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The first hybrid technology with a positive ROI
Gizmag.com ^ | 01/15/08 | Gizmag

Posted on 01/15/2008 6:53:37 AM PST by Reaganesque

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Sorry, Gizmag editors apparently don't believe in paragraphs. Anyway, we are getting closer and closer to the point where we can tell OPEC to shove their oil where the sun doesn't shine and I don't mean back in the ground.
1 posted on 01/15/2008 6:53:41 AM PST by Reaganesque
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To: Reaganesque

The federal and state gubmints are gonna freak out and take counter measures if alternative high mileage vehicles ever become widespread enuf that it makes a dent in their gasoline tax income.


2 posted on 01/15/2008 7:08:12 AM PST by webschooner
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To: webschooner

Shhhh... only if you tell them, too dumb to do it on their own.


3 posted on 01/15/2008 7:12:16 AM PST by Camel Joe (liberal=socialist=royalist/imperialist pawn=enemy of Freedom)
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To: Reaganesque

All this sounds great BUT no mention of air conditioning and/or heating and the effect of such systems on their battery/capacitor idea.

There are many parts of the US where AC is mandatory as is heating in other parts.

Does their modified SUV test vehicle even contain AC & heat?


4 posted on 01/15/2008 7:12:54 AM PST by Seeking the truth (Queen Hillary faux postage stamps - 0cents.com)
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To: Reaganesque

Dang! A privately held company.


5 posted on 01/15/2008 7:18:51 AM PST by vets son
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To: Seeking the truth

I have no idea. Maybe the Saturn website has more details?


6 posted on 01/15/2008 7:46:19 AM PST by Reaganesque (Charter Member of the Romney FR Resistance)
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To: Reaganesque
Who knows...maybe I get one in a couple of years.

The condo assoc. needs to provide powering plug areas though. Else I will be stringing a 100 ft. power cord from my door - which I won't be doing because of liability issues. So I guess this car is not for me.


I'd rather be waterboarded than vote for John McCain.
7 posted on 01/15/2008 7:49:09 AM PST by citizen (Capt. McQueeg: "Have any of you an explanation for the quart of missing strawberries?" [click-clack])
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To: Seeking the truth

Electric AC and heat in cars has been a solved problem as far back as the EV-1. The Prius doesn’t have a problem with it either.

And if they’re using a Vue Hybrid, it already has it.


8 posted on 01/15/2008 7:49:38 AM PST by Spktyr (Overwhelmingly superior firepower and the willingness to use it is the only proven peace solution.)
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To: Reaganesque

To the extent this technology relies on recharging the energy store from an electric utility, it is burning coal, gas, oil, or whatever other hydrocarbon was burned (or generated by nuclear, hydro, etc.) to supply the power.


9 posted on 01/15/2008 8:06:26 AM PST by theBuckwheat
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To: theBuckwheat

Obviously so.

Is there a problem with that? We have a *lot* more coal, here in the USA, than we have oil. And we have the capability of deploying many nuclear plants, if we had the sense.


10 posted on 01/15/2008 9:00:30 AM PST by FreedomPoster (Guns themselves are fairly robust; their chief enemies are rust and politicians) (NRA)
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To: Reaganesque
Anyway, we are getting closer and closer to the point where we can tell OPEC to shove their oil where the sun doesn't shine and I don't mean back in the ground.

Not really unless you live and work in a city.

The batteries on electric cars do well at low speeds and in start and stop traffic as long as you don't try and stomp on it.

If you do try and stomp on it or drive fast, you will find that the electric motors provide a lot of torque and HP to the wheels. However, doing so will also drain the battery far quicker, as will higher speeds.

If they are rating the range on electric at 40 miles at city speeds of 35 mph, you are going to go closer to half that far at highway speeds.

It sounds like for the 150 mpg they simply aren't counting the electricity used to charge the battery at home. I guess that means it has infinite mpg as long as you take short trips only on electric. That's a highly misleading way to present the fuel efficiency of this vehicle.

So what happens to the fuel efficiency on a 300 mile trip where most of it is spend driving 70 mi/hr? You'll get about 20 miles for free from the electric motor, and then you're back to using gasoline, and you're moving a vehicle made heavier by the need for the large batteries and both DC and IC motors.

For one type of driving it does great. However, for me the short trips I take to work or to the store make up a small amount of the gasoline I use. It's the longer trips on the weekend that cost me significant amounts of money for gasoline, and the occasional longer trip during the week. This hybrid isn't going to have a positive ROI for me, and for people with long commutes at highway speeds, it will be an even worse investment.

There are people that will see a positive ROI from this kind of hybrid, however I don't think it is a large percentage of the population, and even more significantly those people consume a small portion of the fuel consumed in the country, so as far as our dependence on foreign oil, it's not going to do much.

We need much higher capacity batteries or capacitors before the plug in electric cars are going to benefit a significant number of drivers.

11 posted on 01/15/2008 9:17:28 AM PST by untrained skeptic
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To: Reaganesque

The ROI argument is largely faulty. People buy a car for what they think about it. Every car does about the same task, but you can buy a car for $15,000, or $35,000, or $55,000. All of them take you from point A to point B.

In 1990, I bought a van for about $20,000, and it got about 22 MPG, and took us anywhere we wanted.

In 2002, I bought a Prius for about $20,000, and it got about 45 MPG, and took us anywhere we wanted. Same price, same utility for me, over double the gas mileage.

Of course, I could have gotten a car for less than $20,000, but I liked the Prius. I could have bought a car that didn’t do any more for me but cost $30,000 as well.


12 posted on 01/15/2008 9:39:33 AM PST by CharlesWayneCT
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To: CharlesWayneCT

Your van and Prius example isn’t the best because they are very different vehicles. They may have had the same utility for you, but I would need two Priuses (Prii? How do you make that plural?) to do the same job. (With six kids we have a small selection of minivans we can buy - gotta have 8 passenger seating.)


13 posted on 01/15/2008 10:03:09 AM PST by Gil4 ("There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism" - Teddy Roosevelt)
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To: Gil4

That was my point — vehicles have a lot of different measures of utility, and it’s not easy to compare them to determine the ROI of better gas mileage.

For example, many vehicles come with two selections of powerplants. You trade off power for gas mileage. Well, how much power did you need, so you can determine whether the tradeoff was a good ROI? Obviously if you try to tow something and you can’t make it up a hill, it was a really lousy ROI. But if it just means your acceleration isn’t the envy of your neighborhood, well what was that worth to you?

Now, if you are comparing the Camry with a Hybrid camry, you may have a point — except that there are other things beyond saving money on gas. For example, you might find filling up less often is worth money — if you get paid $50 an hour, each skipped fillup saves you between 5-15 bucks in time, depending on how far out of your way you drive to get gas.

Also, in some states you can use HOV if you have a hybrid, and that can be worth thousands of dollars.

And, as much as some people find this odd, many of us are willing to spend more money to reduce our own pollution. It was WORTH MONEY to me to have a car that was SULEV, instead of just ULEV. We ALL pay extra for our cars to pollute less (by government regulation), I just paid a little more to pollute even less.

There are a few times when I have to borrow a van or truck to haul big things. But my family of 4 fits in my prius, and it keeps us from taking too much of our own possessions on trips, so we have to find more things to do where we go, which I think is a good thing. With the Van, I could put anything we owned in it.


14 posted on 01/15/2008 10:11:13 AM PST by CharlesWayneCT
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To: FreedomPoster

>>
Is there a problem with that? We have a *lot* more coal, here in the USA, than we have oil.
<<

No real problem, just one of honesty. When a vehicle has a battery that we recharge by burning coal and when we drive it 100 miles but only consume 1 gallon of gasoline because we ran it on batter until we had to fire up the gas motor, it is simply not honest to say it got 100 mpg.

Of course this hybrid vehicle technology is good news, and I wish them success, but we can only improve our own personal and collective prosperity when we improve economic efficiency. Part of this process is that people must be able know the full story about what it really costs to buy and drive these vehicles.


15 posted on 01/15/2008 10:47:31 AM PST by theBuckwheat
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To: untrained skeptic
>If you do try and stomp on it or drive fast, you will find that the electric motors provide a lot of torque and HP to the wheels. However, doing so will also drain the battery far quicker...

There is no fundamental reason that quick acceleration to a given speed will drain the battery any more than slow acceleration to the same speed. The same amount of energy is required.

It is possible to have lower efficiency at high power levels, but in a well designed system, that does not need to be the case.

16 posted on 01/15/2008 11:05:34 AM PST by chipengineer
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To: CharlesWayneCT
The ROI argument is largely faulty

I believe it ignores the cost associated with charging the batteries at an electrical outlet. Which is only free only if it is unmonitored. However, if these became popular, expect all unmonitored electrical outlets to be closed. And electric rates to rise dramatically.

17 posted on 01/15/2008 11:07:02 AM PST by kidd
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To: chipengineer
There is no fundamental reason that quick acceleration to a given speed will drain the battery any more than slow acceleration to the same speed. The same amount of energy is required.

Distance traveled is the velocity times the time. It goes up in direct proportion to the velocity.

The kinetic energy is 0.5 * mass * velocity^2.

The amount of energy expended goes up as the square of the velocity.

If you accelerate quickly you will use more energy to go the same distance because the energy usage goes up as the square of the velocity while the distance traveled only goes up proportional to the velocity.

You will get there quicker, but you will use more energy getting there.

18 posted on 01/15/2008 1:16:15 PM PST by untrained skeptic
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To: untrained skeptic
>If you accelerate quickly you will use more energy to go the same distance because the energy usage goes up as the square of the velocity...

That is not quite correct. The energy you are referring to (proportional to v^2) is not ‘used’ or lost. It remains as kinetic energy of the moving vehicle and can be recovered with regenerative braking (which most hybrids can do).

The energy that is lost in traveling a given distance is due to friction, tire rolling resistance, and air resistance (only this last loss is significantly dependent on velocity). There is no significant dependence on acceleration.

19 posted on 01/15/2008 4:32:14 PM PST by chipengineer
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To: untrained skeptic
The kinetic energy is 0.5 * mass * velocity^2.

The amount of energy expended goes up as the square of the velocity.

If you accelerate quickly you will use more energy to go the same distance because the energy usage goes up as the square of the velocity while the distance traveled only goes up proportional to the velocity.


You are mixing up acceleration with velocity. The kinetic energy is the same regardless if the acceleration is slow or fast. The resultant velocity when acceleration is complete is the velocity to be used in this equation.
20 posted on 01/16/2008 7:35:55 AM PST by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer)
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