Modified Prius gets up to 180 Miles Per Gallon 907
shupp writes "The NY Times (free reg. required) reports in that some folks are not content with the no-plug-in rule that both Honda and Toyota endorse. By modifying a Prius so that it can be plugged in, Ron Gremban of CalCars states 'I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon'. The article also reports that 'EnergyCS, a small company that has collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 mpg, and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power.'"
Oil industry? (Score:2, Insightful)
Misleadning (Score:5, Insightful)
This is misleading. Is it 180mpg sustained? On a 10gal tank of gas, will it go 1800 miles??
Obviously not. Adding extra batteries and charging them up will let the car initially give better "mileage"; heck, in the first 20-30 miles it may give infinite mpg because it is not burning any fuel. But the true measure of mpg is sustained travel over a long distance under somewhat realistic conditions (like city driving or highway driving).
Bio-Diesel (Score:0, Insightful)
unfortunately (Score:2, Insightful)
this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misleadning (Score:2, Insightful)
Happy Late April Fools (Score:2, Insightful)
What they don't tell you (Score:5, Insightful)
And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit. We need real numbers to know if it is, and they are not given.
On the other hand... (Score:3, Insightful)
What is the cost of disposing of the batteries once they have become unusable (which they will)?
How much additional energy (regardless of source) is consumed by hauling the substantial extra weight of the batteries?
Are the people who are doing this also pressing for more nuclear energy plants?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
The benefit of that is... (Score:5, Insightful)
So? You have limited emissions to a very few sources, instead of having to worry about tens of thousands of catalytic converters and pollution control systems. It is a lot easier to deal with one or very few sources.
total energy cost (Score:2, Insightful)
The market doesn't care about you. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oil industry? (Score:1, Insightful)
So much for capitalism spurring innovation, eh?
Re:I own a prius, so don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. They're taking advantage of a second energy supply and only claiming the cost of the first.
In order to normalize the figures, you need a common divisor. As you suggested, money sounds like a good idea to me. I use 91 octane from the station around the corner in my Honda Nighthawk motorcycle. I get about 45mpg. The price I pay is $2.61/gal (California!), which comes to about 6 cents spent on fuel per mile travelled. If you're getting 60mpg, you're at about 4.5 cents per mile.
We need one other number to compare these modified Prius's: the change in size of the energy bill. We could get by with off-peak rates from the CPUC and a miles/kWh figure for the Prius when only using battery power.
Anyone?
Regards,
Ross
This doesn't help the environment, though. (Score:3, Insightful)
The Japanese are leaving us! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Words words words.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:total energy cost (Score:3, Insightful)
The other beauty of electric propulsion is that for stop-and-go traffic in the city, the motor draws power only when it's in use. There's no idling at the stop light...
Electric power != mpg (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course I didn't RTFA, that's cheating.
Re:unfortunately (Score:3, Insightful)
Hybrids are nice... but they are only a TINY stepping stone. And NOTHING near a solution that will lower the dependance on gasoline.
Fule Cell cars are where the technology is going towards, and hopefully in 10 years will be economical enough to be mass produced.
Re:Oil industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My car... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oil industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
A MazdaSpeed Protege will sprint to 60 in 6.9 seconds, gets 30 miles to the gallon on the highway, and does this with a 2.0L engine. It's hard to say that's not relatively 'beefy.'
It's a bit of an extreme example, sure, but the H2 which seems to be selling like mad is just as extreme in the other direction - you'd be amazingly lucky to see 60 inside of 9 seconds, while burning up over twice as much fuel.
I think saying that Americans have an obsession with power is a bit of a cop out. It's an obsession with size, plain and simple.
Re:this is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO it's just as idiotic to assume that producing electric power at a centralized power plant is less cost-efficient than producing power in thousands of individual gasoline motors.
Re:Oil industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't spell nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or better. It is a definite improvement to replace thousands (millions) of smokestacks, one on every car, with just a few (the ones on the power plants).
Re:Oil industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it COULD be, but in most cases isn't. In fact, there's a pretty solid percentage of North America that still runs on coal, while is not as bad as it used to be but still pretty dirty.
As far as nuclear power goes, I wonder what's better, relying on oil or nuclear power? My point was: The 100MPG they claimed did not take into account that they were using utility power which needs to be converted in some way and more likely than not is not solar or geothermal.
Re:About bloody time! (Score:3, Insightful)
So if it costs $20 worth of electricity to get all that extra 'mileage per gallon', but only $15 worth of gasoline to get the extra distance, wouldn't it make more sense just to fuel?
The point of a hybrid is simply to get more out of the energy we put in. The problem isn't combustion engines; its that the engines are notoriously inefficient as far as how much useable energy you get. The regenerative braking and electric motor from the alternator are ways to capture unused energy from the combustion. Then we up the efficiency.
The eventual goal, regardless of the source of the energy, is to put to use a greater percentage of the energy. So if we use a gallon of gas or a gallon of hydrogen, we want to get as much of the potential energy that exists in the materials as possible. That's what hybrids do. Adding two different fuel sources and just filling them seperately doesn't bring us any closer to that goal.
Is this energy-efficient? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are hybrid cars saving anything to society? Are they saving any money to the driver?
Re:Economies of scale (Score:4, Insightful)
A coal fired plant is typically 27% efficient, and there are distribution inefficiencies on top of that. (There are also distribution inefficiencies for gasoline, admittedly).
You need to examine what is known as 'well to wheel' efficiency to make a rational comparison, overall I think you'll find there is very little in it.
Re:Plug in.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Misleadning (Score:5, Insightful)
Emmissions are confined to a single source, the electric company can product power cheaper and more efficiently than most consumer vehicles, and when the power plant changes to fusion or another alternative fuel source, the car doesn't have to do anything different.
Re:Misleadning (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahhh...so you'll be asking your boss to provide power for your car. Wish we could all get that good a deal.
Everything is 'free' if someone else is picking up the bill.
Re:Two beds (Score:5, Insightful)
Then put it in the air.
If you live next to a coal powerplant, you're getting much more radiation exposure than if you lived next to a nuclear plant (assuming both are in compliance with regulations)
=Smidge=
Re:Two beds (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. That's a great argument.
Of course, in the REAL WORLD, we don't sleep over nuclear waste. Oh, and in the REAL WORLD, coal emissions end up in the air we breathe.
So, here's a choice: we produce a small amount of nuclear waste - waste that is disposed of away from humans and in a safe manner - or - we produce a large quantity of pollution and dump it into the atmosphere.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but there are regulations and procedures in place to ensure its safe disposal.
With coal power, production by-products are simply dumped into the air. Yes, there are regulations, but as long as we are burning fossil fuels, there will always be substantial emissions.
Re:Two beds (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Plug in.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The relative lack of innovation in car power plant and energy technology over the last 100 years is really a dark spot on the auto industry IMHO--that we're still burning that much fossil fuel to get individuals from point A to point B, with consequences to our health and national security increasing with each barrel of oil we import, shows how skewed our priorities have been as a nation and world. A little money and foresight decades ago could have made today's world much better. And some money and effort today can make tomorrow's world more sustainable as well, let's not forget that.
Re:Two beds (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest surprise... (Score:2, Insightful)
The Prius was featured on the BBC's Top Gear program recently here in the UK and the general gist of the review as far as I remember was "why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?".
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
Re:Two beds (Score:5, Insightful)
As for radiation, coal fired power plants typically emit more radiation than nuclear power plants. For that matter, some sources of uranium are actually coal. (note: might be thorium, its been a few years since I was active in nuclear energy). In addition you have heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. Not only are they in the coal ash, they get into the air. On top of this are the sulfer dioxides, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, fly ash, etc, etc. Nuclear waste is no day at the beach, but coal is no picnic either. And remember, in between 300 and 1200 years the radioactive waste will be less toxic than the ore it came from (depending on which way you measure toxicity). A million years from now the arsnic and mercury in coal ash will be just as toxic.
Re:Don't forget to tweak your own ride (Score:4, Insightful)
So, you seem to be writing complete rubbish in an authoritative style.
Re:The benefit of that is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
Boo-hoo.
What really irks me about industries dying is when radical changes occur because of it. In Oregon, for example, you have to pay more to register your hybrid car. Why? Because they tax the shit out of gas. More hybrids means less tax revenue.
Okay, that's not the oil industry's fault, but it still bugs me. Frankly, I do think that it's not going anywhere anytime soon. They'll lower prices when demand goes down. They'll shrink. They'll find new ways to make their oil interesting. But I doubt it'll actually die quickly. Heck, they'll probably try to get legislation in place to secure their business.
That's nice but uh. (Score:3, Insightful)
I dislike the oil industry quite a lot, but this sort of thing isn't a solution to our problems at all. Thanks for nothing, fellas!
Re:Misleadning (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, and... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two beds (Score:1, Insightful)
And with wind, spoiled rich people don't wind turbines spoiling their view.
And with Solar, cuurent panels lose 50% of their effectiveness after 20 to 25 years. And then there will be disposal issues.
And Hydrogen harms the Ozone.
And..And..
What the heck ever happend to Fusion, I heard that the experiments done by those Utah fellows have actually been reproduced and there might something to it after all.
Re:Two beds (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to read up on what actually happened before you start spouting Chernobyl as an example.
Not only are US nuclear reactors are significantly safer than Chernobyl could have even dreamt of being, but the majority of fault with Chernobyl was because of human stupidy.
I say stupidity instead of error because there was a lot more than one problem and many of them were done intentionally. They were doing things they shouldn't have been doing to the reactor and when things went wrong they didn't do what they were supposed to do to fix the problem. A lot of the casualties were caused because they didn't follow the clean up procedures we would be following today.
Claiming US nuclear power plants are unsafe because of what happened in Chernobyl is foolish at best.
Re:Oil industry? (Score:3, Insightful)
A significant plus for electricity is that it is cleaner at the point of consumption. Even if the electricity is generated by burning oil, burning the oil in one place to make electricity to distribute to thousands of people means you have a single place where you can apply all your pollution control, as opposed to having thousands of people burn that oil, requiring pollution control at thousands of places.
Re:Economies of scale (Score:2, Insightful)
No one cares. Power is not priced based on how much of the original product that could have been turned into electricity was turned into electricity. It's based on, duh, how much it costs to make and get it to you.
In addition to cost, we should also look at 'pollution', which also is completely unrelated to efficiency, and isn't even scalar...it's a bunch of different things. Coal and nuclear result in total different byproducts that are handled in different ways.
And to further confuse the issue, some things don't pollute, like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but they can have an effect on the nearby enviroment, by, for example, stopping fish movements. These effects tend to be extremely limited in range, but people need to know of them.
In additions, there are a relative dangers of different kinds of power productions. Coal mining accidents, for example.
In the real world, 'efficiency' is vaguely useful when you need to know the maximum amount of energy a new process can produce. That's about it. Gasoline engines might be more efficient than coal power plants, (I'm honestly confused as to why anyone would compare it just to coal, we're hydroelectric throughout most of Georgia.), but that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
Re:Electric Power ain't the answer (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear this argument all the time. But what the people that say it fail to realize is that it is much easier to increase the efficiency and lower the pollutants of 1 large power plant, than to do the same to 1000s of mini power plants(cars).
electric economics, coal, Re:Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
Even better if you can get permission to use "off peak" (if they have that in your part of the world).
Starting up and shutting down coal-fired generators is quite expensive/uneconomical, so to reduce starts and stops you can have hot water, and perhaps heat banks, running "off peak"; the electric company can turn it on when it suits them to manage their load.
Further, some hydro schemes generate in peak times and pump the water back again off-peak; the losses involved are less than the cost of firing the coal plants up and down.
If you're going to carry power in batteries, you may as well plug them in when you can.
Re:Two beds (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a tough question. There are multiple types of radiation and multiple types of exposure, and multiple factors in determining risk for each of those types of exposure.
The worst types of exposure are when the radioactive elements end up locked in your body (such as iodine, strontium, etc). When the quantities of the elements that stay in your body for long periods are essentially gone, the risk of the waste is greatly reduced. Alpha emitters are rarely a problem (U238, for example) unless consumed in significant quantity. Beta, gamma, and neutron emitters are worse.
Then, there is the issue of how you get exposed. Some things are at greatest risk of being kicked up as dust and inhaled. Others are at risk for being ingested from water, or locally grown plants. In the area around Chernobyl, for example, the radiation level is many times higher off of the roads than on the roads; rain has cleaned most material off the roads, but it has become locked up in the soil and plants nearby.
In short, there's no easy answer for how much risk there is after a given amount of time. The best you can do is "rough estimates". The "rough estimates" I've seen for Chernobyl, for example, range from 200 to 500 years. What about an accident at Yucca Mountain? Well, if someone set off an atomic bomb in there and blew everything into the atmosphere (once it is filled), the damage would make Chernobyl look like a transmission fluid leak by comparison. Chernobyl had one plant's worth of partially spent fuel; this is to be the completely spent fuel, of many cycles, from every plant in the US. On the other hand, if the accident is, say, slow leaching into the groundwater, it's hard to say exactly what the effects on people, if any, there would be. It all depends on the type of exposure.
Improved batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've got a battery that can get you 30 miles on a charge... you can still get pretty far by going with mixed gas/battery power. If you plug it in, well you can go 30 miles...
If you plug it in, you get better "milage" as it were because you're depending on gas less to charge the battery, but you're limited to 30 miles range before you start hitting the ol' fossil fuel again
Now, if you get a better battery in the future that can get you, say 100 miles.... you could probably go farther or get better milage mixing gas/battery driving yes, or you could get excellent milage with a change+go strategy so long as your target is within the 100 mile range.
So really, your milage depends on 3 factors:
a) How far you need to go between charges
b) How far a battery charge will take you
c) Whether you mix 'n match battery/gas power, or just plug 'er in at stops.
Re:Two beds (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact is, not making a decision on nuclear waste IS making a decision - to leave the waste sitting distributed throughout cooling ponds all over the country, building up continuously as they wait for the federal government to build them the containment vessel that was promised to them years ago.
Re:Misleadning (Score:3, Insightful)
Electricity won't be 6 cents/kwh once everyone starts running their cars with it. Nor would gas stay at $4.50.
Re:Park and charge (Score:1, Insightful)
But, what about the transmission losses thru the power lines?
We,d need those figures as well.
Re:Oil is FAR worse than Nuclear power! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On Discovery Channel last night.... (Score:3, Insightful)
is NOT a subsidy (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you mean to say "only large SUV"? Small ones like jeeps are not that much heavier than cars: and might in fact be lighter.
Also, how much more damage do the big ones cause compared to cars? If it is twice as much damage, then the SUV owner might very well already be paying for it: if it gets half the gas mileage of the car, the SUV owner is paying twice as much in taxes.
"If SUVs paid tax according to the damage they caused, it would be over $10 a gallon to fuel one."
You really need to look up what subsidy means. A subsidy is a cash grant. When the government robs you less, it is not a gift of money. It is your money in the first place. Not a single cent of money earned is a subsidy; a gift from someone else. Even if the government decided "no taxes on SUV owners", not a single cent would have been given to them in the form of a subsidy.
Re:That's nice but uh. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sick of hearing this incredibly ridiculous claim.
Power plants are FAR more fuel-effecient and evironmentally friendly than the engine in your car. Even if ALL of your electricity was being generated by burning oil, you're comming out way ahead because car engines are vastly ineffecient.
There is nothing wrong with burning coal either. No wars for coal, because there is a lot of it domestically available. The only problem right now, is the EPA's very loose regulations on mercury emissions. Once that gets straightened out, coal will be preferable to oil.
Now, besides that, the fact of the matter is that the majority of electricity comes from much cleaner sources. Nuclear power plants are very clean, and produce huge ammount of power. The USA hasn't built any new nuclear power plants in about 30 years, and today they account for much of the electricity produced in this country.
Hydro-electric power is used extensively. I recently heard the statistic that 30% of California's electricity is produced by hydro-electric plants. No oil-burning there.
There are also the solar power plants, photovoltaic arrays, glass chimneys, etc. As well as huge fields of wind turbines, which are getting almost to the point of being entirely economical.
And last but not least, most of the electric power plants built in the past several years have been designed to burn natural gas, not oil or coal, so they are about as clean as you can get.
Now, where you are, what time it is, etc., all determines how much pollution is being made for that electricity you are drawing from the wall. Even in the absolute worst cases, an electric car causes FAR less pollution than a gasoline internal combustion vehicle.
Now, I would like to ask everyone to stop spreading bullshit like this around, unless you work for the oil companies, or can provide some real factual data, because claims like yours don't even pass the laugh test...