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.'"
The secret? (Score:5, Funny)
Extra Perky! (Score:4, Funny)
Must be an average... (Score:5, Funny)
The 180 miles per gallon must be some extremely tough-to-calculate average since a car that's plugged in can only go as far as the power cord (unless they got a really , really, really long power cord
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?
Re:Park and charge (Score:5, Funny)
How much is a gallon of electricity going for these days?
Re:Park and charge (Score:5, Informative)
"The energy content of a gallon of gasoline ranges from about 109,000 to 125,000 Btu. The average is about 114,000 Btu."
and this:
"1 kW = 3413 BTUs"
so, one gallon of gas (on average) = about 33kW
Electricity ranges from about 5 - 10 cents per kW, so a gallon of gas (more than $2) has as much energy as $1.65 - $3.30 of electricity.
Re:Park and charge (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Park and charge (Score:4, Informative)
Power plants are much much more efficient than an engine that has to fit into a car and run at a wide range of RPMs. So even with coal this is a much better alternative.
Toshiba's new nano-battery should make this an even more attractive technology. A quote: [linuxinsider.com]
"For example, the battery's advantages in size, weight and safety highly suit it for a role as an alternative power source for hybrid electric vehicles."
Re:Park and charge (Score:4, Informative)
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
Nevertheless, this comparison shows... well, that the prices are nearly equal (with the order of magnitude) and there are no economic incentive or disincentive to use electricity on its own---only coupled with either environmental or political incentives.
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).
Re:Misleadning (Score:5, Interesting)
And your grid electricity consumption goes way, way up.
Tradeoffs.
Re:Misleadning (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Misleadning (Score:3, Informative)
Second, your comparison would be quite a lot more useful if you actually used similar units. A kwh is 3.6 MegaJoules, a gallon of gasoline corresponds to about 130 MegaJoules of energy, assume a moderate conversion efficiency of 20% and call it 26 megajoules. So $.06/kwh is $16/GJ, while $2.50 per gallon is $96/GJ.
Re:Misleadning (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleadning (Score:3, Informative)
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:Misleadning (Score:3, Informative)
That's a heck of a lot cheaper than providing health insurance and the electric car might even be cheaper than providing free coffee. Maybe the boss will care about the price and maybe he won't. But since the cost is so lo
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: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.
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.
Words words words.. (Score:5, Informative)
Still, it's a claim to be approached cautiously. Perhaps improved batteries can improve hybrid milage -- but by a factor of 3? In any case, the "up to" is a hint that this is one of those meaningless "gee whiz" statistics, as with "The IQ of Slashdot users is as high as 300."
Re:Words words words.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 s
Re:Words words words.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Words words words.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 deviat
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
Approximate Figures (Score:4, Informative)
It turns out that electricity is extremely cheap per unit of energy. According to these folks [electroauto.com], it takes about
The national average for electricity is around $ 0.10 per kwh, so this is a phenomenally cheap way to power a car. If we wanted to go 100 miles in a purely electric car, it would take 40 kwh, or $0.40.
I rented a Dodge Neon recently and got only 20mpg from it. (It must have had an old or badly tuned engine). Going 100 miles in the Neon would have taken 5 gallons of gas, at about $ 2.50 a gallon. That's $12.50! Even if I could get the peak mileage of non-hybrid cars, or 40mpg, that's still over $6 to run the car the same number of miles electricity would power for $ 0.40. Even if electric rates doubled, electricity would still be phenomenally cheaper than gas.
So why haven't electric cars taken over the world? Because often you need to go further than the charge range in a day. When I went to Sacramento a year or so ago to visit the Capitol, I decided to try renting an electric car. All it had to do was go about 20 miles, the round trip to and from the Capitol. With extra excursions to find parking and the like, I barely got there and back successfully. On the other hand, I had completely free "fuel". The rental company didn't account for it in any way, because it was, truly, too cheap to meter.
So it seems clear that if you can squeeze a big enough battery into the Prius, you could have the best of both worlds: The economy of having a purely electric car, combined with the "get home" ability of the gas engine.
I should briefly address a specious argument against this idea which seems to have gotten wide currency. Once we Californians got through our tiresome power crisis, we thought that anything that plugged in was Bad. Well, true, during the day when we run hefty air conditioners and the like. But once we've cooled down, demand for power plummets and there is no problem at all with plugging in something like an electric car. In fact, the power companies dearly want this to ramp up demand and enable expensive power plants to run at a higher duty cycle.
Once you express this idea in terms of costs, it becomes, well, pretty obviously a brainy scheme. I wonder why Toyota wants to shut it down, since it seems like a wonderful idea for everyone involved, and really, an amazing PR coup for Toyota.
Hope this helps.
D
this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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:this is stupid (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, its perfectly acceptable, as long as you plug your car into someone else's power outlet.
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
That Boston accent (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't this a little off-topic? What does where you go to buy fish have to do with it at all?
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.
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
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.
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.
Re:The benefit of that is... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The benefit of that is... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Plug in.... (Score:5, Informative)
It can help in other ways, perhaps the power plant where you are getting the electricity from is cleaner burning (or nuclear) than your car, and it reduces overall air pollution.
Re:Plug in.... (Score:3, 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
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.
My car... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My car... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My car... (Score:3, Funny)
I'll achieved this with my Hummer H2. No big deal. (Score:5, Funny)
This doesn't help the environment, though. (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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:Cost goes UP! (Score:3, Informative)
However, from a fuel usage standpoint, electric power is only about 50% efficient (the best plants reach 60%, most are less), whereas a car is maybe 25%. So let's consider fuel -> mechanical for both systems.
Charging batteries is not very efficient when the batteries are more than say 50 or 60% full already. Your 80% figure is off considerably [sandia.gov] when you consider that the battery is probably not discharged more t
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: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+77 7-+200/ [aua.com].
Wow, that seem
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: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 leftov
Is this energy-efficient? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are hybrid cars saving anything to society? Are they saving any money to the driver?
Re:Is this energy-efficient? (Score:3, Informative)
Clarifications: we encourage you to read our docs (Score:5, Informative)
Also look at the new section at our vehicles page where we document the benefits of PHEVs even when they're recharged from a dirty (coal-fueled) grid.
We've added a link to this discussion at http://www.calcars.org/kudos.html [calcars.org]
Felix Kramer, Founder, CalCars
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:Oil industry? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oil industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oil industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Oil is FAR worse than Nuclear power! (Score:5, Informative)
Then address the actual problem, i.e. use less coal powered electricity stations.
Hydro, solar and to a lesser extent wind as well as of course nuclear are great options here.
As far as nuclear power goes, I wonder what's better, relying on oil or nuclear power?
Then you should probably hold off on expressing an opinion before you wade into the discussion. Any 10 year old should be able to tell you the answer to that is very clearly Nuclear.
If one persons electricity needs for their entire life time were met using electricity generated from a Nuclear power plant, the total amount of nuclear waste generated as a result would be approximately the size of a tennis ball.
You then simply collect large amounts of it together, encase it securely (in reality quite easy to do, large amount of concrete come in handy here) and dump it somewhere, e.g. in the sea. Given 3/4 of the planet's surface is water and it has valleys several miles deep, finding space to put isn't going to be a problem). If you think this is bad, consider that each of us in the western world uses more landfill space than this on a DAILY basis, and it's easy to see how trivial the problem of disposal of the tiny amount of waste generated is. The result is something that's completely inert too!
Let's take a long hard look at the safety aspect too...
The worst nuclear disaster in history was Chernobyl, which has killed 30 people.
The worst coal disaster in history (to my knowledge) was at Benxihu Colliery which killed over 1500 people.
Oil, as we know from very recent events, is also far more dangerous (as seen from events in Texas). The Piper Alpha disaster alone killed over 150 people (and that was in a supposedly well maintained modern Western environment).
Across the world, have been quite literally hundreds of coal and oil retrieval & power-plant related disasters in the last century, with tens of thousands of people killed. Gas and oil are inherently extremely dangerous to handle, coal mining especially so. Nuclear disasters make for far more sensationalist news though, so one disaster at a very poorly run nuclear power plant (which should never have been allowed to run, and wouldn't in any Western country) and so people who can't be bothered to do any research, decide that nuclear is 'bad'.
Nuclear power isn't the only answer, in particular it's not a great solution for unstable regions of the world (politically or geologically), but for Western regions, like North America and Europe it's far and away the best solution we have for a sustainable reliable energy source, that is by and large environmentally friendly to boot.
Re:Oil is FAR worse than Nuclear power! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yes, and... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two beds (Score:4, Informative)
Politicians are currently deciding where to build ITER, the prototype reactor. Europe and Japan both want it. It costs 4.6x10E9 euros in parts and will take about 10 years to build. Running it for 20 years will cost about the same.
ITER will provide the knowledge for DEMO, the first model fusion reactor, to be operational 5 years after. Followed by commercial reactors.
According to this EFDA folder.
Re:Two beds (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Two beds (Score:4, Insightful)
Where to put nuclear waste (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Two beds (Score:5, Funny)
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:Two beds (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two beds (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. The Chernobyl people had turned off most of the safety equipment in order to conduct a test. The reactor was almost at zero power. They were pulling out control rods in an effort to start the reaction up. But they made a fundamental mistake with reactors. The control rods control rate of change, not the absolute power rating. So when the reaction did start up, it rapidly overloaded the reactor. On top of that, the reactor was designed with a positive thermal coefficient. English translation: the hotter it gets, the faster the reaction runs. No wonder the damn thing exploded. Its like Windows, when you see how well it was designed, its no wonder it gets hacked.
But this is old technology. Look at the more recent technologies like pebble reactors. They figured out the maximum temperature a reactor could hit, and then designed the ceramic shell to melt at a higher temperature. It can't melt under its own power. Its passive safety, which I trust a lot more than active safety with all its pumps and valves and moving parts that can fail.
TMI was within a couple of hours of a *total meltdown* before they finally figured out what was going on
According to the Kermey (sp?) report, the reactor actually melted down about 25-50%. The reactor designers were quite conservative. They assumed that steam would not cool the reactor core at all. In reality it cooled about half as effective as water. So in spite of the operators turning off the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) pumps, the absolute wrong thing to do, the reactor didn't completely melt down.
it's not a given that the containment building would have stopped a liquid pool of molten nuclear fuel from eating through down to the water table
Kermey report actually goes into that. TMI-2 had a relatively new reactor load, therefore had few waste products built up. It would not have penetrated the containment building. I think the doc even questions if it would eat through the reactor vessel. Its been years since I've read those docs, so memory fades a bit.
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.
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: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 thousa
Re:Nuclear energy is unsafe (Score:5, Informative)
Wow. How then thousands die each year in cities like Toronto from smog? I guess their quiet deaths are not heard. Nothing spectacular like freaking out the uninformed about the dangers of "radiation".
Just because US has scaled up their submarine reactors to be used as energy producting reactors doesn't mean all reator types are that unsafe. CANDU (Canadian heavy water) and pebble-bed reactors are inherently safe. In the CANDU reactor, if the cooling fails and the pipes explode from too much pressure, the reaction stops. This is nothing designed by humans. It is part of physics of this type of nuclear reaction.
The amount of waste produced by a nuclear power plant is miniscule. The tons of crap we have are all good fuel that can be reused if it is reprocessed. But as of now it is cheaper to dig up Uranium from the ground.
A reactor can work for 5-7 years and the amount of actual waste produced will fit in a small bucket. And this waste is contained. With coal, it just spreads everywhere killing all of us, slowly.
Anyway, fusion reactors are around the corner (ie. they work now). All we need is will on the part of the governmnents to fund the development of the commercial fusion reactor.
Re:Oil industry? (Score:3, Informative)
It's also a greenhouse gas which brakes down into large quantities of CO2 which is another greenhouse gas so I know it's all that safe either.
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
Certainly (Score:3, Funny)
Certainly. The same oil companies that tricked John DeLorean into buying cocaine, squashed the 500-mpg carburator, and killed the genius who invented the car that would run on snot.
Re: (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.
Electric power != mpg (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course I didn't RTFA, that's cheating.
Re:Electric power != mpg (Score:4, Funny)
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
Re:Oil industry? (Score:3, Funny)
Or the hamsters. WHY WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE HAMSTERS!?!?!?
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...
Re:total energy cost (Score:3, Informative)
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: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.
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Informative)
17.17 - 26.42 miles per litre,
27.63 - 42.51 km per litre,
3.619 - 2.352 litres per 100km, or about
LXXVIII - CXXI stadions per sester,
depending on what measuring system you like.
Re:Mislead Environmentalism (Score:4, Funny)
1) You plug your car into the house.
2) Your house gets electricty from "somewhere."
3) That somewhere is a diesel fired power plant.
4) The electric company notifies the cops of your excessive electricity usage.
5) Armed narcotics agents arrive with a search warrant and ransack your house looking for a grow operation. [thesmokinggun.com]
You'd have to be nuts to plug a car into the wall if you live in the United States.
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:Call me when... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The biggest surprise... (Score:4, Informative)
The Prius is not a small car. It's not an Expedition, but it's at least as big as a Camry or Accord, both of which are considered mid-sized sedans. 50mpg (about normal for the Priuses I've seen) is excellent for a car of that size. My Corolla (a typical "small" car, and quite a bit smaller than the Prius) averages 35mpg. Where are you finding all these "normal" gasoline cars getting 65mpg?
Re:The biggest surprise... (Score:4, Informative)
It's interesting to look at the [toyota.com] actual [toyota.com] numbers [toyota.com]. The Prius is shorter lengthwise and heightwise then both the Corolla and Camry, but the wheelbase is almost that of the Camry (106" to 107", with the Corolla at 102"). The luggage capacity of the Prius (16.2 ft^3) is much closer to a Camry (16.7) than a Corolla (13.6). Curb weight and passenger volume for the Prius are about halfway between the Corolla and Camry. Interior dimensions are all over the place - the Prius has less headroom than the Corolla (and Camry), but more legroom than either. Overall - I'll agree with you that the Prius isn't quite as big as a Camry, but it's definitely larger than a Corolla.