Doing this once and publishing video of it results in a massive savings in resources compared to each person who wants to see this happen having to do it themselves. Think how many wasted iPhones and non-food-safe toxified blenders would be created if even one in ten thousand people who watched this video had instead simply heard about it and decided to try it themselves.
Consider the responsiveness of google's applications, the volume of data, and the number of users. This isn't a server at some ISP, or even a server farm-- google owns a massively distributed network of staggering complexity from central points all the way out to local nodes. They snap up dark fiber left and right to augment their backbone. They're currently running somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-million servers.
If anybody can figure out how to coordinate the use of millions of hybrid-car batteries as some sort of parellelized grid-connected energy store despite the obvious availability problems with mobile energy stores that are only connected intermittently, it's probably them.
It always seems like that, so I'll add my two cents. Comcast showed up and put two cablecards in my Tivo, and 15 minutes later (mostly the tech waiting for the head-end activation on the phone) it was up and running. No trouble since.
It doesn't take a techie. Heck, a suggestion like "just plug the cable in" in a world of proprietary cable boxes, encryption, DRM, a half-dozen compression and modulation schemes, cablecards, various incompatible resolutions, framerates, and interlacing schemes along with all of their associated digital and analog audio and video interconnection formats... is at best a long shot.
Unless you have one of the LCDs with an undocumented QAM tuner and a cable company broadcasting PPV on unencrypted QAM channels, what are the odds that plugging the cable in would get you anything beyond analog channels in the first place?
Heck, it surprised me. I get HD cable with no box, including my neighbors' PPV and some bizarre channels that appear to be fragments and scaled images for use on the menu system of some sort of cable box.
Note that gallons are not the same size in the US and the UK. A gallon in the UK is a bit over 1.2 US Gallons. Your "40mpg" UK BMW gets 33 mpg if you're using US Gallons, which is quite a bit lower than the 47mpg the Prius gets under even the revised EPA ratings that just came out.
That's precisely why I love voice chat on XBox Live so much. Nothing motivates a good game like an 8-year-old screaming "holy fuck you fucking cheating fag fuckers!" at the top of his lungs.
There aren't any hybrid vehicles on the market using a fuel cell. If you were referring to the extra energy required to produce the batteries and electric motors required in current-generation hybrid cars, there is indeed a penalty compared to normal cars. The payback time is short, however, generally just a few months. After the payback period, the car saves energy over a comparable car for the rest of its lifetime. And while the batteries are full of not-so-healthy stuff you wouldn't want to drink, they are recycled in their entirety at the end of their useful lives.
As to whether you should wait for the next generation or not... that's always a tough call. At some point, you just have to stop and buy a car. Otherwise, you'll *always* be waiting for the Next Great Thing. It's a lot like buying a computer. You could make the argument that you should wait, since you know that things will be much, much faster at the same price in two years-- but in two years, the same thing will still be true.
They need a way to verify if the answer is correct... if they know the answer, they don't need help digitizing the hard-to-read text. If they don't know the answer, it won't work as a CAPTCHA.
In city driving, that would be okay, though it would allow people to be more of a jackrabbit driver at the expense of more gasoline consumption.
Equivalent power is equivalent power... how are they going to be more aggressive in a hypothetical car with the same power and torque output and a slight weight disadvantage?
I can't imagine it would still be able to sustain 75MPH, with a 52HP engine. Let alone in the worst case... on an extended 5% incline
This is an excellent point. Although I don't know where the line is offhand (and it will vary with car weight and aerodynamics), there will be some point at which you have downsized a gas engine too much to be workable in a parallel hybrid. Since the electric motor gets its power from the gas engine, and has only a limited storage bank-- any sustained excursion above the gas engine's maximum output will result in a dead battery and no more "boost" from the electric motor. The gas engine must be large enough to remain driveable.
As you also point out, however, the electric motor is usually only a small fraction of the power output at cruising speed. It does, however, beef up the low-end torque curve greatly-- particularly when paired with an Atkinson-cycle engine where we've sacrificed torque for efficiency. The loss of the electric motor has only a small effect on cruising, but a large penalty for acceleration from low speeds-- and to get to a low speed again you'll have to brake at some point, which will dump some power back into the battery.
20% was chosen arbitrarily-- I'm sure the engineers who hybridize your improved ICE will make sure the car is driveable when the battery goes flat, and avoid crossing the line. And if you get to claim the hybrid encourages "jackrabbit" city driving as a downside, I can claim your ICE encourages high-speed uphill driving.:)
Yeah, me too. But I am enjoying the discussion, which has remained astonishingly civil and seems to include well-thought-out points.
Adjusting the CVT design slightly, or adding another, lower gear on the manual version, will easily give you close to the max.
This is where I repeat my sticking point... if you can achieve better torque in this fashion, it benefits the hybrid in exactly the same way. Take the resulting ICE, scale it down another 20%, and add a hybrid system to beef it back up... and suddenly you've got an equivalent car that's more fuel efficient again. (At the expense of cost and complexity, of course.)
I won't argue that you could potentially build an ICE car equivalent in power and efficiency to today's hybrids. But doing so would make tomorrow's hybrids more efficient as soon as they adopt your improved ICE and transmission.
Hybrid or not, I hope somebody builds the car you're looking for. Choice is good.
But the electric motor provides almost all of the low-end torque. Without the electric motor, the Insight makes its peak torque of 66 pound-feet at 4,800 rpm. With the electric motor, it makes 79 pound-feet at 1,500 rpm. Making that up with only an Atkinson-cycle ICE without greatly increasing the engine size will be tough.
Besides... I thought you didn't like the little 2-seater bubble cars?
But I AM proposing a way to make-up the difference... Reduced engine weight, thanks to not requiring a battery pack, electric motors, etc., etc. Not to mention reduced sale price, and maintenance costs.
You'd have to eliminate a proportional amount of weight. You want similar performance with 25% less power? You'll have to cut 25% of the car's weight. In a car like the Civic, where we can compare the hybrid model directly to a non-hybrid to see how much the extra crap weighs, it appears to be less than 300lbs. out of about 2700. You'd need to lose another 375lbs. from the engine alone to make it workable.
And what do you have when you're done cutting all the weight? A car whose engine could be downsized another 20% and turned into a hybrid with little weight penalty. Because if we're going to postulate that a 25% reduction in engine size can shave 375lbs. off the weight of a car, then it's enough to cover the weight of a modern hybrid system.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I've enjoyed the discussion, but we've hit a wall. I can't seem to explain that ICE engine and car-body weight improvements all help hybrids as much as pure ICE designs in a way that makes sense to you. I agree that hybrids have weight, price, and complexity downsides. I agree that more options would be better, including a cheap and reliable ultralight aerodynamic modern ICE car. I agree that hydraulic accumulators are cool, but that they have their own ups and downs. But I won't agree, barring some sort of radical new development in ICE engines that simply cannot be used with hybrids, that a hybrid system will be less efficient. It may not be ideal, or the end-all of car design, but it's going to remain better than pure ICE for efficiency *despite* the slight weight disadvantage.
The EV1 was certainly the slipperiest production car ever. The Prius is a respectable third place. We're not comparing a brick and a missile here-- the two are very close.
You're right. Replacing a Civic's already-small engine with a smaller 3-cylinder running on the more efficient but less powerful atkinson cycle would make it more fuel-efficient. You could build a 75hp Prius, too. I'm thinking you'll find that neither one sells very well. In a single stroke of genius, you've managed to propose a car that uses both a reduced engine size AND a reduced engine power density, without offering a way to make up the difference.... in a car already widely regarded as fairly anemic.
It's not magic in either design. But hybrids offer several non-magical advantages over conventional engines: the ability to recoup energy while braking, the ability to use only the fraction of your combined ICE/electric system you need at any given time, and the ability to do things like run on the gutless atkinson cycle while having high torque at low RPM from an electric motor. There are several non-magical disadvantages, too-- increased weight, complexity, and price.
I don't drive a hybrid, but pretending they're not currently more efficient than similarly performing conventional cars seems weird. And any breakthrough that works for ICE engines alone works for hybrids as well.
Me, I'd love to see a lower-priced option just like you suggest. Small modern ICE, good aerodynamics, turbo/VVT/HCCI/cylinder deactivation/idle stop/etc.... choices are good. But it won't be the efficiency champ.
I would certainly love to see a non-hybrid with modern fuel efficient tech, in a light car that can seat 4 people, and doesn't look like a bubble.
Love or hate the bubble, good engineering says there's only a few ways something that's really aerodynamic AND has room for people AND fits into our existing road/parking infrastructure will look.
That said, I drive a last-generation non-hybrid Honda Civic HX. It's very much like what you describe-- CVT automatic transmission, small modern variable valve timing/lift engine, and so forth. It does a respectable job, but despite being smaller and lighter than a Prius it only manages a rating of 34/40 mpg by the old EPA standards, and is a full category worse in emissions.
Neither is some false "trading" of imaginary carbon credits.
Carbon credits are not the perfect solution, but they are a way to harness the power of the market for positive results in the short-term. You set your caps where you want them across the board and distribute the credits to all parties-- and then let the market decide whether companies comply directly through reduction or indirectly through buying excess credits from somebody who already reduced their emissions.
This speeds up compliance a lot more quickly than a straight-up regulatory approach because the cost of reduction is often not available in small chunks. If new caps mean a company needs to cut emissions by 10%, it's likely they have no way of doing so. They probably could cut emissions by 50% by radically rebuilding something, though-- but then they've overspent. It's not likely a company can afford such a radical rebuilding of their facilities to meat a small emissions cut, and small gradual cuts are the only thing to come out of the government. Credits give them a way to fund this upgrade by selling the remaining 40% of their cuts to four other similar facilities who needed 10% cuts. It's a way to let the market optimize the flow of capital to best fund the modifications needed to meet the emissions caps you want to hit.
But it's not an end-game solution if the needed cuts are too drastic-- it only works as long as there's enough legal emissions under the cap to allow the simultaneous existence of some dirty and some clean facilities. It doesn't work if you want zero emissions, because there's nothing left to trade for at that point.
I completely agree. Of course, there's nothing at all stopping hybrids from using VVT (I'm fairly sure Honda and Toyota both already do) or turbochargers. You can downsize *any* engine system and bolt on the hybrid system to compensate. The fact that there are better ICE designs available makes hybrids better, too.
Mileage, yes. "Hybrid," no. Your car's hybrid system (electric motor/generator) shuts off at 35MHz, and can't possibly help your gas mileage, in any way, above that speed.
That's certainly true. The electric motor is generally off at cruising speeds... which means the hybrid system has allowed 20% of your engine's power to go offline. It's similar to cylinder deactivation in that it saves power by simply not using it when no longer needed. In a car with neither a hybrid system or cylinder deactivation, you get to pump the whole engine even when you only need part of it to maintain speed.
The hybrid system helps on the freeway in that it allows the gas engine to be smaller and run on the Atkinson cycle. You could argue that a similar car could be built by just dropping all the hybrid bits and running the exact same car on the Atkinson cycle ICE, but nobody wants that car-- it would lose a significant fraction of its total power and the majority of its low-end torque. If you think a Prius is gutless now, it would be nearly undriveable then.
A hybrid can't make an engine more efficient. It just makes it more efficient over certain parts of the power band.
It certainly can, although not in the way you're thinking. A hybrid system is a split engine that allows part of your total engine capacity to shut off when unneeded. If you have a hypothetical 100hp gas engine vs. an 80hp gas engine w/ 20hp electric motor... at freeway speeds you'll just be running your 80hp engine. And since weight is relatively unimportant when cruising (compared to when accelerating), a few hundred pounds of extra doodads isn't gonna hurt much.
Cylinder deactivation has similar advantages, too.
The savings in gasoline consumption and cost do not overtake the expenditure in the cost of the hybrid until you have owned the car for 7 or 8 years. In this day and age people are rolling their cars over every 3 or 4.
Yeah, I've noticed that. What gives, people? It makes absolutely no financial sense to turn over cars that quickly. It was a real head-scratcher for me in threads arguing about how long it takes a hybrid to pay for itself vs. another car. For my yearly driving distance and current car, a Prius would pay off in about five years at $2.30/gallon if I had made that choice when both cars were new, and it baffled me that people weren't reaching similar conclusions... until I realized they thought of a car's lifetime as about three years.
I've never owned a car less than eight, and I hadn't realized I was atypical. Sadly, I chose a non-hybrid car despite the math based on worries about reliability that have proven unfounded. It's a good car, but seven years in and well above $2.30 a gallon, I would have saved a ton of money.
#1 The best milage comes from the most conservative driving.
True. But the biggest mileage improvement happens for people who drive aggressively. Only a hybrid or a pure electric car can recover some of the energy wasted in hard acceleration when you brake.
#2 The batteries are more toxic than those in a normal car- and with each hybrid carrying between 5 and 7 of those batteries, they are not better for the environment.
I don't know where you got 5-7 batteries. They have one pack. It's about 3x the weight of a normal car battery in the Prius. And who cares if it's toxic when they're all being recycled completely? Were you planning on eating it?
#3 The total energy used to manufacter a hybrid vehicle is higher than what it is for a regular vehilce of same size.
This is also true, but it takes only a few months to reach the break-even point again-- after which, it's all net energy saved.
#4 The depreciation rate is held up by popular opinion. This is true in all vehicles, but the steep cliff at year 6 is going to make most people unhappy, and the battery replacement at year 8 will be a very large cost to shoulder and may drive many people out of this market all togeather.
Depending on who you ask, the battery pack should never need replacing. Of course, some will break-- just like some cars need replacement engines or transmissions. Do you expect them all to fail immediately at the end of the 100k mile warranty?
#5 There is currently no plan for the recycling of these batteries.
This one is complete and utter bullshit. Toyota, for example, recycles ALL of their hybrid battery packs, right down to the plastic case and wiring. To ensure that they are returned for recycling, there's a 1-800 number printed on the pack and there's $200 bounty for each battery returned. This program has been in place since the RAV-4 EV in 1998. How you could even begin to think "there's no recycling plan" when there is, in fact, an extremely comprehensive plan is beyond me. Did you actually check?
My wife's Prius is averaging right around 47mpg in mixed city/highway driving after about two years. She doesn't do anything special while driving-- just treats it like any other car. Since the new rating is 48/45/46, it sounds like they're right on the money.
It's about damn time the EPA revised their ridiculously inaccurate tests. The data has been off for years, for all cars.
That depends. If IBM is going to keep doing the work (which would seem likely), they're just going to offshore it. Assuming this layoff happens like Cringely predicts, it will (for American IT workers) be like 100,000 workers just appeared with nothing to do. For the offshore workers, on the other hand, it will be like 100,000 jobs worth of work just appeared.
Shame there's all these pesky immigration laws that keep people from moving as freely as the work does.
My "hot spot" was noise. I could hear the older switchers a mile away, it seemed. I could walk by a house and know if anyone had a TV on, as its horizontal transformer whined away.
I can still hear tube televisions whine, but I've only got two out of maybe 30 CFLs that produce any noise I can hear. I put those two in the garage door opener a few years ago, where I don't give a crap if they buzz.
I can't see any rainbows on newer sequential DLPs in general. Somewhere in the race to speed up the color wheels, they passed my threshold.
Aren't the phosphors typically an order of magnitude slower than the flicker anyway? Maybe it's just 'cause I'm old, and I can't see the high-speed flicker anymore. I can see "rainbows" on sequential-color DLP sets and get cranky with the sluggishness of LCDs, but I have *never* seen a CF bulb with flicker I could perceive. I have had a few that hummed audibly, though.
Maybe I've just been really, really lucky in my random bulb purchases. People here keep posting stories about bulbs dying in a month, or catching fire, or humming loudly, or what have you.
I'm curious on the flicker. Most modern CF bulbs have ballasts that run in the 10-kilohertz range. The phosphor coating, on the other hand, has a much longer response time. So assuming you can actually see things flickering at 10kHz... you STILL wouldn't see flicker, since the phosphors wouldn't have time to dim each cycle.
If you can see them flicker, movies and television must look like a series of photographs being leisurely swapped to you.
Warmup time is definitely a real issue for some bulbs, though. I kinda like it in the in the morning. Gives my eyes time to adjust. The rest of the time, it's annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing this once and publishing video of it results in a massive savings in resources compared to each person who wants to see this happen having to do it themselves. Think how many wasted iPhones and non-food-safe toxified blenders would be created if even one in ten thousand people who watched this video had instead simply heard about it and decided to try it themselves.
Consider the responsiveness of google's applications, the volume of data, and the number of users. This isn't a server at some ISP, or even a server farm-- google owns a massively distributed network of staggering complexity from central points all the way out to local nodes. They snap up dark fiber left and right to augment their backbone. They're currently running somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-million servers.
If anybody can figure out how to coordinate the use of millions of hybrid-car batteries as some sort of parellelized grid-connected energy store despite the obvious availability problems with mobile energy stores that are only connected intermittently, it's probably them.
It always seems like that, so I'll add my two cents. Comcast showed up and put two cablecards in my Tivo, and 15 minutes later (mostly the tech waiting for the head-end activation on the phone) it was up and running. No trouble since.
It doesn't take a techie. Heck, a suggestion like "just plug the cable in" in a world of proprietary cable boxes, encryption, DRM, a half-dozen compression and modulation schemes, cablecards, various incompatible resolutions, framerates, and interlacing schemes along with all of their associated digital and analog audio and video interconnection formats... is at best a long shot.
Unless you have one of the LCDs with an undocumented QAM tuner and a cable company broadcasting PPV on unencrypted QAM channels, what are the odds that plugging the cable in would get you anything beyond analog channels in the first place?
Heck, it surprised me. I get HD cable with no box, including my neighbors' PPV and some bizarre channels that appear to be fragments and scaled images for use on the menu system of some sort of cable box.
Note that gallons are not the same size in the US and the UK. A gallon in the UK is a bit over 1.2 US Gallons. Your "40mpg" UK BMW gets 33 mpg if you're using US Gallons, which is quite a bit lower than the 47mpg the Prius gets under even the revised EPA ratings that just came out.
Handy Converter
That's precisely why I love voice chat on XBox Live so much. Nothing motivates a good game like an 8-year-old screaming "holy fuck you fucking cheating fag fuckers!" at the top of his lungs.
There aren't any hybrid vehicles on the market using a fuel cell. If you were referring to the extra energy required to produce the batteries and electric motors required in current-generation hybrid cars, there is indeed a penalty compared to normal cars. The payback time is short, however, generally just a few months. After the payback period, the car saves energy over a comparable car for the rest of its lifetime. And while the batteries are full of not-so-healthy stuff you wouldn't want to drink, they are recycled in their entirety at the end of their useful lives.
As to whether you should wait for the next generation or not... that's always a tough call. At some point, you just have to stop and buy a car. Otherwise, you'll *always* be waiting for the Next Great Thing. It's a lot like buying a computer. You could make the argument that you should wait, since you know that things will be much, much faster at the same price in two years-- but in two years, the same thing will still be true.
They need a way to verify if the answer is correct... if they know the answer, they don't need help digitizing the hard-to-read text. If they don't know the answer, it won't work as a CAPTCHA.
Am I missing something fundamental here?
In city driving, that would be okay, though it would allow people to be more of a jackrabbit driver at the expense of more gasoline consumption.
Equivalent power is equivalent power... how are they going to be more aggressive in a hypothetical car with the same power and torque output and a slight weight disadvantage?
I can't imagine it would still be able to sustain 75MPH, with a 52HP engine. Let alone in the worst case... on an extended 5% incline
This is an excellent point. Although I don't know where the line is offhand (and it will vary with car weight and aerodynamics), there will be some point at which you have downsized a gas engine too much to be workable in a parallel hybrid. Since the electric motor gets its power from the gas engine, and has only a limited storage bank-- any sustained excursion above the gas engine's maximum output will result in a dead battery and no more "boost" from the electric motor. The gas engine must be large enough to remain driveable.
As you also point out, however, the electric motor is usually only a small fraction of the power output at cruising speed. It does, however, beef up the low-end torque curve greatly-- particularly when paired with an Atkinson-cycle engine where we've sacrificed torque for efficiency. The loss of the electric motor has only a small effect on cruising, but a large penalty for acceleration from low speeds-- and to get to a low speed again you'll have to brake at some point, which will dump some power back into the battery.
20% was chosen arbitrarily-- I'm sure the engineers who hybridize your improved ICE will make sure the car is driveable when the battery goes flat, and avoid crossing the line. And if you get to claim the hybrid encourages "jackrabbit" city driving as a downside, I can claim your ICE encourages high-speed uphill driving.
I seem to be repeating myself...
Yeah, me too. But I am enjoying the discussion, which has remained astonishingly civil and seems to include well-thought-out points.
Adjusting the CVT design slightly, or adding another, lower gear on the manual version, will easily give you close to the max.
This is where I repeat my sticking point... if you can achieve better torque in this fashion, it benefits the hybrid in exactly the same way. Take the resulting ICE, scale it down another 20%, and add a hybrid system to beef it back up... and suddenly you've got an equivalent car that's more fuel efficient again. (At the expense of cost and complexity, of course.)
I won't argue that you could potentially build an ICE car equivalent in power and efficiency to today's hybrids. But doing so would make tomorrow's hybrids more efficient as soon as they adopt your improved ICE and transmission.
Hybrid or not, I hope somebody builds the car you're looking for. Choice is good.
But the electric motor provides almost all of the low-end torque. Without the electric motor, the Insight makes its peak torque of 66 pound-feet at 4,800 rpm. With the electric motor, it makes 79 pound-feet at 1,500 rpm. Making that up with only an Atkinson-cycle ICE without greatly increasing the engine size will be tough.
Besides... I thought you didn't like the little 2-seater bubble cars?
But I AM proposing a way to make-up the difference... Reduced engine weight, thanks to not requiring a battery pack, electric motors, etc., etc. Not to mention reduced sale price, and maintenance costs.
You'd have to eliminate a proportional amount of weight. You want similar performance with 25% less power? You'll have to cut 25% of the car's weight. In a car like the Civic, where we can compare the hybrid model directly to a non-hybrid to see how much the extra crap weighs, it appears to be less than 300lbs. out of about 2700. You'd need to lose another 375lbs. from the engine alone to make it workable.
And what do you have when you're done cutting all the weight? A car whose engine could be downsized another 20% and turned into a hybrid with little weight penalty. Because if we're going to postulate that a 25% reduction in engine size can shave 375lbs. off the weight of a car, then it's enough to cover the weight of a modern hybrid system.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I've enjoyed the discussion, but we've hit a wall. I can't seem to explain that ICE engine and car-body weight improvements all help hybrids as much as pure ICE designs in a way that makes sense to you. I agree that hybrids have weight, price, and complexity downsides. I agree that more options would be better, including a cheap and reliable ultralight aerodynamic modern ICE car. I agree that hydraulic accumulators are cool, but that they have their own ups and downs. But I won't agree, barring some sort of radical new development in ICE engines that simply cannot be used with hybrids, that a hybrid system will be less efficient. It may not be ideal, or the end-all of car design, but it's going to remain better than pure ICE for efficiency *despite* the slight weight disadvantage.
The EV1 was certainly the slipperiest production car ever. The Prius is a respectable third place. We're not comparing a brick and a missile here-- the two are very close.
You're right. Replacing a Civic's already-small engine with a smaller 3-cylinder running on the more efficient but less powerful atkinson cycle would make it more fuel-efficient. You could build a 75hp Prius, too. I'm thinking you'll find that neither one sells very well. In a single stroke of genius, you've managed to propose a car that uses both a reduced engine size AND a reduced engine power density, without offering a way to make up the difference.... in a car already widely regarded as fairly anemic.
It's not magic in either design. But hybrids offer several non-magical advantages over conventional engines: the ability to recoup energy while braking, the ability to use only the fraction of your combined ICE/electric system you need at any given time, and the ability to do things like run on the gutless atkinson cycle while having high torque at low RPM from an electric motor. There are several non-magical disadvantages, too-- increased weight, complexity, and price.
I don't drive a hybrid, but pretending they're not currently more efficient than similarly performing conventional cars seems weird. And any breakthrough that works for ICE engines alone works for hybrids as well.
Me, I'd love to see a lower-priced option just like you suggest. Small modern ICE, good aerodynamics, turbo/VVT/HCCI/cylinder deactivation/idle stop/etc.... choices are good. But it won't be the efficiency champ.
I would certainly love to see a non-hybrid with modern fuel efficient tech, in a light car that can seat 4 people, and doesn't look like a bubble.
Love or hate the bubble, good engineering says there's only a few ways something that's really aerodynamic AND has room for people AND fits into our existing road/parking infrastructure will look.
That said, I drive a last-generation non-hybrid Honda Civic HX. It's very much like what you describe-- CVT automatic transmission, small modern variable valve timing/lift engine, and so forth. It does a respectable job, but despite being smaller and lighter than a Prius it only manages a rating of 34/40 mpg by the old EPA standards, and is a full category worse in emissions.
Neither is some false "trading" of imaginary carbon credits.
Carbon credits are not the perfect solution, but they are a way to harness the power of the market for positive results in the short-term. You set your caps where you want them across the board and distribute the credits to all parties-- and then let the market decide whether companies comply directly through reduction or indirectly through buying excess credits from somebody who already reduced their emissions.
This speeds up compliance a lot more quickly than a straight-up regulatory approach because the cost of reduction is often not available in small chunks. If new caps mean a company needs to cut emissions by 10%, it's likely they have no way of doing so. They probably could cut emissions by 50% by radically rebuilding something, though-- but then they've overspent. It's not likely a company can afford such a radical rebuilding of their facilities to meat a small emissions cut, and small gradual cuts are the only thing to come out of the government. Credits give them a way to fund this upgrade by selling the remaining 40% of their cuts to four other similar facilities who needed 10% cuts. It's a way to let the market optimize the flow of capital to best fund the modifications needed to meet the emissions caps you want to hit.
But it's not an end-game solution if the needed cuts are too drastic-- it only works as long as there's enough legal emissions under the cap to allow the simultaneous existence of some dirty and some clean facilities. It doesn't work if you want zero emissions, because there's nothing left to trade for at that point.
I completely agree. Of course, there's nothing at all stopping hybrids from using VVT (I'm fairly sure Honda and Toyota both already do) or turbochargers. You can downsize *any* engine system and bolt on the hybrid system to compensate. The fact that there are better ICE designs available makes hybrids better, too.
I'm anxiously awaiting a nice turbodiesel hybrid.
That's certainly true. The electric motor is generally off at cruising speeds... which means the hybrid system has allowed 20% of your engine's power to go offline. It's similar to cylinder deactivation in that it saves power by simply not using it when no longer needed. In a car with neither a hybrid system or cylinder deactivation, you get to pump the whole engine even when you only need part of it to maintain speed.
The hybrid system helps on the freeway in that it allows the gas engine to be smaller and run on the Atkinson cycle. You could argue that a similar car could be built by just dropping all the hybrid bits and running the exact same car on the Atkinson cycle ICE, but nobody wants that car-- it would lose a significant fraction of its total power and the majority of its low-end torque. If you think a Prius is gutless now, it would be nearly undriveable then.
It certainly can, although not in the way you're thinking. A hybrid system is a split engine that allows part of your total engine capacity to shut off when unneeded. If you have a hypothetical 100hp gas engine vs. an 80hp gas engine w/ 20hp electric motor... at freeway speeds you'll just be running your 80hp engine. And since weight is relatively unimportant when cruising (compared to when accelerating), a few hundred pounds of extra doodads isn't gonna hurt much.
Cylinder deactivation has similar advantages, too.
Yeah, I've noticed that. What gives, people? It makes absolutely no financial sense to turn over cars that quickly. It was a real head-scratcher for me in threads arguing about how long it takes a hybrid to pay for itself vs. another car. For my yearly driving distance and current car, a Prius would pay off in about five years at $2.30/gallon if I had made that choice when both cars were new, and it baffled me that people weren't reaching similar conclusions... until I realized they thought of a car's lifetime as about three years.
I've never owned a car less than eight, and I hadn't realized I was atypical. Sadly, I chose a non-hybrid car despite the math based on worries about reliability that have proven unfounded. It's a good car, but seven years in and well above $2.30 a gallon, I would have saved a ton of money.
#1 The best milage comes from the most conservative driving.
True. But the biggest mileage improvement happens for people who drive aggressively. Only a hybrid or a pure electric car can recover some of the energy wasted in hard acceleration when you brake.
#2 The batteries are more toxic than those in a normal car- and with each hybrid carrying between 5 and 7 of those batteries, they are not better for the environment.
I don't know where you got 5-7 batteries. They have one pack. It's about 3x the weight of a normal car battery in the Prius. And who cares if it's toxic when they're all being recycled completely? Were you planning on eating it?
#3 The total energy used to manufacter a hybrid vehicle is higher than what it is for a regular vehilce of same size.
This is also true, but it takes only a few months to reach the break-even point again-- after which, it's all net energy saved.
#4 The depreciation rate is held up by popular opinion. This is true in all vehicles, but the steep cliff at year 6 is going to make most people unhappy, and the battery replacement at year 8 will be a very large cost to shoulder and may drive many people out of this market all togeather.
Depending on who you ask, the battery pack should never need replacing. Of course, some will break-- just like some cars need replacement engines or transmissions. Do you expect them all to fail immediately at the end of the 100k mile warranty?
#5 There is currently no plan for the recycling of these batteries.
This one is complete and utter bullshit. Toyota, for example, recycles ALL of their hybrid battery packs, right down to the plastic case and wiring. To ensure that they are returned for recycling, there's a 1-800 number printed on the pack and there's $200 bounty for each battery returned. This program has been in place since the RAV-4 EV in 1998. How you could even begin to think "there's no recycling plan" when there is, in fact, an extremely comprehensive plan is beyond me. Did you actually check?
My wife's Prius is averaging right around 47mpg in mixed city/highway driving after about two years. She doesn't do anything special while driving-- just treats it like any other car. Since the new rating is 48/45/46, it sounds like they're right on the money.
It's about damn time the EPA revised their ridiculously inaccurate tests. The data has been off for years, for all cars.
That depends. If IBM is going to keep doing the work (which would seem likely), they're just going to offshore it. Assuming this layoff happens like Cringely predicts, it will (for American IT workers) be like 100,000 workers just appeared with nothing to do. For the offshore workers, on the other hand, it will be like 100,000 jobs worth of work just appeared.
Shame there's all these pesky immigration laws that keep people from moving as freely as the work does.
I can still hear tube televisions whine, but I've only got two out of maybe 30 CFLs that produce any noise I can hear. I put those two in the garage door opener a few years ago, where I don't give a crap if they buzz.
I can't see any rainbows on newer sequential DLPs in general. Somewhere in the race to speed up the color wheels, they passed my threshold.
Aren't the phosphors typically an order of magnitude slower than the flicker anyway? Maybe it's just 'cause I'm old, and I can't see the high-speed flicker anymore. I can see "rainbows" on sequential-color DLP sets and get cranky with the sluggishness of LCDs, but I have *never* seen a CF bulb with flicker I could perceive. I have had a few that hummed audibly, though.
Maybe I've just been really, really lucky in my random bulb purchases. People here keep posting stories about bulbs dying in a month, or catching fire, or humming loudly, or what have you.
I'm curious on the flicker. Most modern CF bulbs have ballasts that run in the 10-kilohertz range. The phosphor coating, on the other hand, has a much longer response time. So assuming you can actually see things flickering at 10kHz... you STILL wouldn't see flicker, since the phosphors wouldn't have time to dim each cycle.
If you can see them flicker, movies and television must look like a series of photographs being leisurely swapped to you.
Warmup time is definitely a real issue for some bulbs, though. I kinda like it in the in the morning. Gives my eyes time to adjust. The rest of the time, it's annoying.