News on hybrid vehicles, fuel cell cars, and the future of automobiles » hybrid car technology

Why aren’t automanufacturers creating more hybrid cars?

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:32:29 +0000

Seems like automanufacturers are way behind on developing hybrid cars, ethanol (e-85), and electric cars. For years and years they’ve been talking about how much they’re developing. Just to appease the US public. What’s the hold up? I speculate that oil companies and the fact that automakers realize that everyone will eventually have to buy a new technology car, so why allow them to switch now, wait till later when you can make a larger profit and finish milking the gas powered car market. Where are you US government when we need you?

See the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" when it comes to your town, or comes out on DVD. But the short answer is that auto manufacturers have tens of BILLIONS invested in the gas burning infrastructure. Many of the people who are on the Boards of Directors of Oil Companies are on the Boards of Auto companies (and vice versa).

So, short sighted greed has once again carried the day.

As to the government, Big Oil is the lifeblood of the Bush family, and his administration. One quick example Condi Rice was on the board of directors of the Chevron Corporation, and had an oil tanker named after her.

Why aren’t automanufacturers creating more hybrid cars?

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:19:22 +0000

So, short sighted greed has once again carried the day.

i want to be environmentaly healthy, so im thinking of bying a Hybrid car, but should i wait a couple of years

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 20:27:13 +0000

the reason i say Wait, is becuase right now they are pretty expenisve, so in a couple of years , will the price go down??
(also the cars will be even more efficent with more technology)

so far i am thinking about the toyota camry hybrid and
Ford Escape Hybrid

If you want to be environmentally healthy, then a Hybrid is a terrible choice. The battery cells and process it take to make them are worse for the environment that emissions from a gasoline car. Manufacturer’s don’t like to advertise that part though..

As far as efficiency, it takes 5 years or more in some cases to get the return off your extra investment into buying a hybrid over a gasoline counterpart. The Prius has the best over all efficiency of any hybrid currently on the market, so if you are determined to own one, I would say Prius. Happy shopping

Should fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars be required to be converted over to hybrid technology?

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:48:28 +0000

No they should not. Fire trucks and ambulances run on diesel because it is optimal for the truck idling for several hours at the scene of a fire and for hauling all the weight of a fire vehicle or ambulance. Police cars are high performance vehicles designed to pursue and overtake almost any other vehicle on the road. Hybrid and alternative fuels are not good for high performance vehicles. All these vehicles are high performance and are designed specifically to carry out a specific task. Switching to hybrid technology and alternative fuels could cause problems with vehicle performance. Why fix it if its not broken?

I can’t speak for fire trucks and police cars, but I know that ambulances are heavy vehicles that are expected to be able to be on the road 24 hours a day. A hybrid engine can’t support such a heavy vehicle, and gas mileage is the least of our worries as tax payers pay for our fuel. The number of people who have trust in hybrid technology and alternate fuels is small. That is because no car has been made with hybrid technology that is worth buying. When they make a heavy high preformance vehicle using hybrid technology then it may be considered.

Are Hybrids trustworthy? Is the technology still too new?

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:52:08 +0000

I like the idea of the hybrid car. I’m not a car person, but I would think hybrid cars are more complicated mechanically. Has this technology "proven" itself to be reliable? Or is it too soon to know?

I can speak from experience, I own a Toyota Highlander Hybrid and a Toyota Prius. Yes we paid a little more than if we bought a regular ICE vehicle, but not 3X like some uninformed moron says. We originally bought the Prius in ‘05(for the wife) and have averaged 50mpg. This is real world use not EPA estimates. We got the Highlander(for me) back in the spring and it’s drive train is based on the Prius with an additional electric motor on the rear wheels which bumps the hp up to a very impressive 286 hp. It can get up and move. I have averaged 26 mpg from March to the present(again real world data). The technology while fairly new(less than ten yrs old) is good and proven. If you want to shrink your footprint on the world then get a hybrid. If, like the previous posters you just want a car that gets good milage but still pollutes, go for one of the little POS’s that are out now. As with any vehicle purchase do your research, know your prices, know what you can truely afford and stick to your guns!!

Good luck!

Considering maintenance and repair, are hybrid cars worth buying?

admin — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:48:07 +0000

I am considering buying a hybrid car, but am unsure how well the technology is developed and if the dealerships are equiped to maintain these vehicles.

Hybrids are expensive to construct because the manufacturer needs to develop and install two motors instead of one. Plus, the complex vehicles also contain a regeneration system that is used while the driver breaks, gathering energy generated as the vehicle is brought to a stop. These three components are intricate and costly.

The cost of constructing a hybrid car is reflected on the sticker price. Hybrids are considerably more expensive than traditional cars that run solely on gasoline. They are also more expensive to repair. The three systems that comprise the hybrid’s inner workings interact together. When one system fails, they all fail. Since the cars are relatively new to the market, owners can expect to pay hefty repair costs.

The government is trying to offset the high cost of the hybrid car by offering a tax incentive to individuals who buy the vehicles. However, the tax incentive is not enough to cover the difference between the hybrid and the traditional gasoline-run car…..

Has hybrid braking technology been used in regular cars?

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:58:12 +0000

Hybrids get better mileage in the city than highway because the mechanical energy from braking is used to charge the battery. Are there any gas vehicles where they have used this braking energy for anything?

Regenerative braking requires the presence of a load along the power train that can be applied to convert the kinetic energy of the mass into potential energy of some kind, such as electric potential or a mechanical spring. Also, the kinetic energy of the car could be converted to a spinning mass, such as a flywheel.

I believe some buses in the 1950’s were engineered to use a flywheel to store the energy of the wheels and return that energy when accelerating from a stop, but no contemporary commercial cars use that means.

As far as I know, the only method used nowadays for converting the kinetic energy is to use the drag of an electric motor in the drivetrain. If you have an electric motor in the drivetrain, you basically have a hybrid vehicle.

BTW, the hybrids that get better mileage in the city do that through greater use of the electric motor when the gasoline engine is not running, which maximizes the efficiency of the electric motor / gasoline engine system. Only a small proportion of the increased mileage is due to regenerative braking.

Hybrid car phenomena.?

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:14:21 +0000

We have been left to believe that hybrid cars will save our planet as well as our pocket.
However I don’t see why people are so obsess with them, they are suppose to be very efficient however i cannot workout how can two engines could possibly be more efficient than one.
Hybrid (electric-gas ones kind like the Prius) cars have a gas engine which under the right conditions (e.g. driving at lows speeds, in city like environments) will use the gas engine to recharge the batteries which at the same time are used to power an electric motor.
The thing is that i cannot workout how can that process be more efficient. The fact of the matter is that gas engines have an efficiency of about ~20% (which means that 20% of the total chemical energy in gas will be readily usable) therefore a regular gas powered car has about 20% of the gas energy available to move around (less than 20% since energy is loss in electrics and in friction in the gearbox and shaft etc)
However an electric car which have that 20% available from the motor have to recharge the batteries which have an efficiency of about 75-85% (lead-acid battery) which drops to 45-70% when you include all the circuitry used to charge it. Just for the sake of the calculations less assume is a super efficient circuit and the total efficiency is about 80%. This means that 80% of the 20% of the original chemical energy available in gas can be "delivery" by the battery to the electric motor. Now, electric motors are very efficient (about 95% for 50HP+ motors which would probably what would be used to power a car). This means that 95% of the 80% of the 20 % of the original chemical energy available in gas can be used to power the car when the electric engine is running. This ends up being ~15.2% (which is actually less since more energy is lost as friction within the mechanical components and to power the electric accesories in the car, but since those are the same components that would be present in a regular car lets assume thats sums up to 0 energy for both hybrid and regular cars)
This means that hybrid cars (electric-gas type) are nearly 24% less efficient than regular cars (15.2/20*100=24.) And in top of that it weights more than the regular car since it has the batteries and an extra motor (2932lb for prius and 2822lb for corolla even though the corolla is a bit bigger -couple of inches longer and wider-, that is 100lb extra which translates into 1%-2%)
Now how does a Prius manages to get the 45mpg it claims that it can achieve. First, 45mpg is an estimate and unless you drive in a perfect world with not having to break and where there is no air and no slopes etc it wont do 45mpg, second the engine in a prius is minute (1.4 – 1.5L depending on the model, which generates about 110HP) which is a pretty small engine, and the second things that helps in fuel efficiency is the technology that charges the batteries when the car is breaking, however those are things that we could have in regular cars and help increase the efficiency of those without making them hybrid (e.g. use the breaking energy -same technology that the hybrid but without the extra batteries and the extra electric motor) to recharge the regular battery (or maybe one a bit bigger than the regular battery) this will reduce the load in the engine by running the onboard accesories (such as satnav, cd, onboard computer, lights, power windows, power steering wheel, powerbreaks, abs etc) from the battery and not from the alternator which would significantly reduce the engines load.
Anyway regular cars or hybrids wont be around much longer, check on the Honda’s hydrogen cell electric car, now thats the future………
Also keep in mind that the hybrid car is about 4,000-8,000 more expensive than the equivalent gas powered and if you think you saving the environment, think twice since the batteries contain lead which is toxic, and rare earth metals are used to manufacture the vehicle (are rare for one reason) and in top of that materials have to be imported from all over the world, guess what kind of fuel planes use?
34356, did you even bother in reading what i said? you cannot get energy out of the thin air if the gas engine is inefficient then the gas engine + electric engine MUST be less efficient than the gas alone since the energy available for the electric engines = total energy in gas – energy lost as heat and friction due to gas engine inefficiency – energy lost while charging the batteries due to battery’s inefficiency (e.g. heat) – energy lost by the electric motor due its own inefficiency (e.g. heat, however this last one is very little ~5%)

What scares me away is the price of replacement batteries….As much as $10,000 —where’s your savings now? Sell the car before the batteries die or else you’ll never be able to sell it. Who would buy -say a 15 year old car that you need to invest $10K in. It will become an environmental polluter as it goes to the junk yardand gets buried.

Micro electric hybrid car TV ad from the 1980’s

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:22:10 +0000

The Sinclair C5 was one of the first hybrid electric micro cars. It was called an electric tricycle at the time. This allowed it to be marketed as a vehicle that can be driven on the sidewalks by anyone over the age of 14 without a license or insurance. It is similar to the Wycycle (see video). However, the early Wycyclles did not have pedals for moving. And the Wycycle could be folded up and had a top to cover the person. What may be interesting is to see a kind of C5 Wycycle which embraces the latest technology for achieving strenght, weight reduction, motor power and energy efficiency, along with latest battery technology (such as lithium polymer batteries).

Duration : 0:0:42

Technorati Tags: c5, car, electry, human, hybrid, micro, sinclair, uk

Fuel cell car and hybrid car from Japan – why can the US not focus on such things?

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:47:11 +0000

Father-in-law lived in Japan after WW2 and has his own stories to tell. What do you say about their change of focus on domestic technology instead of only-war-stuff?
Lessons for the next generation of entrepreneurs and invetors – plenty here and lower than the cost of a textbook.

UTC in Connecticut will be using fuel cells to power one of the new bldgs (Freedom Tower) at the WTC former site. Hope they can power our homes before we solve all the problems mentioned with fuel cells in cars…

maybe because the US consumer is stupid and has to have an SUV to drive to the market?

that is, until you beat him over the head with $100 a tank gasoline.

and even then ……. that skull is pretty thick.
remember how many say that something has to be done about gas prices — as if this is all someone else’s fault, and they’d like the government to give ‘em all free gas.