Are you looking for retired or market analysts? Here's just a random example for you, of Jim Jarrell excoriating Simmons for his utter lack of understanding of even basic physics terms, let alone understanding of oil production.
I like to call it the "Reverse Cassandra Effect" (stole the term from Simon). People *love* to listen to doomsayers, far more than people who tell you that things are going to be fine. The doomsayer can have the flimsiest of evidence and the dissenter a solid case, but the very notion of doom itself seems to make the audience more receptive to what they have to say.
A classic example is the Simon-Ehrlich Wager. Julian Simon, a libertarian-leaning business professor, bet Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who had published a series of books about imminent resource scarcity in the 1970s, that the inflation-adjusted price of five commodity metals -- of Ehrlich's choosing -- would average dropping over the course of the 1990s. Simon won -- bigtime. All five metals dropped in price, some by huge amounts. The aftermath? Despite Ehrlich's loss and his similar forecasts of huge famines, resource wars, etc all failing to materialize, Simon remained in relative obscurity, while Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award for "greater public understanding of environmental problems" in his doom-preaching books.
And when I say this, note that I in general am *not* fond of libertarian ideals, and consider myself an environmentalist. But these doomer notions of secret imminent scarcity are just plain hokum.
You know, the Doomers at The Oil Drum don't exactly have the best record at forecasting oil production.
Contrary to widespread myth, the notion of "imminent peak oil" is nothing new. The same sort of shysters have been hawking it for nearly a century and a half. Kier's Rock Oil used to encourage people in its ads to buy their product quickly, before it was depleted from nature's laboratory.
It wasn't supported then, it's not supported now, and it never will be supported (so long as Fischer-Tropsch exists). The only kind of "peak" we're likely to see is a demand peak.
That's one of the dumbest arguments people sometimes make. The reason they're not exploited is because current oil prices don't justify exploiting them. The deeper, the more isolated, the lower the flow rate, or a whole host of other factors concerning oil in a block lease, the higher the oil price you need to justify developing it.
You're mixing apples and oranges. I said more t-shaped 20A than non-T-shaped 20A.
That's because almost nobody makes the official 20A plugs, because there's almost no sockets for them, because you can't plug 15A plugs into the 20A sockets. It's a viscious cycle.
It may be common to find that, but no licensed professional electrician that I know will do that.
Aks the electricians you know about that. It's pretty much standard in the US. Kitchen, bathroom, garage, and outdoors go on 20A breakers, with everything else, 15A. In fact, there's an increasing trend to just put everything on 20A, 12awg.
Check out the power ratings on hair dryers some time and do the math. A lot of them *expect* you to have more than a 15A breaker, but they have a 5-15 plug. Esp. given that a 15A breaker typically means drawing no more than 12-13A sustained.
A 15A socket, wired with 14guage wire
Who said anything about 14 guage? They're NEMA 5-15R sockets with 12 guage wire and a 20A breaker.
No, it's not. Every power system out there is 3-phase
We're talking in the home. It's 3-phase out on the lines.
Single-phase is just one of the three phases
Not that simple. Line voltage is a lot higher than home voltage, so you have to transform it anyways. We transform it with a center-tapped transformer to get two phases and a neutral out of it.
Here in the US, we supply a single phase to each household, and then that's split into 110 (actually 117) volts.
No, we supply a single phase to each household, and then that's split into *two* 120 volt lines of opposite phase, net 240 between them and 120V to ground. 5-15s are only wired up to one phase or the other.
In other countries, it should be the same, except that they just leave everything on that one 220V phase, and don't split it.
No, it's automatically split by the center-tapped transformer. They then typically run one phase to one household and a different phase to another, saving wire.
For a given amount of power, if you double the voltage (and thus halve the current), you halve the resistance. OR, you reduce the copper and keep the resistance the same. Or any combination thereof.
Higher voltages = less loss and less copper.
I never expected a 240V equipment to care about neutral if it had the expected ground (for safety), but that doesn't seem to be the case, although I have no clue as why
Because if you draw 120V on a neutral-grounded 10-30, you dump current to ground.
Our body's resistance is roughly the same regardless of the voltage applied, so we'd get a worse kick from 240V than from 120V.
True, but your common sockets would be rated for half the current. No need to up the average power of the average plug. Double voltage, half current. And either half resistance or less copper.
Huge? Why? Can you point to some scientific references?
V=IR.
> that we only went with because it's easier to make a 120V incandescent lightbulb than a 240V.:P
I'll have to take your word on that.
Read "Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930". In particular, it was carbon filament bulbs, like Edison's, that didn't work well with higher voltages.
There's a reason for using split phase and it's not that weird. It creates two independent single phase circuits providing 110V and it can be used as one 220V circuit by replacing the neuter with the other phase. It saves copper, as opposed to your very first statement.
No, it uses more copper. It's a case of one live, a neutral, and a ground, or two lives, a neutral, and a ground, all to carry the same amount of current. It used to be considered acceptable to wire the neutral and the ground together (NEMA 10-30), but no longer is (hence NEMA 14-30 is the new standard).
But even in that case, it'd still be useful. Homes usually have both 30A and 50A 240V sockets. But you can't plug a 30A into a 50A without an adapter, even though there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. And you should also be able to plug a 120V plug into one phase of your 240V/30A or 50A sockets, but you can't do that without an adapter, either.
It's not clear to me what you're asking. You want a socket to provide both 110V and 220V and be able to plug such devices according to their needs? It seems a bit complicated in my opinion."
I'm saying that our current system restricts you for no good reason. It's not "needlessly complex" in the least to have all of your sockets on 240V and have plugs with a lower current plug into higher-current sockets. What's needlessly complex is having a mix of incompatible sockets with two different power delivery configurations (single phase and split phase).
Perhaps, for some definition of weird. Center taps on transformers aren't exactly a foreign concept, and the 220v is, itself, single phase.
No, it isn't. It's split phase, which is different from single phase. The hots are 240V relative to each other, but only 120V relative to ground. And it's a hack to deal with our current 120V system.
I'd hazard that my local Home Depot has more stock of the T-shaped version than the non-T-shaped version.
More stock of the T-shaped than 5-20R, but certainly not 5-15R. Because of the way our system works, it's more common in homes to find 5-15Rs without a T-connector wired for 20A, even though that's not what they're officially rated for. For example, hair dryers at full blast and heat push dangerously close to the limits of a 5-15R (and some even over them), yet still use a 5-15 plug -- but they're okay because we wire our bathroom 5-15s with a 20A breaker. Same with garage, kitchen, and exterior sockets.
Almost nothing sold into the consumer market uses 30amps at 110volts.
You mean like RVs?
And don't get me started on our 110V/220V system, which is stupid in its own right.:P But if you really want to talk about dryers and ranges, you can't plug a dryer into a range socket without an adapter, even though there's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to. NEMA 14-30 vs. NEMA 14-50.
Oh, don't get me started on 120V. It's a huge waste of copper and power that we only went with because it's easier to make a 120V incandescent lightbulb than a 240V.:P
Anyway, you won't find a 120V 30A outlet in your average US home because we run most higher power devices at (the more reasonable) 240V (although we do it in a weird way -- split phase). But even in that case, it'd still be useful. Homes usually have both 30A and 50A 240V sockets. But you can't plug a 30A into a 50A without an adapter, even though there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. And you should also be able to plug a 120V plug into one phase of your 240V/30A or 50A sockets, but you can't do that without an adapter, either.
OTOH 110v 20A is a lot more common, and you can plug a 110v 15A plug into a 110v 20A outlet;
Only if you have a special 15A/20A hybrid outlet. The standard NEMA 5-20R doesn't have a T-shaped slot; it only has the horizontal on that side. This is the US trying to correct a weakness in our outlet system after it was discovered; it's a bandaid on the problem of having entirely different pin layouts on each socket. The Australian standard of having different pin *sizes* deals with this problem automatically.
That is a special case in our system, not the general case -- the hybrid NEMA 5-15R/5-20R socket. And they're rare in homes, found mainly in commercial settings (and even there, they're not super-common).
In the general case, that sort of approach doesn't work with US sockets. For example, the standard for home dryer sockets is NEMA 14-30, while the standard for range sockets is NEMA 14-50. Can you plug a 14-30 into a 14-50? Not without an adapter you can't.
I kind of like Australia's socket design. In the US, our NEMA sockets are designed so that a plug for a 30A socket can't plug into a 15A socket or vice versa. In the Australian design, a higher current plug can't plug into a lower-current socket, but a lower-current plug *can* plug into a higher current socket. Which only makes sense.
Of course, all of them are pretty weak compared to EV charging connectors like J1772. Designed for 10,000 connect/disconnect cycles, and the power pins don't go live until the data pins confirm a connection. And the data pins can talk with the device to determine what kind of power to deliver.
Did you actually read the post? Snake oil is full of EPA, like fish oil, which has been shown through double blind studies to be a powerful anti-inflammatory agent. It also has a bunch of other medical benefits, as determined by modern science, including reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia and increasing the efficacy of chemotherapy.
Actually, the funny thing is, real snake oil actually does what it was originally supposed to do. "Snake oil" comes from traditional Chinese medicine (as a cure for joint pain), and was made from the fat of the Chinese water snake, Enhydris chinensis. It is extremely high in omega-3 fatty acids (particularly EPA), and is very similar to what is sold today as fish oil. Omega-3 fatty acids (in particular, EPA) are now known to reduce the progression and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
Now, in the US, a variety of hucksters took fats from any old snake (if it even involved snake oil at all) and made all sorts of miraculous, unsubstantiated claims about what it would do. But concerning in its original role in Chinese medicine, snake oil likely did exactly what it was claimed to do.
Even if that were the case, you lost nothing. But if it's a li-ion conversion, you'll get more than 6 years out of it. And by going electric, you'll skip most other vehicle maintenance -- no more oil changes, no transmission failures, no belts, pulleys, blah blah blah... EV drivetrains have a tenth as many moving parts.
What's wrong with six years to break even, with the money spent raising the value of the vehicle?
If you were given an low-risk option for your 401k wherein you'd earn the amount of money you put into the fund in only six years, and continue earning from there on out, wouldn't you leap at the opportunity? That's a 12% rate of return.
Your body has to pump the salt because it's going from a low concentration gradient (blood) to a high concentration gradient (urine). Obviously. This is just the opposite. In each side, one ion is going down a *major* concentration gradient (20% to 3.5%), while the other ion is going up a *minor* concentration gradient (0% to 3.5%). So entropy favors the reaction, and it will continue until the ions run out from the freshwater; you're ending in both a lower entropy and energy state. The key is that you have to create that major concentration gradient (20%), which is a lower entropy state. That's done through evaporation.
The advantage of this process over evaporating it and condensing it (say, with a transparent roof) is building and maintaining a pond with a transparent roof costs about 10x more than building and maintaining an empty pond. Glass costs a fortune and can be damaged. Plastic is cheaper, but it has to be thick enough to withstand the elements and it photodegrades, meaning it has to be replaced every several years.
I haven't been keeping a list, and I don't know of anyone who is. But just to give you an idea, there had already been at least three crashes by July 25, 2008, when they were barely rolling off the line: #2 (Eberhard's), #6, and #13. I keep up on EV news, and there are always stories coming out of newly wrecked roadsters -- often in extreme circumstances, like the 100mph wreck not too long ago.
I don't know how that compares to other sports cars; I know that sports cars in general have a high accident rate. One thing that can be said for the Roadster is that despite all the accidents and often extreme circumstances, I haven't yet heard of a single person being killed or even seriously injured in one. Seems to be a very safe car.
To tie in with an earlier article on the front page: the Tesla Roadster's battery pack management system is ARM-based. It's built around a Philips-LPC2294 with 32 megs of ram and a 1GB U3 Cruzer Micro USB flash drive, running Linux kernel 2.6.11.8-1.3.0.
Wow, you can hypermile. Hooray for you. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have these things called controlled tests...
Honda's IMA system sucks. The original Insight gets its good stats from its aerodynamics and light weight. With as low of a CdA as it has, it should blow the Prius out of the water rather than marginally exceeding it in controlled tests. But IMA sucks, so it doesn't. It uses a puny electric motor which can't run independently of the engine, paired with a small pack. It's primarily a city hit; there's not too much difference between IMA and Synergy on the highway.
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Erm, that should read over the course of the *1980s*, not 1990s.
Are you looking for retired or market analysts? Here's just a random example for you, of Jim Jarrell excoriating Simmons for his utter lack of understanding of even basic physics terms, let alone understanding of oil production.
I like to call it the "Reverse Cassandra Effect" (stole the term from Simon). People *love* to listen to doomsayers, far more than people who tell you that things are going to be fine. The doomsayer can have the flimsiest of evidence and the dissenter a solid case, but the very notion of doom itself seems to make the audience more receptive to what they have to say.
A classic example is the Simon-Ehrlich Wager. Julian Simon, a libertarian-leaning business professor, bet Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who had published a series of books about imminent resource scarcity in the 1970s, that the inflation-adjusted price of five commodity metals -- of Ehrlich's choosing -- would average dropping over the course of the 1990s. Simon won -- bigtime. All five metals dropped in price, some by huge amounts. The aftermath? Despite Ehrlich's loss and his similar forecasts of huge famines, resource wars, etc all failing to materialize, Simon remained in relative obscurity, while Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award for "greater public understanding of environmental problems" in his doom-preaching books.
And when I say this, note that I in general am *not* fond of libertarian ideals, and consider myself an environmentalist. But these doomer notions of secret imminent scarcity are just plain hokum.
You know, the Doomers at The Oil Drum don't exactly have the best record at forecasting oil production.
Contrary to widespread myth, the notion of "imminent peak oil" is nothing new. The same sort of shysters have been hawking it for nearly a century and a half. Kier's Rock Oil used to encourage people in its ads to buy their product quickly, before it was depleted from nature's laboratory.
It wasn't supported then, it's not supported now, and it never will be supported (so long as Fischer-Tropsch exists). The only kind of "peak" we're likely to see is a demand peak.
That's one of the dumbest arguments people sometimes make. The reason they're not exploited is because current oil prices don't justify exploiting them. The deeper, the more isolated, the lower the flow rate, or a whole host of other factors concerning oil in a block lease, the higher the oil price you need to justify developing it.
At least Rush isn't an alleged rapist/murderer.
If Glen would only call and confirm or deny the charges, these nasty rumors would go away. It breaks my heart that he refuses to.
You're mixing apples and oranges. I said more t-shaped 20A than non-T-shaped 20A.
That's because almost nobody makes the official 20A plugs, because there's almost no sockets for them, because you can't plug 15A plugs into the 20A sockets. It's a viscious cycle.
It may be common to find that, but no licensed professional electrician that I know will do that.
Aks the electricians you know about that. It's pretty much standard in the US. Kitchen, bathroom, garage, and outdoors go on 20A breakers, with everything else, 15A. In fact, there's an increasing trend to just put everything on 20A, 12awg.
Check out the power ratings on hair dryers some time and do the math. A lot of them *expect* you to have more than a 15A breaker, but they have a 5-15 plug. Esp. given that a 15A breaker typically means drawing no more than 12-13A sustained.
A 15A socket, wired with 14guage wire
Who said anything about 14 guage? They're NEMA 5-15R sockets with 12 guage wire and a 20A breaker.
No, it's not. Every power system out there is 3-phase
We're talking in the home. It's 3-phase out on the lines.
Single-phase is just one of the three phases
Not that simple. Line voltage is a lot higher than home voltage, so you have to transform it anyways. We transform it with a center-tapped transformer to get two phases and a neutral out of it.
Here in the US, we supply a single phase to each household, and then that's split into 110 (actually 117) volts.
No, we supply a single phase to each household, and then that's split into *two* 120 volt lines of opposite phase, net 240 between them and 120V to ground. 5-15s are only wired up to one phase or the other.
In other countries, it should be the same, except that they just leave everything on that one 220V phase, and don't split it.
No, it's automatically split by the center-tapped transformer. They then typically run one phase to one household and a different phase to another, saving wire.
I thought we were talking about power
For a given amount of power, if you double the voltage (and thus halve the current), you halve the resistance. OR, you reduce the copper and keep the resistance the same. Or any combination thereof.
Higher voltages = less loss and less copper.
I never expected a 240V equipment to care about neutral if it had the expected ground (for safety), but that doesn't seem to be the case, although I have no clue as why
Because if you draw 120V on a neutral-grounded 10-30, you dump current to ground.
Our body's resistance is roughly the same regardless of the voltage applied, so we'd get a worse kick from 240V than from 120V.
True, but your common sockets would be rated for half the current. No need to up the average power of the average plug. Double voltage, half current. And either half resistance or less copper.
Huge? Why? Can you point to some scientific references?
V=IR.
> that we only went with because it's easier to make a 120V incandescent lightbulb than a 240V. :P
I'll have to take your word on that.
Read "Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930". In particular, it was carbon filament bulbs, like Edison's, that didn't work well with higher voltages.
There's a reason for using split phase and it's not that weird. It creates two independent single phase circuits providing 110V and it can be used as one 220V circuit by replacing the neuter with the other phase. It saves copper, as opposed to your very first statement.
No, it uses more copper. It's a case of one live, a neutral, and a ground, or two lives, a neutral, and a ground, all to carry the same amount of current. It used to be considered acceptable to wire the neutral and the ground together (NEMA 10-30), but no longer is (hence NEMA 14-30 is the new standard).
But even in that case, it'd still be useful. Homes usually have both 30A and 50A 240V sockets. But you can't plug a 30A into a 50A without an adapter, even though there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. And you should also be able to plug a 120V plug into one phase of your 240V/30A or 50A sockets, but you can't do that without an adapter, either.
It's not clear to me what you're asking. You want a socket to provide both 110V and 220V and be able to plug such devices according to their needs? It seems a bit complicated in my opinion."
I'm saying that our current system restricts you for no good reason. It's not "needlessly complex" in the least to have all of your sockets on 240V and have plugs with a lower current plug into higher-current sockets. What's needlessly complex is having a mix of incompatible sockets with two different power delivery configurations (single phase and split phase).
Perhaps, for some definition of weird. Center taps on transformers aren't exactly a foreign concept, and the 220v is, itself, single phase.
No, it isn't. It's split phase, which is different from single phase. The hots are 240V relative to each other, but only 120V relative to ground. And it's a hack to deal with our current 120V system.
I'd hazard that my local Home Depot has more stock of the T-shaped version than the non-T-shaped version.
More stock of the T-shaped than 5-20R, but certainly not 5-15R. Because of the way our system works, it's more common in homes to find 5-15Rs without a T-connector wired for 20A, even though that's not what they're officially rated for. For example, hair dryers at full blast and heat push dangerously close to the limits of a 5-15R (and some even over them), yet still use a 5-15 plug -- but they're okay because we wire our bathroom 5-15s with a 20A breaker. Same with garage, kitchen, and exterior sockets.
Almost nothing sold into the consumer market uses 30amps at 110volts.
You mean like RVs?
And don't get me started on our 110V/220V system, which is stupid in its own right. :P But if you really want to talk about dryers and ranges, you can't plug a dryer into a range socket without an adapter, even though there's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to. NEMA 14-30 vs. NEMA 14-50.
Oh, don't get me started on 120V. It's a huge waste of copper and power that we only went with because it's easier to make a 120V incandescent lightbulb than a 240V. :P
Anyway, you won't find a 120V 30A outlet in your average US home because we run most higher power devices at (the more reasonable) 240V (although we do it in a weird way -- split phase). But even in that case, it'd still be useful. Homes usually have both 30A and 50A 240V sockets. But you can't plug a 30A into a 50A without an adapter, even though there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. And you should also be able to plug a 120V plug into one phase of your 240V/30A or 50A sockets, but you can't do that without an adapter, either.
OTOH 110v 20A is a lot more common, and you can plug a 110v 15A plug into a 110v 20A outlet;
Only if you have a special 15A/20A hybrid outlet. The standard NEMA 5-20R doesn't have a T-shaped slot; it only has the horizontal on that side. This is the US trying to correct a weakness in our outlet system after it was discovered; it's a bandaid on the problem of having entirely different pin layouts on each socket. The Australian standard of having different pin *sizes* deals with this problem automatically.
That is a special case in our system, not the general case -- the hybrid NEMA 5-15R/5-20R socket. And they're rare in homes, found mainly in commercial settings (and even there, they're not super-common).
In the general case, that sort of approach doesn't work with US sockets. For example, the standard for home dryer sockets is NEMA 14-30, while the standard for range sockets is NEMA 14-50. Can you plug a 14-30 into a 14-50? Not without an adapter you can't.
I kind of like Australia's socket design. In the US, our NEMA sockets are designed so that a plug for a 30A socket can't plug into a 15A socket or vice versa. In the Australian design, a higher current plug can't plug into a lower-current socket, but a lower-current plug *can* plug into a higher current socket. Which only makes sense.
Of course, all of them are pretty weak compared to EV charging connectors like J1772. Designed for 10,000 connect/disconnect cycles, and the power pins don't go live until the data pins confirm a connection. And the data pins can talk with the device to determine what kind of power to deliver.
Did you actually read the post? Snake oil is full of EPA, like fish oil, which has been shown through double blind studies to be a powerful anti-inflammatory agent. It also has a bunch of other medical benefits, as determined by modern science, including reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia and increasing the efficacy of chemotherapy.
Actually, the funny thing is, real snake oil actually does what it was originally supposed to do. "Snake oil" comes from traditional Chinese medicine (as a cure for joint pain), and was made from the fat of the Chinese water snake, Enhydris chinensis. It is extremely high in omega-3 fatty acids (particularly EPA), and is very similar to what is sold today as fish oil. Omega-3 fatty acids (in particular, EPA) are now known to reduce the progression and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
Now, in the US, a variety of hucksters took fats from any old snake (if it even involved snake oil at all) and made all sorts of miraculous, unsubstantiated claims about what it would do. But concerning in its original role in Chinese medicine, snake oil likely did exactly what it was claimed to do.
Even if that were the case, you lost nothing. But if it's a li-ion conversion, you'll get more than 6 years out of it. And by going electric, you'll skip most other vehicle maintenance -- no more oil changes, no transmission failures, no belts, pulleys, blah blah blah... EV drivetrains have a tenth as many moving parts.
What's wrong with six years to break even, with the money spent raising the value of the vehicle?
If you were given an low-risk option for your 401k wherein you'd earn the amount of money you put into the fund in only six years, and continue earning from there on out, wouldn't you leap at the opportunity? That's a 12% rate of return.
In a NiMH hybrid, it regens about 1/3rd of the energy. On a li-ion EV, it's about 2/3rds.
Your body has to pump the salt because it's going from a low concentration gradient (blood) to a high concentration gradient (urine). Obviously. This is just the opposite. In each side, one ion is going down a *major* concentration gradient (20% to 3.5%), while the other ion is going up a *minor* concentration gradient (0% to 3.5%). So entropy favors the reaction, and it will continue until the ions run out from the freshwater; you're ending in both a lower entropy and energy state. The key is that you have to create that major concentration gradient (20%), which is a lower entropy state. That's done through evaporation.
The advantage of this process over evaporating it and condensing it (say, with a transparent roof) is building and maintaining a pond with a transparent roof costs about 10x more than building and maintaining an empty pond. Glass costs a fortune and can be damaged. Plastic is cheaper, but it has to be thick enough to withstand the elements and it photodegrades, meaning it has to be replaced every several years.
Yeah, you "just" put a roof over it. As though that wouldn't 10x the construction and maintenance costs of the evaporation ponds. :P
I haven't been keeping a list, and I don't know of anyone who is. But just to give you an idea, there had already been at least three crashes by July 25, 2008, when they were barely rolling off the line: #2 (Eberhard's), #6, and #13. I keep up on EV news, and there are always stories coming out of newly wrecked roadsters -- often in extreme circumstances, like the 100mph wreck not too long ago.
I don't know how that compares to other sports cars; I know that sports cars in general have a high accident rate. One thing that can be said for the Roadster is that despite all the accidents and often extreme circumstances, I haven't yet heard of a single person being killed or even seriously injured in one. Seems to be a very safe car.
To tie in with an earlier article on the front page: the Tesla Roadster's battery pack management system is ARM-based. It's built around a Philips-LPC2294 with 32 megs of ram and a 1GB U3 Cruzer Micro USB flash drive, running Linux kernel 2.6.11.8-1.3.0.
Wow, you can hypermile. Hooray for you. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have these things called controlled tests...
Honda's IMA system sucks. The original Insight gets its good stats from its aerodynamics and light weight. With as low of a CdA as it has, it should blow the Prius out of the water rather than marginally exceeding it in controlled tests. But IMA sucks, so it doesn't. It uses a puny electric motor which can't run independently of the engine, paired with a small pack. It's primarily a city hit; there's not too much difference between IMA and Synergy on the highway.