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.'"
Sinclair C5 anyone? (Score:2)
Batteries aren't good enough (Score:3, Informative)
Something like 95% conversion efficiency is routine for electric motors/generators, between electri
The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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So what's the environmental impact / mile of gasoline vs. electricity, given the average mix of power sources used in the US? [Which is mostly coal, which has been pretty dirty, but also includes nukes, natural gas, renewables.]
Of course with electricity the consumer has options with varying environmental impact, whereas with gasoline the consumer has almost zero choice about the impact of refining the gas or burning it. (Onc
Here you go... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Electric%20Cars%20and%
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Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
That depends on the cost per foot of your extension cord.
The answer is - the same. (Score:2)
The difference is that the electricity you get from the plug is a whole lot cheaper and typically cleaner (depending on the source) than the electricity created from the from gasoline engine.
8 miles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong. Sort of. Lithium-ion batteries can power a car for 200 to 250 miles, but they're expensive.
I think what they really meant is that "battery technology is still insufficiently cheap for long-distance travel."
The technology is insufficently advanced. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Battery Life (Score:4, Interesting)
Heat, deep discharges, cell reversal, and overcharging is hard on batteries. The long range drivers do the worst.. Top the batteries off to get maximum range, run them till they go no more and repeat. Plan on buying new batteries every few years just like you do for your digital camera, MP3 player, cell phone, laptop, and other devices that get deep cycles often.
I think the Toyota 8 mile range is to extend the battery life to 10+ years. It is not for maximum driving range at a high cost.
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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.
Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far Toyota has made the most marketable hybrids to date and is actively trying to reduce costs. I'd say their engineering is spot on, given their goals.
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Most of the posts here focus on "omg batteries die". This is not the engineering failure. It's a simple fact that batteries must be recharged or replaced when they run out of charge. It's not a major engineering issue. The engineering problem is that the car is mechanically crap.
"Mechanically crap?" you ask. "But it's a Toyota! They'll get it right eventually!" No. No they won't. Not until they realize that electric cars aren't ICE cars.
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.
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-nB
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Sports sedan
Tesla is also currently working on an announced but unrevealed sedan, codenamed "WhiteStar", which may be introduced in 2009 as a 2010 model. It is being designed as an alternative to the BMW 5 Series, with an estimated price of $50,000-70,000. [1] WhiteStar is to be built in a new plant in New Mexico.
[edit]Future models
Future plans include a more affordable third model. The development and production of this future model, codenamed "BlueSta
Re: Common Sense Killed The Electric Car (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder, how many Teslas have ever been sold, and how many Toyotas were sold.... -last month?....
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Here's a fun comparison:
The Tesla costs $98,000, does zero-60 in 4 seconds, and the battery pack lasts 100,000 miles.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
The EPA mileage is 16/26 city/highway (let's use an average of 20 mpg, in use?)....
And to
Common Sense plus shortsightedness = blindness. (Score:5, Insightful)
You remind me of the people who said cars would never be practical, explaining that there were no gas stations, and that you didn't have to crank a horse to start it.
The Tesla is a carefully crafted, rare, high-tech, high performance ride, very early into the market, and it is priced accordingly. A corvette is an assembly line commodity produced in comparatively huge volume after literally decades of absorbing engineering costs and marketing costs. When the automakers get around to putting a comparable electric car into mass production, the niche the Tesla occupies will close (and the cachet of having a high performance, non-polluting car will go away because they will no longer be rare.) If you think the Tesla's price represents an accurate measure of the price in a competitive market, you're not paying enough attention to how industry works.
My point was that electric cars don't need to be either slow, or have an 8 mile range. The price is what, maybe 5x that of a Prius? That's not so far off, frankly. This is the beginning of the curve. Some of us see that clearly and are all about waiting a little; but others... are still looking at Corvettes.
Re:8 miles? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Prius has a full rear seat and cargo area, which limits the amount of space that can hold the battery pack. In addition, as has been pointed out, the Tesla also costs nearly 4x a Prius.
Now, you show me a Tesla four-door hatchback that can carry more that a set of golf clubs, and still match the performance specs of the Roadster, then you might be able to say that Toyota "needs a little schooling."
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What do you think extending the body length by a few feet and a few hundred lbs would do to the performance? Do you think they made it a two-seater because they had to, or because they figured a hundred thousand dollar car might not be all that salable if wasn't sporty? Did you look at the t
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Maybe GM didn't kill the electric car, and they were right all along?
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Neither is Toyota's:
Also, an EV1 cost about $80,000 at the time, according to Wikipedia (and by extension the Washington Post).
The thing is, while GM may have been 'right' to terminate the EV1 program, the failure to keep purs
120 miles? (Score:4, Interesting)
The batteries don't have a long way to go, they've just been forced out of the picture.
Works for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I'll still keep my bigger, gas fueled beast for when I have further to go, but this should be a real option for many people.
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You'll be cutting it close buddy. Not to mention when you are stuck behind a pileup with no way to get off that current road.
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Thanks much, Mr. Waddams.
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You may live such an idle life that an extra hour a day is easily spent; many of us do not.
During the school year, I have no idle period greater than five minutes between 7:15 am and 9:30 pm.
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In my case I can also park closer to my desk when I bike.
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You are absolutely joking, I'm sure. A trip of 3.5-4.5 km should be well within the 10-15 minute range for a person on a bike, which is barely enough to make a me break a sweat (unless it is above 25 C out).
I'm sure with all the money you save by filling up once every month or two (since cars are great for grocery runs), you could get some pitstick to take with you if the odour is that bad. A car that does 13km round trips is great for
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That's the beauty of this.
Who killed the electric car? (Score:2, Insightful)
Promising technology (Score:2, Funny)
http://www.t-g.com/story/1218203.html [t-g.com]
http://www.t-g.com/story/1232246.html [t-g.com]
Basically it is a car with no fuel and a self recharging battery and runs on a hydraulic pump system. They are getting a patent for it now, so they are trying to keep the details to a minimum. But they say from the fly wheel back the car is unchanged.
Reporters suck. Perpetual motion as straight news. (Score:2)
Happens every year or so.
These are the types of idiots who take courses in 'Critical Thinking' but for whom high school physics is a mystery.
Good job there liberal arts schools. Real 'well rounded education' they're providing.
8 miles... (Score:2)
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
Why the Prius?? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Toyota makes Scion and the Scion Tc is a nice looking car in the same size range as the Prius. Why aren't they sticking batteries in that sucker??
Re:Why the Prius?? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words. It's a fashion statement! (Score:2)
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The Prius was something of an experiment, so I don't think they wanted to retrofit an existing design. They wanted to start from scratch so they could design the car around it's needs instead of trying to shove that technology into a Corolla or something. The first Prius looked quite a bit like a normal car (although a little more egg shaped). The redesign made the car much more aerodynamic, and I think it actually made it bigger. It took some getting used to (I really liked the looks of the 1st gen), but I
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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).
why wasn't the original plug in? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if your daily commute is too significant to be made in electric-only mode (mine totals 40 miles and my employer won't let me recharge an EV at work), cutting some portion of the gas burning miles is still a major breakthrough. Running few power plants is more efficient than running millions of small engines to generate the same amount of energy. They physics of scale makes ICE cars look insanely wasteful. Electric cars aren't tied to any single fuel source--energy can come from coal, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. This makes EVs a great way to transition from a fossil fuel economy to any future power source. An all-electric car with lithium ion batteries and a several hundred mile range (at working class prices) would blow my mind. But I'm not going to complain if I can't have one yet. Plug-in hybrids may not be ideal, but they're a step in the right direction.
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some data on that please? (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it, unless the power plant is nuclear or solar etc. If you're burning fossil fuels to make the electricity, which do you think is more efficient: a car which turns chemical energy directly into kinetic energy, or a car which starts by converting that same fuel first to electricty at the power plant, then transmitting it many miles, then converting it to chemical energy in the batte
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:some data on that please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider that regular hybrids already convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, and then into electrical energy, chemical (battery) energy, and then back into electrical and finally mechanical energy. Obviously, this complicated series of thermodynamic conversions must make them less efficient than conventional gasoline cars, right?
No, because there are all sorts of mitigating factors. For hybrids, this comes from the fact that they use regenerative braking. There are other factors at work in power plants.
The specifics of thermodynamics are best worked out in practice, not theory.
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nicad? (Score:2)
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Nimh batteries would be a more cost effective option, and Toyota used them in it's all electric Rav4. Sadly, Chevron now owns the patents and won't let the technology back on the market -- http://www.ev1.org/chevron.htm [ev1.org]
Crusing Range (Score:2)
That's it in a nutshell. Maximum range will have to increase for me. How about if you go out at night, and then consider waiting at stop lights, etc?
Batteries pose their own environmental problems... (Score:2)
It isn't enough to get rid of the gasoline engine. Batteries that have reached their EOL are a disposal problem.
Electric Vehicle (Score:3, Interesting)
For anyone interested, he has a site describing how he did his conversion here:
http://www.evhelp.com/ [evhelp.com]
-Nate
Please explain (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Please explain (Score:4, Interesting)
But there's really no reason to rule out a giant rubber band.
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
From an environmental standpoint, no this isn't a one stop solution. But it does centralize the problems. First, with electric cars many will have the choice to live fossil fuel free because there are already solutions available to live off the grid on renewable energy sources. Second, this eliminates oil as an enemy and allows everyone to consolidate their efforts on energy generation from renewable sources.
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
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We also have plenty of uranium and plutonium. Time to start building some modern nuclear reactors!
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the assumption of a "reasonable dielectric" that knocked you off your horse. That's where ultracaps have left the building. They're using altogether unreasonable dielectrics, and there is stuff on lab benches that is approaching battery levels right now.
Making hydrogen results in a significant net loss of energy. After you've made it, transporting it is a huge problem because hydrogen likes to leak right through most "solid" materials. It has a very low energy density at one aatmosphere, so it has to be compressed to insane degrees to get any decent portability out of it. Both in tankers and/or pipelines and in the target vehicle. That also means fueling presents some serious issues.
Ethanol has already caused corn prices to tweak all kinds of ways; not a good thing. At least at this point, that's a really bad side effect. Corn is a mega-important food crop. Ethanol is like gasoline, in that it must be delivered via tanker, at a hidden energy and pollution cost. It is carbon neutral, in that the carbon in the plant came from the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere as exhaust. Better than gasoline, which takes carbon from the ground and sends it to the atmosphere. However, electrical vehicles can be 100% carbon negative, as a hydro plant, nuke plant, wind plant, tidal plant, geothermal plant, solar plant... none of them produce carbon at all. Better yet. And then corn prices will come back down, too. And we won't need tankers.
The last thing - but not the least - is that to get the most power to the ground, at the least cost, electric wins hands down. Electric motors today are easily manufactured to be lighter and provide better torque and power curves than any internal combustion engine ever made in even a slightly comparable size class. That's why railroads use electric engines everywhere. When torque and power are the issue, electric is the answer. The really cool thing is you can have torque, power, and braking/recovery and efficiency.
Re:Please explain - dielectrics (Score:3, Interesting)
Batteries have energy storage on the order of 1 MJ/kg. The numbers I quoted for the theoretical limits for capacitors are on the order of 1 MJ/kg. You aren't doing a very good job of disproving my point with your examples.
I assumed you had a magical die
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.
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I just don't get this at all. "Carbon neutral" is a bad term, and bad science. I first saw this when reading about thermal depolymerization [wikipedia.org]. (I don't see it in this article)
You have plants removing X per time amount of carbon from the atmosphere. You have cars and stuff emitting carbon at Y
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?
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Try to be snarky...
That's a ~36mpg Civic. On "Slow down cowboy!" mode - because it thinks it is about outta gas.
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So - where is your previous 13 gallons? Let's go back to where it came from, the oil it was refined from. Considerably more than 13 gallons, by the way - it may be as much as 26 gallons of oil, presuming 87 octane. You've used that up. It is gone now. It isn't, as far as we know, being replaced by any process. There's a finite amount. What you did was use a good portion of it up and make a bunch of pollution. When you got "more", you
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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
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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
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It isn't money. And it isn't discipline or operating skills. Or the designs. It's politics. Getting any kind of nuclear plant built at this point in time is like trying to wrestle the midgard serpent. Immovable, stupid, and mythical.
There are new designs that are much safer than the 1960s era stuff by their very nature. They still can't be built, because "nuclear" (sorry, "newk-you-lar") is a boogyman word to the unwashed hordes. Never mind that we lose more people and property to almost any minor cause
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Up front, they are less expensive (not "infinitely cheaper") right now, yes. However, batteries have a very short lifetime compared to ultracaps. This makes total cost of ownership of ultracaps lower. Even right now. Certainly this will be so if and when the power/weight ratios equalize.
No, not a net plus. They have to be transported two ways each time, and t
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That's fascinating; I can see how small flywheels could fit into that application very well. They use them for some small machines to even out performance, essentially storing energy across inputs, as in a car transmission.
I think the Mr. Hates Ultracaps guy was talking about something like this [hybridcars.com]; as near as I can tell, that's state of the art for flywheel ideas with regard to cars. Of course it can't store nearly enough energy to be useful to actually run the car for any length of time so its not really
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
Gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks, furnace oil for ships and kerosene for the jets all come mainly from imported crude oil. The shortfall between domestic crude production and the demand has widened very rapidly in the last decade. To keep sending more and more money to the Middle East to import oil is madness. Sooner we kick the imported oil addiction better it is for the West. Plug in hybrids would reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, having an electric car means that when the electric company upgrades their plant, you're automatically greener. With a gas car, you're still polluting the same amount.
That's just off the top of my head, mind you.
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Re:Please explain (Score:5, Interesting)
With internal-combustion-only cars, there is no migration path. Whatever method of energy generation you use, it all has to end up as gasoline (or similar fuel). This is, currently, enormously wasteful for energy sources that aren't fossil-fuel based.
With electric engines, you're right that *today*, we mostly use fossil fuels to generate it, and so it isn't a great solution.
But *soon*, we will be using more wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, you-name-it energy sources, and as that happens, we start to eliminate the need for fossile fuels.
My father in law lives in L.A., and has enough spare energy from solar to power a car, but there's no option on the market that will let him do this. Right now, he just sells it back to the grid. But with this type of hybrid vehicle, he could be almost completely self sufficient.
Electricity is fungible - you can turn anything into it, and turn it into just about anything. Fossil fuels are only good for burning.
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: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:4, Insightful)
Do you buy a household generator for your electricity generating needs?
Exact same reasoning applies, both pro and con. The determents to an all-electric car are battery weight and battery cost, not electricity generation.
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And that's assuming you're getting your power from fossil fuels instead of nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, or solar.
Or you could put solar panels on your roof and charge your car that way.
Hybrid is a misnomer (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, you put gas in the tank, and the engine will charge the battery, or you could put gas in the tank and drive it up a hill and brake all the way down. Either way it is powered by gasoline.
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: (Score:2)
Isn't the electricity generated from fossil-fueled power plants much more efficient than the internal combustion engine? As for nuclear, well there aren't any pollutants released into the air from it. And a river dam? Kills some fish, but does that really hurt anything in the long run?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As for hybrids - I agree that they are not the long term solution, but they can be a positive force. I get 60mpg in mine, and have since 2000. Trip
Re:More Smug to come (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't reduce my environmental impact or foreign fuel usage to zero, but I try to lessen it, and I buy products like the Prius to vote with my dollars for technology that can lead in that direction. I don't expect anyone else to follow suit unless they want to.
Could it be that some people just like to insult other people's actions without understanding them?
I saw the South Park episode, by the way, and it's great. It even recognizes, unlike you, that hybrids can be a good thing if people aren't assholes about it. The show wasn't about hybrids, it was about people thinking their better than others without cause, kind of like you're doing with your post here.
Cheers.