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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. "
Plug in hybrids still use gas. That's why they are hybrids, otherwise they would simply be electric cars.
The idea here is to juice up the batteries at home and use them for the first x number of miles (hopefully enough to handle your commute). After that, when the batteries are low, a small diesel (or gas) engine will start up and begin charging the batteries providing you with more range. So if your out of juice you would simply fill up just like a regular car.
Of course I'm curious how they will report the millage on these cars. I would want to know the range on the electric system and the millage when running purely on gas, but I worry they will come up with some new way to measure it that has little to no meaning.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
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Learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
...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.
I ordered an electric vehicle, and am building another one from scratch. To charge them, I built a charge controller that fetches the current price of power from my utility, and only charges the vehicles when the price of power is below a threshold. This way I take advantage of Time Of Day pricing (1-2 cents/kwH between midnight and 4am, Nuclear power in Northern Illinois).
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. . . .
This functionality is already present in the Chevy Volt. It has a timer so you can plug it in to the wall socket when you park your car in the evening, and it can be programmed to charge the battery starting at midnight, etc.
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.
The volt has a charge timer built into the car's charging system. Set the timer once, and plug the car in any time. It will start charging (and/or stop charging) when you specify.
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!
For any kind of sizable battery, you'd likely want a dedicated circuit anyway.
The current Prius battery is about 1.5KWhrs, so assuming a dedicated 100-120V 15A circuit, it would take about an hour to charge from dead to full, but that will only get you a few miles on pure battery.
The current plug in modification kit's battery is about 6KWhr, so 4x the time.
Sources I see on the factory plug in say a capacity between 6 and 12KWhr, and a 12 would require a full 8 hours to charge, which is getting to the limit of "charge overnight", so you might want to put in a dedicated 240V 20A circuit, like you would use for an electric range.
And you'd definitely need a dedicated circuit for a full EV, like the Tesla, as the battery pack is 53KWhr, which would take about 35 hours to charge on a dedicated normal circuit, and still 7.5 hours on a dedicated 220V plug.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Wind farms don't scale
They do. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The Chevy Volt seems to be using two basic metrics.
1. How far you can run on fully charge batteries (40 miles)
2. MPG when the generator kicks in (50 MPG)
The 50 MPG is based on using only the gasoline generator without any energy input from the batteries.
So, if you start up in the morning with completely dead batteries, you can still drive and get 50 MPG.
A "plug-in hybrid" does have a gas engine for charging the batteries and energizing the motors, by definition. That's what makes it a "hybrid."
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
They should design hybrids so that the transmission switches the energy source. Higher gears switch to battery power, lower gears switch to gasoline.
That's pretty much the opposite of what you want. Electric motors develop peak torque at low RPM, gas engines at high RPM. In fact I wonder about the losses in the additional transmission if you want to drive the wheels from the gas engine; mechanically it makes more sense to use the electric all the time (much simpler transmission) and run the gas engine at a constant speed (more efficient) to keep the batteries charged.
-- Alastair
That article doesn't say wind farms scale, it just notes that multiple wind farms can take up the slack for each other.
That article has a rather pathetic output for each one of these. 1.5MW of *peak* power which they are not producing all the time.
A nuclear power plant will produce 2000MW.
The average wind turbine according to Wikipedia, produces an average of 0.35MW.
"Typical capacity factors are 20-40%, with values at the upper end of the range in particularly favourable sites. For example, a 1 megawatt turbine with a capacity factor of 35% will not produce 8,760 megawatt-hours in a year (1x24x365), but only 0.35x24x365 = 3,066 MWh, averaging to 0.35 MW." (thanks wikipedia)
That means almost 6000 turbines(!) to match one nuclear power plant.
I don't think the parent was questioning our capacity to distribute power, I think they were questioning the number of turbines we can reasonably fit without 'em taking over the landscape (wind power kills far more animals than nuclear power - think of the fuzzy bats).
And, yeah, those turbines are *huge*.
You can count the number of turbines that you can fit in a massive wind farm in the dozens.
6000 turbines to equal one nuclear power plant. Dunno. I think that's what he was talking about.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'