10,000 years B.C. -- Man invents the first hybrid car...
Posted on 06/06/2006 6:16:07 PM PDT by G. Stolyarov II
A Camry hybrid costs about $5,000 more than it's nonhybrid brother, or is it sister?
If a driver goes 15,000 miles a year with an efficiency of 39mpg s/he will save about $500/yr. Easy math. It will take 10 years to get your money back.
The good news is a Toyota will last 10 years and 150,000 miles. The bad news is Americans won't drive the same car for that long. But then neither will anybody else in any other country. The Japanese will change cars every 3-5 years.
This is one of the reasons why the hybrid market only makes up 1.2% of US vehicle sales.
So, does that mean hybrids aren't worth it?
Hardly...what it means is if more people bought them the price would go down.
It also means that money is spent in making cars rather than consuming gasoline... and there is a different kind of savings there.
The question - are there trade-offs worth it?
Ah, but you see some manufacturers have the vision and others do not.
Honda didn't manufacture the Insight for 7-years or so because it sold well, it manufactured it for the right to claim the gas mileage crown year after year. Great business and free advertising.
Can you imagine what VW would do if they had the gas mileage crown of 80mpg? They'd think it was a fluke and start downplaying it.
This one will. And the reason I can do it is that it's a Camry.
Muleteam1
The future might be in a diesel-electric hybrid ... diesel motor turns at a fixed rpm to recharge the batteries ... the potential for 100 mpg is NOT outside the realm of possibility.
You drive your vehicle that can tow 10k pounds to Walmart and back?
Surely you can afford a couple grand for a used Jeep and take the wear and tear off of your work vehicle.
"The future might be in a diesel-electric hybrid ... diesel motor turns at a fixed rpm to recharge the batteries ... the potential for 100 mpg is NOT outside the realm of possibility."
There is a reason why every locomotive has that combo. Then again, the locomotives NEED the weight of the batteries.
Anyone here on a fire dept? What are the safety implications of a hybrid vehicle that's been mangled in a bad wreck? Fire? Electrical shock? Acid all over the place?
Just wondering.
Hey, it's the new generation of blue collar Americans. One to operate the backhoe, four to stand in the shade of the 15,000 pound battery that was brought to the work site by a diesel Cat. :)
<< Better yet. My friends VW Golf TDI diesel regularly gets 50mpg at highway speeds.... 75 mph in Utah. No hybrid can do that.
The future is turbo diesels... not hybrids. >>
The future is more than twenty years ago when I bought my first of the many European turbo diesels I have owned.
A Merc turbo diesel from back then, even, would get almost 40 MPG while cruising all day at 25% over even the Montana speed limit [Then as fast as you were willing to go knowing that if you were caught you'd be fined $5.00, literally on the spot, for possibly pissing off the Jimmah Cartah liberals by "using too much gas"] as would my wife's early 80s Peugeot turbo diesel.
Modern European turbo diesels get more than 60 MPG as a matter of course.
Check this out,
http://www.airscooter.com/
The problem is that California's new stricter air standards have effectively legislated diesel automobiles out of the California market. Several eastern states have matched those stricter standards. Auto makers have to effectively engineer diesel cars for a fraction of the market. That's why Chrysler is discontinuing their diesel SUV.
Which is why he called it a hybrid...
10,000 years B.C. -- Man invents the first hybrid car...
Muleteam1
I believe even the cleaner diesel fuel will not be quite as clean as the European spec. If they were the same we could get some of those sweet diesels they make in Europe. The ones we get are still low tech, bastardized versions of the Euro models.
Muleteam1
2006 Prius. 1021 miles on the odometer since we bought it new. Traveled to PA. Started with a full tank, filled up after driving 136 miles, using cruise control where feasible and with the air on. Took 2.2 gallons. More interior space than my '99 Camry. Wife tells me to slow down when I start cruising at 80. I see drivers of SUV's and similar trucks/cars trying to keep their speed down and even to squeeze a few miles more out of tankful so they can postpone the $50 to $60 fill up a few days longer and I laugh.
I know the theory is that the batteries get some recharging from the electric motor acting as a generator when the car decelerates by braking or when coasting downhill, but it doesn't seem to me that the relatively small amount of time that process is taking place compared to the much longer time that the storage batteries would be discharging energy instead of receiving it would make the savings from the recovered energy almost inconsequential.
As you can see, I am no mechanical or electrical engineer, but I think I do have a basic understanding of the principles of conservation of energy. It takes a certain amount of energy to overcome the combined resistance to movement of the tires, wind drag, and weight of the car whether that energy comes directly to the wheels from a gasoline engine or from a battery pack which stores and discharges energy to the wheels, energy it receives from the gas engine by the charging process. Where is the energy saving other than the relatively minuscule amount that is recovered through braking. Am I missing something?
Sorry....I don't really laugh....I smile with deepest sympathy.
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