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Another Stab At Sorting Hybrid Hype From Reality
Attila Dimedici writes "Eric Peters makes the case that hybrids have been over-hyped. His argument is that in order to sell people on hybrid cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of hybrids in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given. He refers to a recent case where an individual has chosen to forego membership in a class action law suit and has instead chosen to go to small claims court. He suggests that there is a significant chance that she will win there and that this will open up all of the manufacturers of hybrid vehicles to similar lawsuits.
The article was on a rather partisan website, so I am curious what factors he has chosen to overemphasize to make his case. (Or what factors he has chosen to ignore to the same end.) I know that Slashdot has a large contingent of hybrid and EV supporters who are well educated on the subject (as well as a large contingent of those who are not so well educated)."
My wife and I both have hybrid cars (a prius and an insight) and we both consistently get mileage in the mid 40s.
For all kinds of cars the energy efficiency is measured in ideal conditions and quite often is very far from what you get in real life.
Hybrids are probably overhyped, but I thought most educated consumers these days realized that they got the biggest efficiency gains in two types of driving: 1) lower-speed, stop-and-go city traffic, where they can mainly use the electric drivetrain, and sometimes turn off the engine entirely for brief periods; and 2) constant-speed highway travel, where they mainly use the gas engine, but one that can be made smaller due to being able to rely on the electric assist when needed. Yes, if you frequently accelerate at higher speeds, you'll use both the electric and gas engines and not save much. Do people not know this?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hybrids have been out for a long time. It appears to me that they are increasing in popularity in spite of the naysayers. Every single person that I know who has a hybrid (maybe a dozen) is pretty happy with the fuel economy. None have complained about having to fork over money for a new battery system yet. One could argue concerning the high manufacturing cost, but I think that that has come down enough relative to selling price to achieve parity with non-hybrid vehicles. The technology continues to evolve and any battery breakthroughs will make them even more attractive.
in order to sell people on [x], [advertisers] have emphasized the [benefits] of [x] in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary [usage] they will not come close to meeting the [benefits advertised].
Sounds like advertising industry best practices to me.
We bought a Prius six years ago so my wife could use the carpool lanes for an hour-long commute through Los Angeles. We didn't get the EPA's mileage, but it's still double the mileage of our other car.
Since the EPA does the testing and approves the mileage figures, doesn't this shield the manufacturers from liability for inflated numbers? The EPA sets the testing criteria. I know that I never hit the estimated city mileage for my conventional car and never expected to, so I only use the published gas mileage numbers to see relative mileage between cars. I never thought I'd hit that number exactly.
That said, the Prius owners I know are quite happy with their 40mpg+ mileage and are close or even over the published mileage. Granted, it takes a difference in driving style to hit that number (for example, by maximizing regenerative braking), but most people that buy a Prius are willing to help it maximize their mileage.
I bought a 2011 Prius IV, and it works exactly as advertised. I drive about 15 minutes each way to work, about half highway and half road, and I get about 49 MPG, which is exactly what was advertised. The idea that you have to stay below 50MPH and never accelerate or go up hills is just silly (I live in Cincinnati, OH, which is fairly hilly as well). I have learned to not slam on the gas when I am taking off, but that is because it shows you your efficiency real time, so it's easy to see what you are doing to your mileage when you take of like a race car. Generally, I drive it like any other car, although the information it gives me allows me to drive a little better than I did in the past.
And I'm sorry, but no car will get the advertised gas mileage if you are going up mountains. This has nothing to do with hybrids and everything to do with that fact they don't take into account extreme driving conditions when they calculate mileage. This is actually the first car I have ever owned that gave me the gas mileage it advertised.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
The article author claims, "To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg."
I happen to own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the _very first time_ I drove it on the freeway at moderately consistent speeds at 60-65 MPH, I got over 40 mpg. I still do that routinely.
So, either he's lying that he has "driven all of them, extensively", or he's lying about what you need to do to get that mpg rating. Probably the former--it's easy to drive a few in a not-very-MPG-friendly way, get disgusted, and then overgeneralize. Easy, but not terribly forgivable for a journalist.
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If I had space to park two cars at my house, I'd have an electric one as a regular vehicle, but with certain transportation needs, I'm not able to find them in an electric vehicle yet and I can't afford the conversion costs.
If you live in a city, one option to having 2 cars might be to join a city car share program. If you rarely need the range of a gas powered engine, it could be a cost effective alternative to owning two cars. Plus you can choose the car that best meets your needs - take a sporty convertible for a weekend getaway with your wife, take a minivan on the long trip with the kids, take a pickup truck to the hardware store, etc.
http://www.zipcar.com/
http://www.citycarshare.org/
This is a good case for not mixing science and politics. There are certainly cases where hybrids function better (inner city, garbage trucks, buses etc). These work well because the type of driving for these scenarios is ideal for regenerative braking. This makes for a best case scenario for allowing the hybrid to recover energy and work at it's peak. These cases justify the environmental price of the hybrid because the environmental costs is offset by their use.
When you consider the environmental cost that a hybrid requires (the Prius is well documented on the Internet for what is required for it's battery packs) if your not using a hybrid in the right conditions you are arguably harming the environment. This is because you are exacting an environmental cost that is not repaid through your usage scenario.
My point is most consumers are better off getting a high efficiency gas or diesel engine car (Cruze, Jetta etc). Most consumers do not have a driving scenario that is ideal for a hybrid car. It has been decades since most people lived in core cities instead of suburbs or the country. The bottom line is that different technology is better suited for different drivers. One is not fundamentally better than the other in all cases.
People are letting politics try to dictate science, when science should always be free of politics and allowed to stand on it's own merits.
The problem is all people are asking is, "is it a hybrid?" The question they should be asking is, "How hybrid is it?"
Honda Civic Hybrid '06
Gas engine: 85 hp
Electric motor: 13 hp
Saturn Vue Hybrid '07
Gas engine: 170 hp
Electric motor: 15 hp
Toyota Prius '07
Gas engine: 76 hp
Electric motor: 67 hp
There are plenty of cars that were technically hybrids, but when I bought a hybrid in 2009, the Prius was the *only* one which got a significant amount of power from its electric system. The rest were basically just gasoline engines with a little toy electric motor duct taped to them. The '09 Civic Hybrid I tested was particularly bad: larger gas engine than a Prius, 1/4 as much electric power, so it gets worse mileage, and with so little horsepower you feel like you're putting your life on the line every time you take an on-ramp.
Look beyond the hybrid label, and check out the size of the electric power system. It matters.
We own a 8 year old Prius, we get slightly over 40 MPG, something the author claims is difficult. When the car was newer, we got over 42 MPG.
To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg.
We drive on freeways like everyone else, routinely driving 70-80 MPH. I'm not a lead-foot accelerator, but I drive like most people. I don't practice any exotic hyper-miling techniques.
There are also hills. Hybrids work best on a perfectly horizontal plane.
We also happen to live at the top of a large, steep hill (Berkeley Hills), which we go up and down every day. And yet we still get 40+ MPG, unpossible! The hybrid engine is great for recapturing some of the potential energy that would otherwise be lost.
The EPA defines how energy efficiency numbers are calculated, and those numbers have to be displayed on the car. The car companies could advertise a lower number, but there is no simple one number that tells the whole story, and you can't give a full technical report in a 30 ad. By all using the same system to determine the fuel efficiency at least the numbers are relatively meaningful even if the absolute value isn't directly true for all circumstances.
Finally, good luck suing a company for false advertising when the numbers they are using are determined by government testing, not by the company.
The Slashdot community is for the most part logically and scientifically oriented. We believe in the scientific method, and an understanding of the universe built on an accumulation of experiments built on logical and testable explanations for empirical data, observable phenomena and so forth. And in many fields of endeavor, there can be general agreement about things. For example, it's accepted almost by consensus that the nearest know star is the Sun, and that the next nearest known stars are the three in the Alpha Centauri system. Aside from a handful of cranks like Gene "Time Cube" Ray, virtually everyone accepts this. If somehow we found a star nearer than the Centauri ones, which was too faint to notice before, or right next to a much brighter star and unnoticed or whatnot, if the measurements were good and clear enough, I'm sure soon again everyone would be in agreement that this new star was the next closest one to the earth. It is far away, affects little here, and there's no reason for people to argue over it.
On the other hand, ExxonMobil is the most profitable company in the country. It made $30 billion in profits last year, off of $354 billion in revenues. It is #2 on the Fortune 500 after Wal-Mart (which had more revenues, but about half the profits in 2011). Chevron and ConocoPhillips are #3 and #4 on the list.
If hybrid cars were effective, that would dent the revenues of these three companies whose revenues were collectively three quarters of a trillion dollars. Does anyone think that this fact might possibly, conceivably hurt the objectivity of an article, released in a very partisan political magazine like the American Spectator?
Honestly, it doesn't even warrant attention, other than debunking. These types of articles belong in actually objective magazines like Consumer Reports or something, which could tell you which hybrids were good or weren't. Just from anecdotal evidence, people I know with hybrids have been telling me they are spending less at the pump. Which is exactly what worries magazines like American Spectator, which work to protect monopoly capitalism over actual economic growth in capitalism. We see these forces at battle all the time - the RIAA and MPAA want to go from a world where friends lent records to one another to one where that is impossible. The oil companies want us stuck on oil reserves until they run out and junky old gas-burning cars - and this also hurts industry, which would be helped by cheaper energy. AT&T and Verizon are more concerned with preserving their monopolies than having a growing wired and wireless network. Karl Marx said capitalism starts out as a progressive force, economically and socially, but eventually tends to get more and more mucked up in defensively protecting trusts and monopoly instead of smashing shibboleths to allow growth and scientific advancement. I'd say there's plenty of evidence around nowadays that he was right about that.
And once the batteries are depleted, the car can no longer shut down its gas engine...
I live high in the hills, and by the time I'm at home the battery is usually on its last couple of bars. This is normal and it has no ill effects. In fact, the battery still retains about half of its charge at that time.
The author is clearly avoiding the truth here. Any Prius owner knows that his claim has nothing to do with reality.
By the way, the climb uphill is usually at 15 mpg, but the descent is at 100 mpg, and the average efficiency is about 43-45 mpg. If I stay in the valley for a long time (say, a whole day of driving with a meter reset) the efficiency will be about 52 mpg. That's with a 2005 (Gen.2) Prius.
For me, though, one of major selling points of Prius is not just its efficiency but it's CVT. The ride in Prius is the smoothest I every encountered, which is not a surprise because it has no gearbox that would switch anything.
Anyone who's been paying attention should know by now that the vast majority of hybrids on the market are pure marketing/greenwashing hype. They got a big early boost from the first hybrids to market, the original Prius and Insight, but very little since has lived up to the promise of those first two. If you look closely at those two cars, you'll quickly realize why -- they were designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency, and their hybrid motors were only a part of that strategy. The original Insight, for example, has a body made entirely from aluminum, with a minimized frontal area and vanishingly low coefficient of drag. In spite of its heavy battery pack, the Insight managed to be lighter than any other US-market car at the time. Its engine was a purpose-built, low-displacement 3-cylinder engine made with as much aluminum, magnesium and plastic as the designers could get away with. The electric motor was integrated into the flywheel, minimizing the extra weight of the hybrid system by allowing it to perform two functions simultaneously. The hybrid system helps, but the vast majority of the first-gen Insight's fuel efficiency comes from these things. Tuners have pulled the whole drivetrain out and replaced it with a 200-horsepower Civic Si engine, and still managed almost 50 miles per gallon out of the chassis!
From the above, it's pretty clear that hybrid drivetrains are just a piece of the fuel-efficiency puzzle -- yet ever since those first two cars hit the market, manufacturers have been tacking electric motors to otherwise ordinary cars and selling them to gullible consumers as the saviors of Earth. The electric motors are a little more efficient at low speeds, but everywhere else they're just additional dead weight that the gas engine has to drag around. Is it any surprise that these half-baked hybrids don't perform as advertised?
I have a 2004 Prius with almost 200,000 miles on it. I have a 70 mile per day commute, 60 freeway/10 city, in Southern California. I drive at normal freeway speeds (for California), and had the carpool sticker which was discontinued last July. In the carpool lane, I was able to average between 75 and 80MPH during my commute, which has a few hills, but nothing major (I-405 South from 55 to San Juan Capistrano and back).
I have been averaging about 48MPG on this commute since the day that I got the car.
I am by no means a hypermiler, but when my wife drives the car, she is lucky to get 40MPG in the city, since she has more of a lead foot than I do. On a long freeway trip at 80MPH, she can get about 45MPG. I can get a higher mileage if I drive slower (65MPH or below). In that case it goes above 50MPG. If I get caught in traffic on the freeway, the mileage improves (during stop and go traffic).
My previous car was a Plymouth Neon that got 24MPG, so my MPG has been doubled for the last ~200K miles. According to my rough calculations, at that mileage, I purchased about 4166 gallons of gasoline since February of 2004. If you figure an average price of $3 per gallon (which is really not that far off for Southern California since 2004), that is $12,500. If I was able to keep my old car (which was going to require extensive/expensive repairs in order to continue operation), I would have paid $12,500 more for gasoline over that same time period. So therefore, I have saved $12,500 so far. The premium that I paid for the Hybrid system was less than that, so it has more than paid for itself. I ordered a Prius with none of the extra options except the side-curtain airbags which are now standard, so I paid quite a bit less than the fully loaded Priuses that they were selling at the time.
Hopefully my next car can be a pure electric, if I can make my Prius last that long. Maybe a plug-in Prius or Chevy Volt would be a reasonable alternative. That carpool sticker saved me thousands of hours of time as well (over the years). I really miss it!
There's certainly hype, possibly too much, but the devil is in the details here.
Gasoline-based internal combustion engines get a theoretical maximum 30% efficiency in converting the heat of burning the fuel into work. (This is the major reason why the conventional direct-drive internal-combustion engine configuration requires a radiator -- that lost 70% is being dumped out of the car as waste heat, minus the small fraction that's used to heat the interior of the car in the winter.) Non-hybrid configurations also have to size the engine for the maximum power output it's expected to have to handle -- usually accelerating to highway speeds -- and there are numerous compromises in the engine design that make it able to rapidly change power output across a wide range of power demands, all of which make it somewhat less efficient to operate in the more or less steady-state output it's called on to deliver for highway cruising.
Generally, that engine sized for peak demand during highway acceleration and tuned to be able to go from idle to maximum power and then back down to cruising throttle power over very short time spans is going to be less than the theoretical 30% Otto-cycle efficiency most places in the power band. (And chances are it's tuned to deliver maximum efficiency under the parameters of the EPA mileage tests, which the manufacturers know as well as the EPA, so no, you'll never get those EPA numbers in actual day to day use.)
The reason the hybrid concept has as much potential as it does is that electric motors have a far higher efficiency in terms of translating electrical power into torque, particularly with switching mode AC motor controllers and other high efficiency tricks, and typical battery technologies are around 70% efficient (measured as discharge/charge energy ratio), and having a battery allows the engine to be sized much smaller and in most cases run at steady-state power output while the battery handles the peak demand, so, for certain driving styles and trip profiles, the hybrid has a significant advantage. Hybrids require smaller engines because all the engine has to do is maintain charge on the battery at or below a certain break-even speed dictated mostly by drag coefficient. But how much of a differece hybrid vs conventional makes for any given driver or any given set of daily driving routes is going to depend on a fairly large number of variables, and this is true for both hybrid and conventional platforms.
So it's more complicated than just "enough hype" vs "not enough"/"too much"..
Disclaimer: I own a 2007 Honda Civic hybrid.
The complaint about the Civic hybrid is that the car was sold as achieving 48/51 mpg according to EPA estimates.
With normal driving (normal = the type of driving seen every day, exhibited by most drivers), it was not possible to get much closer than 10 mpg of those figures when the car was purchased.
Now, this hybrid has a power assist design (different to the Prius), which lends itself to easily draining the battery - climbing a hill, for example - and the battery only has a limited number of power/drain cycles before it needs replacing.
It turns out that the programming on these cars was initially set to provide more 'assist' - thus improving the published mpg figures - but that has led to premature failures of the battery, leading to many warranty replacements.
Honda's response to this design dilemma? Change the programming so that the power assist is much more frugal. This reduces the cycles on the battery which makes them last longer, but means that the car now averages about 30mpg, since you have less assist from the battery when you need it.
So now, instead of having a car that is somewhat better than the non-hybrid counterpart, it is about the same at best, and has few or none of the attractive attributes that Honda used to sell the car.
We are upset at being conned by Honda selling the car as a high-performing hybrid, and later effectively remove most of the benefits of the hybrid because their design doesn't work.
*Still* negative function...
People conveniently forget the air-quality benefits of hybrids. There's a huge lifetime difference that can be quantified in health improvement (healthcare cost reductions), lifestyle improvement, etc.
It's not all about the MPG.
Uh, one would think that if a hybrid vehicle's gas mileage is roughly the same as a conventional vehicle, they both produce the same emissions from burning the same amount of fuel...
CVTs have not only been implemented on a number of popular cars, they are almost ubiquitous in some applications.
- Many of the Hybrids on the market either come standard with a CVT, or have it available as an option.
- Virtually every modern Scooter on the market is equipped with a CVT.
- Several motorcycles are available with a CVT (Aprilia Mana comes to mind,) although it hasn't caught on for marketing reasons.
- Several full sized cars are available with a CVT, or come equipped with one standard (Nissan Murano being the best known.)
Renault actually built and tested a CVT Formula 1 car, the FW15C, however it was banned before it ever saw competition.
http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2007/05/03/banned-continuously-variable-transmission-cvt/
http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3966
Crowd into sardine can high density housing alongside a rapid transit corridor, of course, like the overlord city planners intend. If you want to see a tree go to a fucking park on your day off and look at one. Above all, remember this: Obey!
Temperature has a huge effect on my 2005 Prius mileage. Below about 40 (F), the engine runs longer to warm up the catalytic converter--and even more if you want heat. Below about 20, the mileage gets worse--perhaps because I really want heat and leave the engine running while I clear the windshield.
Above 50F, I consistently exceed the rated mileage -- and even during the summer with the AC I get 48+ mpg.
There is certainly an effect of the big mileage meter on improving your driving habits.
In theory, because hybrids use a gas engine that runs at a constant speed, it's more efficient and pollutes less.
Table-ized A.I.