Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says

mattnyc99 writes "Honda's challenger to the Prius — the Insight hybrid that we discussed so lividly a month ago — got its official unveiling today at the Paris auto show, with insiders confirming it would be cheaper than the world's most popular 'green' car while still hitting the same fuel-efficiency range. But the hybrid-electric showdown comes in the midst of a sudden rethink by Toyota about plug-in hybrids. Apparently all the recent hype — over the production version of the Chevy Volt, plus Chrysler's new electric trio and even the cool new Pininfarina EV also unveiled today — has execs from the world's number one automaker, and alt-fuel experts, questioning how many people will really buy electric cars, whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear, whether batteries will make them too expensive and more. "

I work in the power industry

The grid can handle this. Millions of cars aren't going to be plugged in overnight. Yes, it takes years for a large power plant projects and big high-voltage lines to be planned, designed, and installed. It also takes years for a new car to become a significant percentage of cars on the road. When you consider that the economy is starting to squeeze people, its pretty clear that millions of people aren't going to run out and buy a new car just because its shiny.

Re:I work in the power industry

You may feel nice and fuzzy warm about getting an electric vehicle, but then, you get a whoop-ass dose of reality when you find out, low and behold, your electric provider uses COAL FIRED plants to create this invisible power. What is the dirtiest method of power?????

The dirtiest would be a tiny mobile power plant burning fossil fuels that can't afford to have large-scale scrubbers on them because, being mobile, this power plant has to carry its own weight so any emissions controls directly effect the amount of fuel needed to travel.

Being large and stationary means coal plants can be made more efficient and have more environmental controls with minimal impact on operation. Even with electricity generated from coal, an electric car is producing less pollution per mile traveled than your gas car.

And hey maybe you didn't know but us tree huggers are also pushing for more green power generation. So while your gas car stays as bad as it is for its entire life, the tree hugger's electric magically becomes more green every time someone builds a wind farm.

Re:I work in the power industry

Winds farms don't scale, and do affect the environment some. Hydro doesn't scale, and building new dams just to make power certainly screws with the local environment. Geothermal doesn't come anywhere close to scaling, and may affect the environment in surprising ways.

Right now, nuclear is the only scalable choice for clean power. Eventually, solar will work too, but since solar isn't reliable it will never be a primary power source until someone invents a magic battery. However, with a magic battery, solar power is "fusion power too cheap to meter" so hopefully somone makes that happen.

ULEV cars are *far* cleaner than existing coal plants, and may be cleaner than a pure-electric car depending on where you live.

"Serial" hybrids (motor turns generator, not axel) are a fantastic idea, because they allow turbine engines to replace reciprocating cylinder engines. Gas turbines can be may much *more* efficient than 4-stroke engines, because you can make good use of the waste heat. I think the theoretical limit for a turbine is double tht of a 4-stroke - anyone know for sure?

Re:I work in the power industry

Wind farms don't scale

They do. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html [stanford.edu]

Re:I work in the power industry

Dude, the Department of Energy says you're wrong:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/excess_nightime.php [treehugger.com]

One common critique of an electric car revolution is that the increased energy demand might just lead to the generation of new power plants, negating some of the cars' positive environmental benefits. Well, according to a new study by the U.S. Department of Energy, those critiques are misguided. The study shows 84% of the 198 million cars, light trucks and SUVs on America's roads could be fueled by the existing energy infrastructure if switched to plug-in hybrid vehicles. When you add vans and other vehicles in the "light duty fleet," 73% of the 217 million vehicles could be powered with the power plants we have in place today. In switching from 6.5 million barrels of oil every day to electric cars fueled by off-peak power production, the study estimates a reduction of greenhouse gases by 27%.

Even with America's current power mix, with a heavy dose of coal power generation, electric vehicles are show to reduce total greenhouse emissions, however the picture isn't all rosy. The Department of Energy study also points to an increase in total particulate emissions with the grid pumping power all night. This, however, is much easier to tackle than petroleum-based pollution. As alternative energy gains a greater share of the American power pie chart, we can look for less particulate emissions as well. In the meantime, check to see if your power company offers green power or try to generate your own. Then, when you get your electric speedster, you can rev it up without worry.

Emphasis mine.

Re:I work in the power industry

Unfortunately, unlike you and I, most "greens" are dead set against expanding nuclear power. They seem to think wind/solar/"biofuel" will be able to get the job done (no, covering the surface of the Earth with solar panels or wind farms is not practical, feasible or desirable). Most of them don't bother to think of the logic behind their positions so it's no wonder they don't have an answer to where all this new electricity will come from. All they know is that their trendy new EV doesn't burn any evil hydrocarbons.

Re:I work in the power industry

Nuclear is not comparable to oil because the quantity of substance needed and expelled is literally millions of times less.

There is enough Uranium on the planet to run modern civilization for many millennia. And waste is a trivial problem which does not deserve all of the attention it gets. France has similar nuclear generation capacity to the US but is a much smaller country (75% of their electricity is nuclear), and you don't see a looming French nuclear waste disposal problem.

The current problems with nuclear power are all political. Uranium supply is not a problem. Construction of new plants is only a problem because it's politically impossible. Waste is only a problem because waste reprocessing is politically impossible.

Re:I work in the power industry

You could vaporize the waste and shoot it up through chimneys, and still release less nuclear waste per watt than coal plants.

But seriously.. it's not waste. It's still mostly-unused-fuel. You do the same thing the foundries do with slag: store it on site until it's economically or politically favorable to process it and run it through again.

There is plenty of fuel available for a LONG time. The only thing more "sustainable" than nuclear power is still, technically, nuclear power.

Re:I work in the power industry

"Environmentalists don't care where Coal, Gas, or Oil waste goes"

Wow. That's one of the most stunningly ignorant statements I've read in a long time. Seriously. Almost every environmental political and legal group is constantly working on issues related to air-pollution from power plants.

You are right in that it's hypocritical to have higher standards for nuclear power than the other power sources. But I'd prefer to bring our standards up, rather than lower nuclear's standards to that of coal. The way most coal powered plants are run it'd look like Chernobyl around the plant, and they'd store the waste in big piles out in the open.

FUD

why are automakers so irrationally risk averse! I understand making sound decisions, but damnit...the market was ready for electric plug-ins in the late 70's...today it's a no brainer!

questioning how many people will really buy electric cars

yes

whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear

yes

whether batteries will make them too expensive and more.

no

If you build it, they will come...in my podunk former GM factory town, everyone would own a prius if they could afford to get a new car (many working and middle class people can't afford ANY kind of new car, no matter what make/model)

The people that can afford to buy a new car are buying Prius's in record numbers...a friend at the Toyota dealership (who helped my parents get their Prius) says they always order the maximum from Toyota and sell out before they hit the lot...for almost two years that's been the case

Plugging in at night is just a logical progression, and from an automaker's perspective, a simple engineering isssue (professional engineers can easily handle redesigning a Prius to have plug-in capability)

As far as added cost of batteries, the Prius my parents own now has more than sufficient battery power, all it needs is a plug-in...

I give Toyota some credibility here...

Around the turn of the century, electric cars had a range of about forty miles... the same as the Chevy Volt. All the improvements in battery technology have been able to do no more than keep up with our expectations of automotive comfort and speed.

Electric cars have, for a century, been waiting for the big breakthrough in battery technology that has yet to occur. The brilliance of the basic TRW design--the one they could never get U. S. carmakers interested in, the design that is fundamentally the same that Toyota uses in the Prius--is that it only relies on the battery as a short-term buffering device, a "torquer" as TRW called it, to make up the difference between the torque that can be provided by a little economical gas engine and the torque that's needed in normal driving.

So, a Prius provides a very meaningful increase in fuel efficiency without demanding a battery made of unobtainium. The Prius battery in fact only stores about enough energy to drive the car for about a mile.

Despite the possibility that Toyota is putting a spin on things, what they are saying makes sense. As hobbyists have confirmed, a Prius is virtually ready to be a plug-in hybrid, needing only a bigger battery. It would seemingly be so easy for Toyota to compete in the plug-in hybrid market that I have to believe they have sound reasons for skepticism.

Another possibility is that Toyota has encountered some serious snags that they're not talking about in trying to produce a plug-in version of the Prius. Perhaps GM knows about these snags and has some trade-secret ways of overcoming them... or perhaps GM hasn't discovered them yet, or is ignoring them because the Volt isn't really intended to succeed and is just a very elaborate "image" ploy.

I will

I will buy an electric car. I will charge it at night. I will. I promise. Start fucking building them.

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

Plug in hybrids still use gas. That's why they are hybrids, otherwise they would simply be electric cars.

The idea here is to juice up the batteries at home and use them for the first x number of miles (hopefully enough to handle your commute). After that, when the batteries are low, a small diesel (or gas) engine will start up and begin charging the batteries providing you with more range. So if your out of juice you would simply fill up just like a regular car.

Of course I'm curious how they will report the millage on these cars. I would want to know the range on the electric system and the millage when running purely on gas, but I worry they will come up with some new way to measure it that has little to no meaning.

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

The Chevy Volt seems to be using two basic metrics.

1. How far you can run on fully charge batteries (40 miles)
2. MPG when the generator kicks in (50 MPG)

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

The 50 MPG is based on using only the gasoline generator without any energy input from the batteries.

So, if you start up in the morning with completely dead batteries, you can still drive and get 50 MPG.

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

I prefer doubloons per league.

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

They should design hybrids so that the transmission switches the energy source. Higher gears switch to battery power, lower gears switch to gasoline.

That's pretty much the opposite of what you want. Electric motors develop peak torque at low RPM, gas engines at high RPM. In fact I wonder about the losses in the additional transmission if you want to drive the wheels from the gas engine; mechanically it makes more sense to use the electric all the time (much simpler transmission) and run the gas engine at a constant speed (more efficient) to keep the batteries charged.

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

unlike gas, which you can only get from one place, electricity would allow you to charge your car while you push it home. Convert calories to green energy, what a win-win situation.

So what could you do to charge your car?

* hook a generator up to a stationary bike
* lay out a few yards of solar panels for a few minutes (if you are only a few miles from home)
* knock on someone's door with an extension cord in your hand and ask to use a few cents of power
* harness some wind power using a wind strip

and last/worst case

* actually use a gas can and use a generator to charge for the few miles home.

converting energy into electricity is so easy and so flexible, it's hard to think what couldn't be used.

Re:Electric Gas Cans?

I often wonder why Toyota pulled the plugin capabilities from the Prius, the hardware is there in the first generation models, my friend has a kit to convert his once the battery warranty is up and there's not a lot to it, just a plug that attaches to some internal terminals and a chip mod to delay the engine warm-up until the battery is much further drained.

Re:Time Based Charge

I ordered an electric vehicle, and am building another one from scratch. To charge them, I built a charge controller that fetches the current price of power from my utility, and only charges the vehicles when the price of power is below a threshold. This way I take advantage of Time Of Day pricing (1-2 cents/kwH between midnight and 4am, Nuclear power in Northern Illinois).

Re:Time Based Charge

The volt has a charge timer built into the car's charging system. Set the timer once, and plug the car in any time. It will start charging (and/or stop charging) when you specify.

Re:The problem isn't plugging them in

The chevy volt will fail because it will cost $50,000.00US by the time it's released. Only the rich eco-trendy will buy that car.

If you want to get hybrids and eco friendly cars to be adopted widely you gotta get the price down to where it's dirt cheap. $19,000 is the MAX price for the low end model. They refuse to make a car like that so they only end up as curiosity toys for the rich.

They gotta get the price way WAY down. two seaters that are tiny and hybrid are the answer. If you get a Smart fourtwo as a hybrid that get's 80-100mpg for $19,000 you will have a car that will out-sell any other car in history.

Problem is, The car makers and the oil companies do not want that car to exist and will do what they can to keep it from existing. The current smart is one of the safest cars on the planet yet it was a uphill fight to get the thing in the USA and then they had to "add safety features" to a car that was already a 5 star crash rating car.

add safety features? why? oh to make it more expensive... I see. They wanted to make sure that the masses would not go out and buy it in droves destroying sales of higher profit margin cars.

If you make a cheap efficient small commuter car, everyone will buy one. I'd rather blow 12mpg on the weekend in my high power sports car on the back roads and clear highways than at 32mph stop and go, in 5 lanes wide traffic on 696 in detroit.

people wont want to plug it in? oh come on, the populace is not THAT lazy.

Re:The market works to reach equilibrium!

This has 0 to do with the market and everything to do with the ELECTION. If gas was still $4.50 a gallon Obama would have way more than a 6 or 7 point lead over McCain. All last year and the beginning of this one we heard that prices were going up because of such a massive increase in demand and less supply, mostly due to the influence of the Chinese and Indians, it's pretty obvious, they aren't using any less, right? Last summer every time a hurricane even threatened the gulf, prices shot up 10-15 cents. There's been a gas shortage now in the southeast for several weeks because refineries were creamed and gas prices are *still* falling. Please, don't fool yourself into thinking this has ANYTHING to do with market forces at all.

Re:Charging at night

For any kind of sizable battery, you'd likely want a dedicated circuit anyway.

The current Prius battery is about 1.5KWhrs, so assuming a dedicated 100-120V 15A circuit, it would take about an hour to charge from dead to full, but that will only get you a few miles on pure battery.

The current plug in modification kit's battery is about 6KWhr, so 4x the time.

Sources I see on the factory plug in say a capacity between 6 and 12KWhr, and a 12 would require a full 8 hours to charge, which is getting to the limit of "charge overnight", so you might want to put in a dedicated 240V 20A circuit, like you would use for an electric range.

And you'd definitely need a dedicated circuit for a full EV, like the Tesla, as the battery pack is 53KWhr, which would take about 35 hours to charge on a dedicated normal circuit, and still 7.5 hours on a dedicated 220V plug.

Re:Toyota may be right.

The Chevy Volt uses an IC engine to recharge the battery when necessary - like all other hybrids (though Chevy calls it a "range extender").

Calling the car an electric w/range extender, rather than simply hybrid (or series-hybrid) is marketing speak.

I don't think that's fair. In all other hybrids (on the market in the US today), the ICE is connected to the transmission and provides power to the wheels directly, in concert with the battery. They will use the battery and ICE proportionally to drive the car based on the speed. At highway speeds, they only use the ICE to drive and don't use the batteries at all. The range of most hybrids on pure electric power would be very small, and is really only the case when accelerating from a stop. On any normal daily commute of even a short distance, you're burning gas.

The big difference in the volt, whether you call it "electric w/ range extender" or "series hybrid", is that the ICE is not connected to the drive train at all. It is nothing but a gas generator to recharge the battery. Thus why I think it's fair to call it an electric car, because the motor is in fact pure electric, and the fact that so long as the battery has sufficient charge, the ICE will not turn on at all. Also it has some big practical advantages. The ICE can be made smaller, and can be optimized for its task and made to operate at only at its ideal RPM -- the Prius' CVT means it can operate in a narrower band, but it still varies as it has to increase power to the wheels to accelerate.

So I think it's fair to call it an EV. If you're only doing a short commute each day, then that's absolutely true, since the car will drive on nothing but electric power. If you need to go farther, the generator kicks in, extending your range. It's not just marketing, it's correctly emphasizing the real practical advantages that differentiate it from a normal hybrid.

Oh, and in most places, yes it is cheaper to use electricity from the grid instead of gas. Especially if you charge during off-peak hours.