Plug-In Hybrids Aren't Coming, They're Here 495
Wired is running a story about the small but vocal, and growing, number of people who aren't waiting for automakers to deliver plug-in hybrids. They're shelling out big money to have already thrifty cars converted into full-on plug-in hybrids capable of triple-digit fuel economy. "The conversions aren't cheap, and top-of-the-line kits with lithium-ion batteries can set you back as much as $35,000. Even a kit with lead-acid batteries — the type under the hood of the car you drive now — starts at five grand. That explains why most converted plug-ins are in the motor pools of places like Southern California Edison... No more than 150 or so belong to people like [extreme skiing champion Alison] Gannett, who had her $30,000 Ford Escape converted in December. Yes, that's right. The conversion cost more than the truck."
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
That depends on how you measure efficiency.
In this case:
(electric+petrol) miles / (petrol only) gallons
The electric efficiency is being ignored completely, and the miles driven on electric power are being used to massively inflate the petrol efficiency.
Automakers never want hybrids to go mainstream (Score:5, Informative)
From a previous article:
"Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/02/210250 [slashdot.org]
translated (directly from the accounting department): "We have run the numbers, and the industry is set to lose X billions of dollars through lost part sales over the coming decades as the masses step from hybrids to full electric for that around-town runner.
No, we never want to help or see hybrids go mainstream, ever. Keep it all business as usual: hard to maintain combustion engines are expensive for the consumer and good for our bottom line. Furthermore, it essentially costs us nothing to FREELOAD the longer term consequences of combustion engines onto the environment and society as a whole, so it is a sound short term strategy to satisfy our immediate obligations to investors."
Re:Whole lot of stupidity (Score:4, Informative)
You are entirely right. A hybrid car makes absolutely NO sense whatsoever. Todays hybrids basically use a big gas motor and an electric motor to help go easier on the gas. The problem with this method is that its carrying TWO BIG ENGINES so more weight means you have to be that much more efficient. If you want to help save the environment you'd build a fully electric car but the problem with that is electric motors are retardedly simple and surprisingly clean to maintain (only a little grease/oil on the moving parts).
The idea behind plug-in hybrids is to make the electric motor the big engine and have a small gasoline motor who's only job is to charge the batteries when they get low. This makes a bit more sense than the current hybrid model does as your primary source of 'fuel' is your batteries. If you don't go very far like what is it 60-80 miles a day you probably don't need an Internal Combustion Engine in the first place. Electric cars have a 60-80 mile range currently and that pretty much covers your typical urbanites driving habits well enough. A plug-in hybrid with a gasoline engine for recharging purposes would be more than enough for anyone except for long haul trips for those things like gasoline and possibly hydrogen or biodiesel in the coming years might be popular for road trips.
Crash testing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Automakers never want hybrids to go mainstream (Score:5, Informative)
If I had $109k... Tesla Motors Roadster [teslamotors.com].
Oh BTW, Tesla Motors is also planning on a 'family' type car in the $50k range soon if I remember one of their press releases correctly. Thats getting pretty close to the sweet spot for people to buy into electric car technology. As the price of oil and gasoline keeps going up, it will make more and more sense to buy a slightly more expensive car that you can fill up the charge on for a measly 12 cents.
All they need to do is use a less powerful engine that gets the 'family' type car to 80 MPH instead of the 125 MPH the Roadster gets to cut a portion of the costs.
Re:Crash testing (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't a one off conversion by definition not a new model, I was under the impression crash tests are only performed on mass produced vehicles.
Anyhow atleast in Sweden all you'd most likely would have to do is to let a government mechanic go through your vehicle and approve it's safety(Which you have to do once a year either way).
Re:Efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
I would have thought a flatbed truck was the ideal starting point at th moment; batteries are still bulky, so just raising the bed of the truck by a foot to fit in a palette of batteries underneath seems like the best use of space.
TWO BIG ENGINES? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
"The problem with this method is that its carrying TWO BIG ENGINES so more weight means you have to be that much more efficient."
Think you'll not have to prove your point if you write BIG often enough, and CAPITALIZED, no less? Ah, well... Wiki says:
The Prius uses a 1.5 liter 4-cylinder "1NZ-FXE internal combustion engine (ICE) using the more efficient Atkinson cycle instead of the more powerful Otto cycle. Because of the availability of extra power from the electric motors for rapid acceleration the engine is sized SMALLER [all caps just for you] than usual for increased fuel efficiency and lowered emissions with acceptable acceleration."
Now, the Volt does what you propose, and uses the gasoline engine simply to recharge the batteries. As such, it should be much SMALLER. Let's see, it's... oh my, a 1.4 L 4-cylinder engine. Tenth of a liter difference? Doesn't sound that much smaller, now does it?
Huh. Well, also according to your theory the Prius is going to need a huge electric motor in addtion to the gas engine in order to cart around all of that extra weight. So... the Prius has a 30 kW (40 hp) electric motor, while the Volt, a pure series hybrid, has... a 111 kW (150 hp) electric motor.
Double huh.
See, the flaw in your reasoning lies in the fact that it takes X amount of power to propel a 2,000 lb vehicle at Y speed for Z distance. Once the battery gets low, the extra power in a PHEV has to come from somewhere. And it does, in the form of an engine powerful enough to recharge the battery while ALSO providing enough juice to keep things in motion.
Bottom line? A tensy, tiny 2-cycle lawnmower engine isn't going to cut it.
And the Volt needs an electric motor 3X larger because it's the only thing moving the car. The gasoline engine is just so much dead weight in that regard, UNLIKE in a Prius, where the engine can also kick in to help out when needed in a much more symbiotic relationship.
Re:Automakers never want hybrids to go mainstream (Score:5, Informative)
"Plug-in hybrid and full-electric will require some changes in the national electricity grid...."
Fewer than you might think. A recent DOE study indicated that we could swap out 84% of the vehicles currently on the road and replace them with PHEVs using the existing infrastructure.
A joke! (Score:4, Informative)
She's green? And drives an SUV by herself? Why does this make no sense?
What she is, would be non-petroleum - but not "green". So she uses coal instead of petroleum ... both are damaging to the environment, both are in limited supply.
I would think she could get a Focus, or even a bicycle, for much less the cost of the hybrid plug-in. And then, she would actually be conserving!
Not green ... just gullible. $35,000 gullible.
Throw out the transmission. (Score:3, Informative)
I read about an interesting hybrid concept a while ago - it basically eliminated the transmission from the car to save weight. The car would use the (small) gasoline engine to charge the battery and drive the electric motors as long as the car was going below the normal highway crusising speed, and engage a clutch to directly power the wheels with the gasoline engine once the crusing speed was reached. Advantages were the lack of a transmission (= weight and space that can be used for batteries instead) while still being able to power the wheels directly (making use of the efficiency of the gasoline engine when cruising).
Re:Automakers never want hybrids to go mainstream (Score:5, Informative)
You tow a generator. [evmaine.org]
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the oil that the U.S. consumes comes from the U.S., Canada and Mexico (Canada is our largest supplier by quite a bit); I don't think Canadians and Mexicans hate us, more just find us tiresome. Most of the rest of it comes from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, countries with which we have quite a bit of political friction, but I'm not sure that the people hate us (especially the majorities, there are certainly people in each country who are not USA #1 fan).
Source:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html [doe.gov]
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
That would be true if you were talking about gallons-per-mile figures. However, miles-per-gallon is different. A five-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency is, indeed, less in absolute terms if your fuel efficiency was already high.
To use the numbers given by the grandparent poster, the number of gallons used to drive 100 miles are:
20 mpg: 100 miles/20 mpg=5 gallons.
25 mpg: 100 miles/25 mpg=4 gallons.
Savings: 1 gallon.
50 mpg: 100 miles/50 mpg=2 gallons.
55 mpg: 100 miles/55 mpg=1.818 gallons.
Savings: 0.182 gallons.
The rest of the world tends to measure fuel efficiency as liters-per-100-kilometers for this reason.
Re:Automakers never want hybrids to go mainstream (Score:1, Informative)
The design power of the Tesla is a direct consequence of the range and the need to be able to absorb as much as possible the power returned by regenerative braking, and not so much the result of a desire to create a high performance car.
A decent range requires a large battery pack. A large battery pack automatically can deliver mucho power. At a 5C discharge / 2C charge a 40kWh battery pack can deliver 200kW effortlessly or absorb 80kW for a short time.
Braking a 1200kg car at 25m/s by 5m/s2 generates 150kW. If the engine or the battery pack are not up to task, energy is wasted and brake pads/disks are worn.
Drivetrain and batterywise, there is very little to reduce without compromising range and efficiency.
"off-peak" electricity production and transmission (Score:3, Informative)
"A new study for the Department of Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 70% percent of the U.S. light-duty vehicle (LDV) fleet, if they were plug-in hybrid electrics. (Note: an earlier version of this release referenced 84% capacity based on LDV fleet classification that excluded vans)."
Looks like they went and changed one of the numbers on me. Oh well, 70% is still a respectable number.
http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=204 [pnl.gov]
Re:Will we do nothing to escape the fantasy? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will we do nothing to escape the fantasy? (Score:3, Informative)
For the record, 'penultimate' means one step away from ultimate. Your first sentence, as read, means that autos are seen as the second-best solution, which I don't think is what you meant. (For extra credit you can refer to antepenultimate, which means third-best.) I don't really think this is a grammar Nazi issue: it's more like talking about C when you mean to be talking about C++.
As for:
>Stuck on the freeway with no gas while the train goes by on its way to NYC?
My own personal motto is that of a bikepirate:
"When the oil is gone we'll roll past your SUV-turned-luxury apartment and smile the satisfied smile of the self-righteous. "
Re:Point-source pollution (Score:3, Informative)
Hear! Hear!
Add this: Converting your car to electricity eliminates a point-source of pollution. If you moved all of your transportation's emissions back to the power plant, we can deal with them better. (The pollution controls at the power plant are better than the ones on your car: they don't get bumped around, have more consistent operating conditions, etc.)
Now if EVERYONE did this, we might get enough concentration that we could actually DO something with it. Problem is, our pollution's too diffuse to be exploited.
Consider: district heating. "Neighborhood" generators can be a way to exploit the waste heat.
Carbon sequestration: this still remains a sham-dance IMHO, but maybe we can pull it off when we've got enough stack-emissions in one place. Sure not putting an Einstein-Szilard fridge on your car's tailpipe to catch the CO2.
So mod the parent up. It's as simple as this: convert the energy as few times as possible (how did that gas get into your tank?) and concentrate the pollution where you can hopefully get some value from it.
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially every peer-reviewed study on the subject has shown that the energy that goes into building a car is dwarfed by the amount consumed in the vehicle's operating lifetime. 70% coal is a ridiculous number; coal power only makes up half our grid, and since both presidential candidates are promising cap & trade, that number is only going to drop. Electricity generation is not 60% efficient; fuel to AC in coal plants is about 35% in coal plants and about 45% in natural gas plants. The energy required to move coal by train is trivial compared to the energy in it; the US *average* for trains is 436 miles per gallon of diesel per ton of freight (a ton of coal contains 15-30GJ of energy, compared to 45MJ per gallon of diesel). Electric power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficient. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. You, like many, left out charger and inverter losses. Chargers are usually 92-93% (rapid chargers, which can charge a battery pack in 5-30 minutes, depending on the type, are more like 90% efficient). Inverter and motor losses combined are usually 85-90% in normal driving conditions.
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
It's hard not to talk down when you're making such elementary mistakes. For example, calling the Lupo a "~90mpg vehicle". Let us count the ways that's wrong:
1) That's per *Imperial* gallon, not US gallon. It's 78mpg per US gallon.
2) That's on the *NEDC*, not the revised EPA drivecycle. The NEDC uses lower accelerations and speeds. EPA ratings of equivalent vehicles generally get about 15% worse mileage than NEDC, so drop that to 68mpg.
3) That's *diesel*, not gasoline for which most Americans are most familiar with mpg figures. Diesel is, quite simply, a 15% denser fuel than gasoline. Per *unit mass* (i.e., per amount of petroleum or per unit CO2 pollution), that drops you down to 59mpg equivalent.
4) Not an equivalent car. You may argue that it's a "5 seater". Sure, if you can manage to cram five people into that thing. It's also underpowered, taking almost 13 seconds to do 0-60 (instead of 10 for a (much larger) Prius and 8 for the EV1). You can make almost any gasoline or diesel vehicle get better mileage by slashing its power output.
5) The Lupo swapped steel components for aluminum and magnesium ones. Directly, without replacing reinforcement. Sure, you can make any car get better mileage by reducing its crashworthiness. Not to mention the expense of aluminum and magnesium.
The VW 1L car plays even more sleight of hand. In addition to the above:
1) It's not even on the NEDC like the Lupo; that number is for a *steady state 45mph*. Let me tell you, I can drive a 12 year old Saturn SL1, whose mpg rating when *new* would only be about 30mpg, at a steady state 45mph and get 45-50mpg or so. If you want an excellent way to BS your mileage figures, you've got one right there. In my personal opinion, the only commonly used way to BS mpg figures that's even more dishonest than that is what some PHEVs do where they assume you'll use electricity for X percent of your miles, then ignore the electricity in the mpg calculations.
2) They threw out even the most basic creature comforts like AC to get it as light as they did.
3) Even *the frame* is made out of magnesium. Magnesium makes aluminum look like steel in terms of strength. Again, if you want to throw safety out the door, you can lighten a car to almost nothing and then cheer its ridiculous numbers. They do use carbon fibre, which has a great strength to weight ratio, but only a tiny amount of it, and is no substitute for having a proper frame underneath.
You might as well cheer the 1000-mpg eco-racers while you're at it.
Don't come on here and expect me not to call you out on it when you act like the energy used to build a car is somehow comparable to the energy used in its operation. Don't expect me not to call you on it when you post ridiculous efficiency figures or act like it takes a proportionally significant amount of energy to haul bulk freight on rails. If you want to play up your credentials, *show them* by what you write.
Re:Efficiency (Score:2, Informative)
No I'm not. I clearly stated the ENGINE's efficiency. I knew exactly what I was saying.
Then you were trying to distort the picture. You won't actually get those numbers driving a car in the real world, so mentioning them without pointing that out is going to mislead readers.
As for well-to-wheel efficiency, the GREET model shows no real difference between a hybrid gasoline-electric versus pure-electric car.
Um, what? [anl.gov] And that's a lot more pessimstic than I've seen in some studies. Their most recent associated paper [anl.gov] doesn't even cover li-ion batteries, which are far more efficient than PbA and NiMH -- yet li-ion are essentially the standard for new mass-produced EVs.
Furthermore, to top it all off, look at the direction things are trending. An increasing percentage of oil is being forced to come from syncrude. The future of oil isn't light, sweet saudi crude -- it's ultra-heavy crude, sour crude, bitumen, shale, coal liquefaction, etc. These are far dirtier and far more energy wasteful from well to pump. Electricity, on the other hand, is going in the opposite direction. Power plant efficiencies continue to rise, and the growing demand for cap and trade is eventually going to push coal (or at least non-"clean coal") out of the mix. Wind power prices and solar prices have plummetted in the past decade. Wind is now cost-competitive with coal in some areas, and solar should be there soon. CIGS/CIS solar could potentially become cheaper than coal even in Alaska. EGS is opening up a whole new front of baseload power. And on and on down the line.
In short, the trend is oil getting worse while electricity gets better.
Re:Efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
Recent studies show that the unused power generated every night that is converted into waste heat because there isn't demand to use it is sufficient to power every american owning a plug in hybrid without the construction of a single new power plant if people charge their vehicles at night.
Right now the power generated by US power plants at night becomes waste heat because there is no demand for it, that power right now could be driving you to work without the use of a single additional ounce of coal or nuclear waste. Everyone arguing over this issue of where the energy comes from seems to forget that right now gigawatts of power go unused every single night. That power is essentially free because it's already being generated and going unused. Plug your car in at night and use that power to drive to work the next day and you just prevented all that power from being wasted.