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Toyota Unveils Plug-in Hybrid Prius
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 27, 2007 08:28 PM
from the whiiiirrrrrrr dept.
from the whiiiirrrrrrr dept.
phlack writes "Toyota has announced a plug-in hybrid vehicle, based on their popular Prius. So far, it will only have a range of 8 miles on the battery (13km). They are going to test this vehicle on the public roads, apparently a first for the industry. From the article: 'Unlike earlier gasoline-electric hybrids, which run on a parallel system twinning battery power and a combustion engine, plug-in cars are designed to enable short trips powered entirely by the electric motor, using a battery that can be charged through an electric socket at home. Many environmental advocates see them as the best available technology to reduce gasoline consumption and global-warming greenhouse gas emissions, but engineers say battery technology is still insufficient to store enough energy for long-distance travel.'"
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Hardware: Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020 619 comments
autofan1 writes "Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and that by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it 'expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars.' Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for '100 percent' of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."
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The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Here you go... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Electric%20Cars%20and%
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Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
That depends on the cost per foot of your extension cord.
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8 miles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong. Sort of. Lithium-ion batteries can power a car for 200 to 250 miles, but they're expensive.
I think what they really meant is that "battery technology is still insufficiently cheap for long-distance travel."
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The technology is insufficently advanced. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Informative)
They do that by cheating. The Tesla, for example, carries half a tonne of batteries, and the car itself is built to be as light as possible (the batteries probably outweigh everything else put together, without passengers in it). Lithium batteries also tend to have lifetime issues; numbers I've heard quoted off-the-cuff for lithium batteries are losing 50% of their capacity within a year or two, and only being good for 100ish charge cycles, though this will vary with the specific battery model. This is tolerable for a cell phone or notebook, as you tend to upgrade these frequently and new batteries cost much less than a new unit, but a car will have serious problems under these conditions.
For a battery-powered car to be really competitive, we'd need a battery technology with at least 5 times the storage density per unit mass, that was good for a decade of daily use before needing replacement. This may or may not be possible; time will tell (unless the engineering difficulties with fuel cells are solved first). On one hand, we aren't anywhere near the theoretical limits to the energy density of batteries, but on the other hand, people have been working on the problem for centuries.
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Re:Battery Life (Score:4, Interesting)
Heat, deep discharges, cell reversal, and overcharging is hard on batteries. The long range drivers do the worst.. Top the batteries off to get maximum range, run them till they go no more and repeat. Plan on buying new batteries every few years just like you do for your digital camera, MP3 player, cell phone, laptop, and other devices that get deep cycles often.
I think the Toyota 8 mile range is to extend the battery life to 10+ years. It is not for maximum driving range at a high cost.
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120 miles? (Score:4, Interesting)
The batteries don't have a long way to go, they've just been forced out of the picture.
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Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far Toyota has made the most marketable hybrids to date and is actively trying to reduce costs. I'd say their engineering is spot on, given their goals.
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Re:8 miles? (Score:4, Informative)
You ARE aware that (1) the Prius has a gasoline motor, too, and (2) there are some people whose daily commute is less than 8 miles.
If I could wave a magic wand and have an 8-mile range electric-only option for MY car, I'd do it in a heart-beat. 3 miles to work, 3 miles back, and I can spend a month on a single tank of gas.
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Re: Common Sense Killed The Electric Car (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder, how many Teslas have ever been sold, and how many Toyotas were sold.... -last month?....
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Here's a fun comparison:
The Tesla costs $98,000, does zero-60 in 4 seconds, and the battery pack lasts 100,000 miles.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
The EPA mileage is 16/26 city/highway (let's use an average of 20 mpg, in use?)....
And to
Common Sense plus shortsightedness = blindness. (Score:5, Insightful)
You remind me of the people who said cars would never be practical, explaining that there were no gas stations, and that you didn't have to crank a horse to start it.
The Tesla is a carefully crafted, rare, high-tech, high performance ride, very early into the market, and it is priced accordingly. A corvette is an assembly line commodity produced in comparatively huge volume after literally decades of absorbing engineering costs and marketing costs. When the automakers get around to putting a comparable electric car into mass production, the niche the Tesla occupies will close (and the cachet of having a high performance, non-polluting car will go away because they will no longer be rare.) If you think the Tesla's price represents an accurate measure of the price in a competitive market, you're not paying enough attention to how industry works.
My point was that electric cars don't need to be either slow, or have an 8 mile range. The price is what, maybe 5x that of a Prius? That's not so far off, frankly. This is the beginning of the curve. Some of us see that clearly and are all about waiting a little; but others... are still looking at Corvettes.
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Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Prius has a full rear seat and cargo area, which limits the amount of space that can hold the battery pack. In addition, as has been pointed out, the Tesla also costs nearly 4x a Prius.
Now, you show me a Tesla four-door hatchback that can carry more that a set of golf clubs, and still match the performance specs of the Roadster, then you might be able to say that Toyota "needs a little schooling."
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you think extending the body length by a few feet and a few hundred lbs would do to the performance? Do you think they made it a two-seater because they had to, or because they figured a hundred thousand dollar car might not be all that salable if wasn't sporty? Did you look at the t
Works for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I'll still keep my bigger, gas fueled beast for when I have further to go, but this should be a real option for many people.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the beauty of this.
why wasn't the original plug in? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if your daily commute is too significant to be made in electric-only mode (mine totals 40 miles and my employer won't let me recharge an EV at work), cutting some portion of the gas burning miles is still a major breakthrough. Running few power plants is more efficient than running millions of small engines to generate the same amount of energy. They physics of scale makes ICE cars look insanely wasteful. Electric cars aren't tied to any single fuel source--energy can come from coal, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. This makes EVs a great way to transition from a fossil fuel economy to any future power source. An all-electric car with lithium ion batteries and a several hundred mile range (at working class prices) would blow my mind. But I'm not going to complain if I can't have one yet. Plug-in hybrids may not be ideal, but they're a step in the right direction.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:some data on that please? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a well-cited "paper" [electroauto.com] on the subject. Even if you don't trust the author to be objective (since his business is selling electric car kits), the references are unimpeachable and the numbers impressive.No. They seem to be much better.
Regards,
Ross
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Re:some data on that please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider that regular hybrids already convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, and then into electrical energy, chemical (battery) energy, and then back into electrical and finally mechanical energy. Obviously, this complicated series of thermodynamic conversions must make them less efficient than conventional gasoline cars, right?
No, because there are all sorts of mitigating factors. For hybrids, this comes from the fact that they use regenerative braking. There are other factors at work in power plants.
The specifics of thermodynamics are best worked out in practice, not theory.
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Re:Please explain (Score:4, Interesting)
But there's really no reason to rule out a giant rubber band.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
From an environmental standpoint, no this isn't a one stop solution. But it does centralize the problems. First, with electric cars many will have the choice to live fossil fuel free because there are already solutions available to live off the grid on renewable energy sources. Second, this eliminates oil as an enemy and allows everyone to consolidate their efforts on energy generation from renewable sources.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, every time I point out these simple sites and concepts that any dolt can easily understand, I get mod-ed down by a strange group that seems to read articles late. I have two theories on this: there are paid
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Please explain (Score:4, Informative)
Big fossil fuel generating plants are more efficient, and that's one factor, but also, a considerable amount of energy is produced by sources like hydro, nuclear and to a lesser extent, solar, wind and so forth. All of these are non-polluting. Further, we have the ability (if not the collective intelligence) to build more nuclear plants. Solar is becoming more efficient. As the grid moves from fossil fuels to non-polluting sources, these types of vehicles will continue to be close to zero impact (they'll still need lubricants and so on, but they won't expel them into the atmosphere.) In addition, electricity transport doesn't require tankers and is non-polluting itself.
One thing about the summary, though — in the end, it won't be batteries, it'll be ultracaps [ideaspike.com] running these things. Batteries - frankly - haven't got a lot to recommend them. They are extreme polluters, hugely difficult to dispose of, expensive and complicated to recycle, charge slowly, can't deliver much power at once, and perform worse and worse as they get older (and not a lot older, for that matter.) I look forward with great anticipation to the day I can say "no more batteries." I'd say that day is about ten years off at most based on the rate that ultracaps have been advancing the last three years.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. So it may take quite a bit less than the ten years I specified; I was just being conservative. Thanks for pointing out that ultracaps are only one order of magnitude back now; a little while ago, it was two. And there are numerous technologies on the bench that show a lot of promise. We just have a tedious wait between lab pokery and commercialization.
The gasoline energy density is irrelevant, of course; gasoline is used up and is non-renewable. Ultracaps aren't used up and are reusable millions of times (consequently, your car will wear out before they do.) Gasoline is energy, in a sense; ultracaps aren't - they're gas tanks. So you have to watch out for those kind of misleading comparisons.
When you say that gasoline carries 10,000 times the volumetric energy of an ultracap, the reader may be misled into thinking that ultracaps can't deliver power. Not so. Designing an 1000 HP drive system that uses ultracaps is a matter of plugging a 250 HP motor onto each wheel, adding a controller and pressing the accelerator. Now you have a 1000 HP, non-polluting, sporty machine. Designing an 1000 HP drive system that uses gasoline means you are going to need your own mechanic, you're going to be producing one heck of a lot of pollution, and the cost will make the electric vehicle look positively thrifty.
The best way to think of ultracaps today is that they are like gas tanks; they hold energy electric motors can use, just like batteries do. They're too small of a "tank" (today) to compete with batteries. A decent metaphor is the walls of the tank are too thick and the volume where the energy is stored is too small. And because they're made in small quantities, they are expensive. But they are improving rapidly and they don't use particularly exotic materials, so there is every reason to think they'll be good enough and inexpensive enough to replace batteries very shortly.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the assumption of a "reasonable dielectric" that knocked you off your horse. That's where ultracaps have left the building. They're using altogether unreasonable dielectrics, and there is stuff on lab benches that is approaching battery levels right now.
Making hydrogen results in a significant net loss of energy. After you've made it, transporting it is a huge problem because hydrogen likes to leak right through most "solid" materials. It has a very low energy density at one aatmosphere, so it has to be compressed to insane degrees to get any decent portability out of it. Both in tankers and/or pipelines and in the target vehicle. That also means fueling presents some serious issues.
Ethanol has already caused corn prices to tweak all kinds of ways; not a good thing. At least at this point, that's a really bad side effect. Corn is a mega-important food crop. Ethanol is like gasoline, in that it must be delivered via tanker, at a hidden energy and pollution cost. It is carbon neutral, in that the carbon in the plant came from the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere as exhaust. Better than gasoline, which takes carbon from the ground and sends it to the atmosphere. However, electrical vehicles can be 100% carbon negative, as a hydro plant, nuke plant, wind plant, tidal plant, geothermal plant, solar plant... none of them produce carbon at all. Better yet. And then corn prices will come back down, too. And we won't need tankers.
The last thing - but not the least - is that to get the most power to the ground, at the least cost, electric wins hands down. Electric motors today are easily manufactured to be lighter and provide better torque and power curves than any internal combustion engine ever made in even a slightly comparable size class. That's why railroads use electric engines everywhere. When torque and power are the issue, electric is the answer. The really cool thing is you can have torque, power, and braking/recovery and efficiency.
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Re:Please explain - dielectrics (Score:4, Informative)
Vapor? Perhaps. But I think we're about to find out. EEStor, a company backed by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. They say this is in a UC with dielectric strengths from 1000 to 3500 volts; the underlying technology has something to do with barium-titanate powders, and yes, I am hand-waving, that's all I know about it. Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies (a competing maker of ultracaps) and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motors, said "I have no doubt you can develop that kind of material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear" which I doubt you would catch him saying if the technology were not as described. He also says a number of doubtful things about the physical stability of ceramics in automotive applications, worries about the low temperature range (which is just FUD... my darned BATTERY needs a heater where I live - temperature low problems are solved off the shelf.) Anyway, when a competitor says "yeah, this is real technology", I'm inclined to go, ok, it's real, then. EEStor has said this tech will be shipping this year - 2007 - as an energy supply system for an electric vehicle. This isn't my claim; this is theirs. So we'll both wait and see.
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Re:Please explain - fuels (Score:4, Informative)
No. Ultracaps can discharge and charge at hundreds of times the rate of batteries without heating at all; if they had a high series resistance, they'd heat up or outright explode. They have a relatively high leakage rate, or at least, some of the technologies do - you must have confused that with the series resistance, which is essentially non-existent.
That isn't what appears to be happening. Existing production is being diverted, and prices are going up. Just check corn futures; it's as plain as day. But your presumption is wrong anyway; because you are assuming that "extra" plants are grown; Where, and what do they replace? Arid spots with no plants? Buildings or roads? Not likely. They'll be grown in fields, most likely replacing other, less profitable crops (that is what we're seeing right now, BTW.) If weeds can't grow, neither can corn. So of course, they replace other plants. Even if they are just replacing weeds, which is the best case because it doesn't screw up other food crop balances, still, they are other plants that would not have been converted into atmospheric carbon dioxide, but which were already involved in scrubbing it from the atmosphere. So in the end, you are taking in carbon and the releasing it; you would have just been taking it in if you had used the plants for food or just left the lot to weeds. Electric systems produce no CO2, and therefore they clearly win on this basis. You're right that technically, this is an actual carbon neutral system; but if you want to go there, then corn can't be, it is carbon positive as soon as you burn it because if you had not burned it, there would be less CO2 in the air.
Hmm. Interesting. I don't know a whole lot about this. What is the lifetime of a fuel cell before it needs service, replacement, etc.? An ultracap typically allows for many millions of full charge / discharge cycles. So if you fully charged and discharged a system each day (call it 300 miles a day of driving) and lowballed to one million cycles, you'd get a million days of lifetime out of the cell, or about two thousand, seven hundred years of lifetime without any kind of service on the ultracaps whatsoever. Basically, they're install and forget until the car is junked, and then they can be moved to your next vehicle. How do fuel cells stack up to that?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't money. And it isn't discipline or operating skills. Or the designs. It's politics. Getting any kind of nuclear plant built at this point in time is like trying to wrestle the midgard serpent. Immovable, stupid, and mythical.
There are new designs that are much safer than the 1960s era stuff by their very nature. They still can't be built, because "nuclear" (sorry, "newk-you-lar") is a boogyman word to the unwashed hordes. Never mind that we lose more people and property to almost any minor cause
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
Gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks, furnace oil for ships and kerosene for the jets all come mainly from imported crude oil. The shortfall between domestic crude production and the demand has widened very rapidly in the last decade. To keep sending more and more money to the Middle East to import oil is madness. Sooner we kick the imported oil addiction better it is for the West. Plug in hybrids would reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, having an electric car means that when the electric company upgrades their plant, you're automatically greener. With a gas car, you're still polluting the same amount.
That's just off the top of my head, mind you.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
With internal-combustion-only cars, there is no migration path. Whatever method of energy generation you use, it all has to end up as gasoline (or similar fuel). This is, currently, enormously wasteful for energy sources that aren't fossil-fuel based.
With electric engines, you're right that *today*, we mostly use fossil fuels to generate it, and so it isn't a great solution.
But *soon*, we will be using more wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, you-name-it energy sources, and as that happens, we start to eliminate the need for fossile fuels.
My father in law lives in L.A., and has enough spare energy from solar to power a car, but there's no option on the market that will let him do this. Right now, he just sells it back to the grid. But with this type of hybrid vehicle, he could be almost completely self sufficient.
Electricity is fungible - you can turn anything into it, and turn it into just about anything. Fossil fuels are only good for burning.
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Re:Please explain (Score:4, Informative)
1) Not all places are stressed at peak loads. California is one, but they are pretty much in the minority.
2) The prime charging time for these vehicles will be AT NIGHT, when the loads are at their least.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
1) It allows us to use locally-produced fossil fuels rather than foreign fossil fuels.
2) Power plants are set up so they run at very high efficiency. Cars run at whatever efficiency they happen to be running at for the task they're doing.
3) Probably most importantly, when cars stop using fossil fuel and start using electricity, they're able to use any sort of power source out there as long as it can be converted to electricity. As our central generators become greener, so do our cars. Automatically. Think of it like software: Why duplicate the "convert resources into usable energy" functionality when you can put it in a centralized place that can be upgraded without disturbing the rest of the system? Electric cars are the reusable code of the automotive world. Whatever your infrastructure, they can tap in to it as long as you can give them the electricity they need.
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Re:Please explain (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you buy a household generator for your electricity generating needs?
Exact same reasoning applies, both pro and con. The determents to an all-electric car are battery weight and battery cost, not electricity generation.
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Hybrid is a misnomer (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, you put gas in the tank, and the engine will charge the battery, or you could put gas in the tank and drive it up a hill and brake all the way down. Either way it is powered by gasoline.
Re:Hybrid is a misnomer (Score:4, Informative)
In the end, you are correct in that all the energy ultimately comes from burning gasoline, but it's more efficient in the use of that energy. Consider a straight gas-powered car. It burns fuel to go up the hill, and you burn fuel coming down. You dissipate energy coming to a stop by turning motion into heat by the brakes. You burn fuel accelerating, cruising, stopping, or sitting idle. None of that energy is recovered
A hybrid will burn fuel going up hill, but then can recover some of that energy going back downhill for later use. The battery helps get the car up to speed when accelerating, periodically when cruising (sometimes taking over completely and allowing the engine to completely stop turning) and stores some of the recovered energy when stopping. Sitting idle at a stoplight or in traffic, and the engine shuts doen entirely.
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Re:Why the Prius?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why the Prius?? (Score:4, Informative)
One of the reasons the Prius looks the way it does (and has the tiny wheels it has) is because the engineers designing the Prius wanted to maximize fuel efficiency. To do that, they gave it an aerodynamic shape and low-rolling-resistance tires, etc etc. You may think it's ugly, but it looks like it does for a reason. (Personally, I think it looks pretty cool).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nimh batteries would be a more cost effective option, and Toyota used them in it's all electric Rav4. Sadly, Chevron now owns the patents and won't let the technology back on the market -- http://www.ev1.org/chevron.htm [ev1.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As for hybrids - I agree that they are not the long term solution, but they can be a positive force. I get 60mpg in mine, and have since 2000. Trip
Re:More Smug to come (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't reduce my environmental impact or foreign fuel usage to zero, but I try to lessen it, and I buy products like the Prius to vote with my dollars for technology that can lead in that direction. I don't expect anyone else to follow suit unless they want to.
Could it be that some people just like to insult other people's actions without understanding them?
I saw the South Park episode, by the way, and it's great. It even recognizes, unlike you, that hybrids can be a good thing if people aren't assholes about it. The show wasn't about hybrids, it was about people thinking their better than others without cause, kind of like you're doing with your post here.
Cheers.
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