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.'"
Re:Oil industry? (Score:4, Interesting)
I own a prius, so don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how the $/mile stack up to see whether or not a plugged in prius can be more efficient in terms of cost.
This reminds me of tuner shops .... (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of the tuner shops like shelby and such setting new standards for then detroit.
well with gas at $2.45 a gallon (southern cali) news like this is welcomed. I can't wait for the day when tuner shops specialize in modifying hybrids for longer range. the new ford cotsworth 80 mpg woot woot
About bloody time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, okay, "free" in the sense that I've already paid for the solar setup -- but with oil prices rising, I suspect charging a car from my solar cells would make them pay for themselves a couple years ahead of schedule.
States need taxes from gas (Score:1, Interesting)
California is already suggesting taxing by the mile rather by the gallon as there revenue decreases from these energy efficient cars.
Maybe this is why they have the no plug in rule? It would be much more difficult to tax by the mile when you could charge up anywhere.
Cost goes UP! (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of you who say "fuel savings at any cost" consider that most of the california electricity is generated by burning natural gas, and that there are considerable losses involved in generating and transmitting the electricity.
Nothing to see here at the moment. Wait until the price of gas goes to $5.00 and then buy some solar panels to charge your car (or at least net-meter your electricity).
Re:Misleadning (Score:5, Interesting)
And your grid electricity consumption goes way, way up.
Tradeoffs.
On Discovery Channel last night.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is really interesting. The technology is out now. And, AFAIK, this form of transportation is emmissionless.
Just as a curiosity, though, why type of hybrid technologies do we have for *airplanes*. Our economy relies so heavily on planes that we need to find alternatives. IANA-Engineer, but I doubt a 747 would run on solar.
Re:Misleadning (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Words words words.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Park and charge (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though. I'm not trying to sound like I'm flaming you. I do think it would be great to just pull into your spot, attach the wire, and head in. But, ertainly someone has to foot the bill for such a system, which I think would be quite expensive not only to implement but to provide energy for.
So.. Who pays and how? Maybe coin op like parking meters?
Pure Electric is Close (Score:5, Interesting)
How? Off peak power now at night (when stationary power plants would love to sell you power) is $.03-$.04 per KWHr, versus about $.40/kwhr for gasoline.
Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) received 2 patents on a way to make Li-ion batteries that charge in minutes and hold 3 times the charge in January 2005, and Fujitsu just announced they will start shipping batteries probably licensed under this patent in 2006.
All-electric cars are FAR FAR closer to practicality than people think because of these dramatic technology breaththroughs.
Re:total energy cost (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:On Discovery Channel last night.... (Score:3, Interesting)
You certainly are no engineer. You may not be very bright, either. I did a quick google on '777 seating capacity' to start thinking about your querry. One of the first page links takes me to the following page: http://www.aua.com/at/eng/Austrian/Fleet/boeing+7
Wow, that seems to have just about all the specs we need. The 777 burns 6,000 Kg/Hr worst case. It carries 344 passengers max and 17 crew. It can travel 940 Km/Hr. It has a max range of 11,000Km.
Lets do some back-of-the-napkin rough math. Say that the 777 takes a 940Km hop with full passenter load just to make the maths easy. That is a 1 hour hop. Lets add 20 minutes for flying the departure, approach, and taxiing. We'll overstate the fuel burn because taxiing doesnt burn 6,000Kg/hr, but oh well.
In 1 hour and 20 minutes we'll burn roughly 8000Kg of jet fuel. Just for sake of my sanity, I'll convert that to lbs. The burn is 13227 lbs of fuel. I recall that JetA is roughly 6.5 Lbs/Gallon. So we'll burn 2035 gallons of fuel during our little jaunt. Now remember that we carried 361 people 584 miles on 2035 gallons. Thats 210824 passenger miles on 2035 gallons, or roughly 104 miles per gallon per passenger.
In the US, nearly all flights are longer than 600 miles, so these numbers would be better as the longer you fly at cruise the better the number would be.
Still think that Jets are abysmal in terms of fuel consumption? What we should be doing is upgrading all of the old jets to the newer, more efficient boeing and airbus designs and retiring the old pigs.
Re:Electric power != mpg (Score:4, Interesting)
I find this "hacking" of the Prius really exciting, and a good protent for the future. If anything, toyota should spin this into a sales pitch:
"Buy a Prius and get 60mpg right out of the gate. But if you would like to save even more on gas, get the Prius Extension Kit for $49.95 and draw electricity form your home to your Prius, doubling the car's mileage."
"But wait - there's MORE! with the Prius Pro Developers Kit, you can swap out the batteries for other even more powerful batteries, and not just doubling your mileage, but TRIPLLING your mileage!"
"Why WAIT? Call Now! Operators Are Standing By!"
Seriously: just like ever punk ass kid can dope up his Honda Civic lifback into a firebreathing psych machine, you should be able to totally juice the crap out of a Prius.
this is the kind of technology that was envisioned years ago by the Rocky Mountian Institute's notions of a hypercar. [rmi.org]
I want one of those...
RS
Public impression? (Score:3, Interesting)
The hybrid concept is great, but I imagine manufacturers wanted to distance it from the pure-electric cars. A lot of people would have assumed that if a car had a power cord, it would have the same problems as the pure-electric systems.
So instead, you expose people to gasoline-only cars with relatively high gas-milages. Later on, once people have accepted that these new things work well enough, you can add a power cord. And even market it as "New and Improved!"
Basically, you don't want the public to assume that the power cord limits where you can go with it.
Re:Plug in.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It costs about $1,800 more to get the Diesel. I've started keeping track of my KM travelled and how much it costs vs. a gasoline car and so far I've saved myself $126.42 with my diesel
But, even better and more important to me is that I'm using less fuel, and using less fuel more efficiently, which is producing less pollutants and emissions. Not to mention the fact that making diesel uses less energy (less refining needed) than gasoline.
So, even though it costs more money to buy a diesel, I was willing (And continue to be willing) to pay a little more to make a little less pollution.
Reading life after the oil crash really helped change my mentality about fuel and energy use. Shifting my energy use to more electricity and less fossil fuels means that, while I'm still using energy, I'm using a cleaner source of it. A lot of the power in SW Ontario comes from either Hydroelectricty or Nuclear power which is considerably cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I guess it all comes down to how much you'd change your lifestyle to help cut back on energy use, and how much of your own money you'd spend to do it.
Re:Words words words.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on the definition, but generally, no, IQ does not have a definitional upper limit.
Some of the earlier tests couldn't measure above 150, which represented a "perfect" score - That doesn't mean that, given a group of people with perfect scores on such a test, you couldn't measure differences in their level of cognitive ability... You just couldn't do it with that particular test.
Most IQ tests now treat IQ as a distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. So, although you would very rarely see someone ranking seven or more SD from the mean, it can happen.
The Barnes & Noble "Take the MENSA IQ challenge today!" books, however, will not suffice to measure such an exceedingly rare trait. But if you had that "problem", you wouldn't have posted your claim in the first place.
Re:Words words words.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Flywheels might be good for that job, but even then only as a temporary storage medium before putting it into the battery. A large flywheel causes a lot of problems, not the least of which is the fact that it is heavy. If you can come up with batteries that will do the job, it's better to use the motor/generators and batteries that are already in the car, and skip the flywheel. On the other hand, I'm of the mind that a TDI (preferably running an alternative fuel like that water/binder-of-some-sort/naptha stuff) is a better solution, because you only need the ICE and not the batteries, motors, et cetera. If fuel cells were more economical then I'd like to see electric cars with regenerative fuel cells and some capacitors or high-current batteries for short-term storage, because that would be even simpler, and simple is good.
Re:Cost goes UP! (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing you left out is that automotive internal combustion engines typically have an efficiency of somewhere around 20%. I hope that the charger + batteries + electric motor have a better effeciency that than. I'll pull a number out of the air and say that 40% of the energy supplied to the charger will eventually show up in the energy supplied by the output shaft of the motor. Using these numbers, one gallon of gasoline will give you 6.6kWh at the engine output. Using 40% efficiency of the electric system, you need to purchase 16.5kWh of electricity to provide the same 6.6kWh at the motor output. Using your rates, this ends up being about $1.98 for the same amount of energy as produced by a gallon of gasoline in the engine.
The good news is that not everybody has to pay that much for electricity. Where I live, I only pay about $0.07/kWh. This means that I can buy a gallon's worth of electricity for $1.16, or about half what I paid today for gasoline.
It gets better, though. The power company could charge a different rate for EV battery charging, with the stipulation (enforced at the meter) that current only be drawn during off-peak hours. Or, they could set-up an 'auction' system where I plug my car in and say how much I'm willing to pay to charge my car tonight. My charger will be supplied with power only when rates drop below my price. If I still have 80% of my range unused, I'd only be willing to pay a low price. If I only have 20% of my range remaining, I'll pay a higher price. If I really need to charge the car now, I'll plug it into a standard outlet.
One other thing: When it comes to charging a battery, there isn't anything magical about 120/240VAC @ 50/60Hz. It's entirely possible that the power company could provide a seperate, lower quality of service, line for battery charging and simialr uses where the voltage and frequency could vary +/-30% without breaking anything. The same logic means it should be easier to charge your EV from off-grid sources than to power your house from an off-grid source.
Re:Pure Electric is Close - yeah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)
First "Altair Nanotechnologies" basically makes specialty powders for surface chemistry applications. Calling this "nanotechnology" is a stretch. What they actually do, as a business, is make titanium dioxide powder, the pigment used in white paint. Read their 10-K filing [10kwizard.com], which is more honest than the press releases they put out.
Altair claims to be working with the "Energy Storage Research Group" at Rutgers University. That did exist, and, sadly, it's one of the leftover bits of what was once Bell Labs. But what's left of it, at Rutgers, doesn't seem to be doing anything in this area. They're concentrating on capacitors and on hydrogen storage. [rutgers.edu] The Rutgers articles on battery technology seem to stop around 2003.
If you look really hard, you can finally find the technical paper [mphasetech.com] on this. It's from mPhase. They're actually trying to make the battery. But what they say they're doing is building a battery with a very long shelf life for use as a backup power source in telecom gear. That's useful, especiallly since mPhase makes DSL gear for telecom carriers. There's gear out on poles that needs some backup power capability, and most existing batteries don't last long enough to be useful in that environment.
But this is a long way from Electric Cars Real Soon Now.
A little math (Score:2, Interesting)
On the third hand, if you look at a list of countries we (or anyone else) buy oil from, you'll see quite a few who we don't neccessarily want to be flooding with hard currency. Perhaps it's worth some sacrifice (though not neccessarily $3000) to try reign in that cashflow.
Where to put nuclear waste (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oil industry? (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, the Toyota execs have it exactly backwards. If it's LiIon, it should make no difference, AFAIK. So unless they're using NiCd batteries or something.... :-D
Re:Always somebody naysaying (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I think you are underplaying the impact of hydro. One study reported in new scientist looked at the environmental impact of flooding areas to provide electricity. The areas flooded upstream of the generators decompose underwater and release large amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This has not been factored into the "green" calculations for most hydro stations.
Not that I'm against removing our dependence on fossil fuels - the future of humanity will depend on it (its just a question of when).
But the alternatives have to be looked at closely. Much as the current green movement doesn't like it, nuclear power is one of the cleaner short term options for power until we get true large scale renewable power available.
My 2c
Michael
Re:Plug in.... (Score:1, Interesting)