Toyota Unveils Plug-in Hybrid Prius 555
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.'"
Before it is asked... (Score:1, Informative)
-SenatorPerry
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.
Re:8 miles? (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps they're not as good at this as they are at fuel based systems, because some people [teslamotors.com] have done a lot better. Apparently, Toyota needs a little schooling.
Tesla Roadster (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php [teslamotors.com]
100% Electric
0-60 in ~4 seconds
135 mpg equiv
Over 200 miles per charge
Less than 2 cents per mile
Now if they could get the price of this down to a reasonable level like a Honda Civic I'd buy it...and a buncha other people would too I'm sure. This would be an IDEAL car for me
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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.
Here you go... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Electric%20Cars%20and%
Re:why wasn't the original plug in? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Crusing Range (Score:2, Informative)
Besides, while TFA doesn't explicitly state this in the first couple paragraphs or what I skimmed, there's no way that this is running JUST on electricity. I don't think there's a person in the world who would spend $25K or whatever (number pulled out of ass) on a car that they can only go 8 miles. (Well, maybe Bill Gates.) It's a typical gas-electric hybrid, but where you can charge the battery externally then use it to go 8 miles. After your battery runs down, the gas will kick in as normal.
But for your short trips around town, you'll still use the gas engine much less, so it could still be worth it.
Re:Please explain (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:8 miles? (Score:3, Informative)
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).
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.
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?
Re:8 miles? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Please explain (Score:3, Informative)
Sure. But those numbers have to be filtered through things like efficiency and how, practically speaking, one can distribute the energy storage system. You definitely don't want your gas tank under your seat. Batteries, not such a problem. Ultracaps, no problem, they're very safe (much safer and less toxic than batteries.) But we begin by asking, can a gasoline engine recover all that energy? The answer is no. Internal combustion engines are about 25% efficient. So, of that hypothetical 10k difference, you can only recover 2500. Not that this will help you when gasoline is too expensive and rare to buy, but that's another issue entirely. But again, this is energy density, not energy availability. Your gas tank takes up a relatively small amount of volume in your vehicle. This is because of that high energy density, essentially; a small amount of gas can get you 300 miles, and that's near the benchmark for a passenger car. So the question becomes, what does it take to get you 300 miles with electric? Because the answer to that question is the answer to your legroom issue.
Turns out, it's not too bad. Look at the Tesla (forget the price - look at the design.) Also remember we're not quite where we want to be yet. But anyway, the Tesla can deliver a 200 mile range (essentially 66% of what we'd like to see) with 450 kg of batteries. A gallon of gasoline is about six pounds. If your car gets 30 MPG, then it takes ten gallons to go three hundred miles. So we're talking about sixty pounds of gasoline. 60 pounds is about 27 kg.
So 27 kg gets you 300 miles with gas, and 450 kg gets you 200 with LI batteries. That's a 2/3rds difference in range, so we'll factor by .66 (or 1/x = 1.5); 450/27 is 16x, and 1.5x that is 25x. So in terms of mass, we're looking at a factor of 25 - not 2500. But keep in mind that batteries are a lot denser than gasoline is, so in terms of volume, we're not looking at 25x, but somewhat less. Don't have numbers on this, but we can hand-wave at least to the degree that the volume requirements are less than a factor of 25.
The Tesla delivers a comparable fuel efficiency of 100 MPG in terms of electrical costs (at retail.) Tesla is good for about 135 MPH, though just like an internal combustion engine, if you drive like that, you won't get a 200 mile range. The Tesla is a 2-person car, and your 30 MPG thing is probably a sedan and good for maybe 100 MPH before it catches fire (but again, you put four people in there, you won't get 30 MPG or 300 miles or go 100 MPH.) How come this isn't different by a factor of 2500? It is because the electrical motors are considerably more efficient, and they don't waste energy the way an IC engine does; the torque and power curves of an electric motor are things of beauty, while an IC engine has narrow peaks you keep having to shift gears to stay in (or your car does, if it is an automatic.) So the electrical motor is always about 85% efficient; the IC engine is only running at its (pitiful) 25% when it is in the right part of the curve. In town, this *really* sucks. On the highway, not so much. You've probably noticed a heck of a difference between in town and on the road mileage; that's essentially why.
But. The Tesla uses LI batteries. According to EEStor, ultracap systems will become available this year that deliver a performance advantage of 280/120 or 2.3 times over LI batteries. So either the weight will come down to 195 kg, leaving you considerably more leg room, or the range will go up to 466 miles, or there could be a compromise between the two. But wait, there's more! Because you're switching from batteries to ultracaps, you'll also get a better recharge, because batteries can't absorb regenerative braking energy and ultracaps can, plus if you'd like (and if they give you really good motors and controllers) you should be able to hit 200 MPH or ma
Not all countries are as backwards as the US (Score:1, Informative)
In china they plan to build a thousand nuclear reactors until 2050, they will probably also have a better nuclear-to-fossil fuel ratio at that time than the USA.
I think it really is time for the US to start building a lot of nuclear power plants and replace all your dirty coal and oil fired plants.
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
Batteries aren't good enough (Score:3, Informative)
Something like 95% conversion efficiency is routine for electric motors/generators, between electrical and mechanical energy. If you are deliberately designing a short-range vehical, then flywheels can fill the bill MUCH better than batteries. They even weigh less, too.
Re:Hmm... (Score:1, Informative)
Um, because it is a hybrid [japancorp.net], not a pure electric?
Re:Please explain (Score:3, Informative)
But solar still isn't contributing as much as wind, and wind isn't contributing much yet.
But have a look at: http://www.skywindpower.com/ww/index.htm [skywindpower.com]
I'm really surprised that I'm nearing more about high altitude wind power research. This approach sounds as if it could outperform solar by an enormous margin, if you look at fixed infrastructure costs. These people are talking as low as 2 cents per kWh. The whole site is only a dozen or so pages, and worth a read.
It seems much more doable than covering vast regions of desert with solar voltaics, at would would be enormous cost, even after economies of scale.