upon? From what we've seen of that, it would be absolutely ideal for this scenario. It uses great big loops and works over several feet. Sounds absolutely perfect. Embed the loops in the concrete of your garage floor, build in the matching loops in the bottom of your car behind a nice tough plastic barrier, and never have to think about a charge again. I don't know how perfectly you have to line up the loops, but from reading the articles about the system MIT has, it doesn't sound like it has to be very precise at all. The few feet of difference in parking a car shouldn't hurt it any. The losses weren't nearly as high as classical radio antennae wireless charging, either. From what we've heard of Nikola Tesla's experiments, it can probably be very high power, too. He was willing to do try stuff at ridiculously high power levels. Intel's version is 75% efficient. Ask that EE how much power you can transmit through a resonant coupled system using coupling loops that will fit on the bottom of a car, and what that does to the efficiency.
It seems silly to me that every rooftop, parking lot, and building in sunny areas isn't covered in solar panels. There's no reason there shouldn't be windmills in parking lots and cornfields in areas with sufficient windspeeds-- you can't ruin the view in a landscape already covered with asphalt or corn. And why not stick 'em on the towers for power lines that already blight the view, in areas where the wind is sufficient?
And there should be nuclear power where we can't realistically do these things.
There's no reason to cover the surface of the earth-- but we might as well slap 'em on the parts of the earth we've already covered with other buildings, huge expanses of unproductive asphalt, giant grid-squares of crops, or power line towers.
I'm in line for the Aptera all-electric model. I get regular updates and they DO seem to be on target for delivery in California. I waited years for the Venture One but it's still vaporware. All seems to indicate Aptera is the real deal.
Since I installed solar panels, the cost of charging the vehicle at night will be nominal, as my day-generation will offset the charge.
huh? I *own* a 300 watt wind genny you can hold in one hand. Then they make them over one megawatt in size that take huge cranes and crews of men to install. And they make them in a variety of sizes in between.
That's scaling.
And your nuclear plants require armed guards with surface to air missiles and whatnot 24/7, three shifts a day, for the next thousand years, and even then there is no guarantee. Government pentesting "red teams" routinely beat existing security at US nuclear plants, so it is only a matter of time before some real bad guys do it, then buh bye downwind for hundreds of miles. They'll blow it from the inside and nuke a huge area. The *most* they could do with a wind tower is knock it over. Big deal.
The most they can do to your nuke plant is probably kill hundreds of thousands of people by taking out a few guards and a more or less small building. Think it isn't going to happen eventually? Think there eventually won't be a bigger accident due to earthquakes, like at diablo canyon or any of the japanese plants? 8 and 9 richtors are a *certainty*, we have geological evidence of it, and your plants are not built to withstand neither a richter 9 nor a concerted attack with bunker busters or salvos of good anti armor rockets, like those cheap as dirt warsaw pact models out on the black market. Yes, they might withstand a tincan cessna or even an airliner, but not serious firepower concentrated at the same spot, military science knows how to deal with thick concrete and steel. Nukes are unsafe because a ton of them are built in unsafe areas, and all of them are vulnerable to attack. Plus, the economics aren't there, they can't even get a single plant built without governmental insurance backup, no private carriers will offer full coverage for them..because of those reasons I just outlined. *They are unsafe*, highly dangerous and a fairly rube goldberg method of just making heat when we have thousands of empty square miles of very hot deserts just sitting around unused.
$19,000 is the MAX price for the low end model. They refuse to make a car like that so they only end up as curiosity toys for the rich.
Your under-$19k idea is a good one, and it appears that Honda realizes it with the new Insight. Around 50mpg, $18,500. Sure, it kinda looks like a Prius, but if Honda can build a Prius-clone for $3k less than a Prius, they'll still have a winner.
Eventually, solar will work too, but since solar isn't reliable it will never be a primary power source until someone invents a magic battery.
They already invented it. It's called the "vanadium redox flow battery". (Also a good match for wind power in single-mill residential applications. Added bonus: DC voltage conversion is free, simplifying peak power tracking controllers for wind and solar.)
It's already being deployed in power-grid sized units, used as an alternative to local peaking-generation plants. (Charge during off-peak and discharge during peak. Cuts line losses, eliminates local noise and pollution, lets you power more locally than you have lines to supply during peak times, and moves power from cheap times to expensive times while losing less than the price difference to battery inefficiency.)
Home-sized and electric-vehicle-sized units will probably be available when somebody decides there's a demand, licenses the patents, does a bit of product and manufacturing engineering, and starts supplying them. If something better doesn't come along first, that is. (The new fast-charge long-life lithium ion batteries, for example, might beat them, due to simplicity and high power-to-weight ratio for vehicle applications, followed by economy-of-scale price advantages once they're adopted for buses and autos.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"What I want to know is, how big of a bath am I going to take when I want go on vacation and drive 600 miles without a chance to re-charge."
Well... why not consider the current Prius as a good indicator? With great aerodynamics, regenerative braking, battery assist, and so on, a Prius gets about 600 miles on a single tank of gas.
The Volt is said to get about 400 miles on a mere 9 gallon tank. Take away the "recharge" range of 40 miles, and that's 360 miles. So charge up before you leave home and you can do your 600 mile trip with just over 12 gallons of gas.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I enjoyed reading about all of these new hybrid vehicles, but the Popular Mechanics article about the Insight was almost unreadable in spots, to the point of being seriously misleading. Thankfully, I knew enough to figure out what the author of the article was trying to say. (In fairness, it could have been the result of an overzealous editor trimming for space and cutting too much in the process.)
Here's one gem from that article:
The way this snippet is written, you'd think that the Civic Hybrid was a 2-seat car with an aluminum frame and side panels. However, the Civic Hybrid is neither -- it is mostly like a conventional Honda Civic (and I've ridden in one). The Insight is the 2-seater with an aluminum construction -- and I know this because I had a coworker who bought one when they first came out.
... the guy with the gold makes the rules. Or is it the other way around now? I sort of forget.
Depends on whether the bailout passes. If it does the guys with the rules will make the money (about 700 billion THIS time, and then more later). But it will be paper and bookkeeping entries, not gold.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not sure what Toyota's strategy is in downplaying the plug-in hybrid model. Are they not able to come up with a good way to do it themselves? Are they trying to steal GM's thunder and delay the buzz until Toyota can catch up? Did the CEO of ExxonMobil threaten to have the CEO of Toyota shot if they started producing plug-in hybrids?
I wondered about this myself. Perhaps it is FUD to help Toyota retain their lead if they've missed seeing the timetable for demand.
Now where'd I put my tinfoil hat?
-- Alastair
I assume what the previous poster meant by "purely on gas" is the situation once you've outrun the electric-only range, so in effect all the power needs to come from burning gasoline. The fact that you burn the gasoline to charge batteries to power an electric engine rather than powering the axles directly doesn't really affect the fact that the energy is ultimately all coming from burning gas.
Of course your proposed measures could be used to compute the mpg: if you know the miles/kW of the electric engine, and the kW/gallon of the generator, you can get the miles/gallon.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To quote, "A new study for the Department of Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84% of the country's 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics. If all the cars and light trucks in the nation switched from oil to electrons, idle capacity in the existing electric power system could generate most of the electricity consumed by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles."
http://www.metrics2.com/blog/2006/12/11/us_power_grid_could_fuel_180_million_plugin_hybrid.html
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In my case I need a plug-in hybrid with a large range for long trips. Something with a 100 mile or so range on batteries plus a motor-generator to get it further and up mountains.
Such a vehicle would be a SINGLE vehicle replacement for my current car: Commute on batteries, start a long trip on batteries then continue with fuel, capture the energy from coming down 8,000 feet of mountains to use crossing the long flats after the foothills.
This cycle is about the same as doing a commute in the SF Bay area (on batteries) and taking vacation trips to Tahoe or Reno (on batteries plus gas, recapturing mountain altitude-energy on the return trip), or commuting in LA and vacationing in Las Vegas. The Bay Area has a very high concentration of fanatical environmentalists with large disposable incomes and an early-adopter mentality. First car company to come up with such a single-vehicle solution gets those bucks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"People who mainly commute could fill up as little as 2 or 3 times a year, and would probably be riding on 1/4 of a tank most of the time."
A Volt can do 100 miles on a quarter tank. A Prius 150. How far away do you need to be?
Further, in a crawling out-of-town emergency stop-and-go situation such as you envision a Prius PHEV would do even BETTER than a typical gas-power car as a Prius can and will shut down and conserve the gas motor in those kinds of conditions. It's just not needed.
Talk about a lame, ill-considered excuse for an argument...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In some Alaskan cities the parking meters already have an outlet - for the engine's block heater. Power bill is included in the parking fee and the power goes off when the meter expires.
Saves 'em money on parking enforcement, too. Forget to feed the meter in the winter and your car won't start. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There is no way the grid can handle so many cars being plugged in to recharge at night. You may feel nice and fuzzy warm about getting an electric vehicle, but then, you get a whoop-ass dose of reality when you find out, low and behold, your electric provider uses COAL FIRED plants to create this invisible power. What is the dirtiest method of power?????
The one where you have to bomb the shit out of other countries to get. Coal may be dirty (in absolute terms), but at least you don't get the stench of blood on your hands.
I too was excited to read about vanadium redox flow batteries. For such a promising technology, it does seem to be poorly commercialized.
It seems unlikely that we'll see this in mobile applications due to the low energy density. To quote wiki:
Current production Vanadium redox batteries achieve an energy density of about 25 Wh/kg of electrolyte. More recent research at UNSW indicates that the use of precipitation inhibitors can increase the density to about 35 Wh/kg, with even higher densities made possible by controlling the electrolyte temperature. This energy density is quite low as compared to other rechargeable battery types, e.g. Lead-acid (30-40 Wh/kg) and Lithium Ion (80-200 Wh/kg).
The main advantage of vanadium redox in mobile applications is quick fills, however certain types of lithium ion batteries also allow very fast charging with much better energy density.
The flow batteries look promising for load-leveling of stationary alternative power sources. It would be interesting to see how they compare with lead-acid in $/Wh. I haven't found any figures on this.
VW has a COOL system. They have small solar panels that have suction cups on them. Them stick them to the inside of the windshield of the cars and they have a plug that plugs into the vehicle to keep the battery charge while they are on the boat comming over the ocean to the U.S.. A guy I know has three of them that we used at a Boy Scout campout to charge a marine battery. Then used the battery to power lights at night. You could use the same idea with electric or hybrid cars. Just have a some solar pannels that stick to the inside of the windows and charge the battery(ies). Granted in the winter and/or when it's cloudy this wouldn't work so well, but it would be great for the southwest area of the country and California and florida where they get LOTS of sunshine.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
They may not follow a specific leader, but I drew up a Venn diagram, and the overlap across "Obama", "Starbucks", "Apple", "Al Gore", and "Trendy fucking hipster" is overwhelming.
No, you described me, a typical liberal. My brother is a Green and the only thing on that list he favors is "Apple". He's voting Green party, not Obama; doesn't patronize evil Starbucks; once warned me against Al Gore's efforts to destroy freedom of speech; and is stuck in the late '60s as far as trends go.
-- Boycott Shell
Please, please bring it here. I need a car exactly like this and I don't want to spend money on another combustion engine car. It's pretty clear that the big manufacturers are going to go the FUD route again. We need the smaller manufacturers to come through for us, and it looks like Pininfarina is going to do that, but they need to bring it here to the US too.
--- What?
No. The ozone produce would artificially age all the plastics and corrode all the metal in such a short time that car will fall apart and you won't have to worry about sitting in it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You could just have an induction plate on your driveway you park the car over and it'll charge it for ya (assuming it's built to do that). Then how can you forget?
Well, what you need then is a wireless extension cord or more correctly, wireless power! http://www.google.com/search?&q=tesla+wireless+power/ We could just download more electrons over our cell phones or an antenna on the vehicle. This stuff is so last century! After all, Tesla was working on wireless electricity around 1900.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will
>>But forgetting to charge your car means you will be late for work
The same applies to setting your alarm clock, putting gas into regular cars' fuel tanks, making sure you have enough clothes to wear for the week...
I'm pretty sure there will be a dashboard gauge that cheerfully informs you of the remaining charge in your batteries, and even a sad chime when you open the door and the charge is 10% (similar to the 'you left the keys in the ignition' chime).
I'm sorry but if you can't get your shit together enough to fuel or charge your car, then tough titty.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, almost all our power is electric - provided by over 90 percent hydroelectric, wind, and natural gas (the latter is used to shape the load).
Converting to plug-in hybrids on a massive scale in a region where almost 40 percent of pollution is from vehicles - is not a problem.
We own more cars than we have people.
The problem is the quantity of plug-in hybrids available to SELL in our market, not the DEMAND. Electricity costs about 1/10th what gasoline does, and diesel is not much cheaper, so cost-wise converting to plug-in hybrids here makes overwhelming economic sense.
The problem with large-scale adoption is not the new vehicles bought - it's the EXISTING vehicles that need to be converted, frequently at a cost of around $4000 to $8000 per vehicle, which is more than said vehicles are "worth", and thus a lot harder to do.
The highest bang-for-the-buck economic return would be converting low-mpg SUVs, passenger trucks, and commercial vans/trucks that are not in constant usage (e.g. takes workers to/from job sites or do hauls every hour or so, not trucks delivering groceries from 1000 miles away that are driven 23 hours a day).
That is the problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you charge your EV batteries using that plug instead of burning fuel, where all those fuel taxes we pay are going to come from?
So auto makers must be thinking twice about what could happen if cars could be charged from the electric plug. Surely they don't want governments asking them where's 'their' (ours!) money.
Face it, if cars could be shit powered, the taxmen would come in to fix a shitmeter to you toilet.
Why would they not offer a special rack mount system that soaks up the sun during the day with solar panels, so that by night time, you transfer what was taken in during the day, thereby needing no electricity bill. This might be a great incentive!!
So there's no gas in Atlanta, I'm driving past 5, 10, 15 stations in a row with bags on the pumps and no prices. After four days of this or 4-mile lines I'm thinking, Yes, I will plugin a hybrid every night!
We need the plug-in hybrids. That is easiest way to fight higher gas prices. It opens up vehicle to alternate fuels. When pulling up at a gas pump, you could make a decision in the future, do I want to wait a little on a electric charge at a cheaper rate, or do I put in the more expensive gas. Having this decision will drive down the cost of gas. This would be amplified if the combustion engine took flex fuel, which we could then maybe have a choice of electric charge, alcohol, gasohol, or standard gas. I want this for several reasons. Choices increase competition. Makes are nation more secure, because we have more ways to fuel our vehicle (if no gas, just charge the battery instead).
Durrrrrrrrr