After weeks of exhaustive testing, Motor Trend editors
found the
Toyota Prius to be a user-friendly gas/electric hybrid capable of
delivering an impressive 60 miles per gallon in city driving. However,
all this is related to larger issues we as a people have with
technology. It's all about the grand gesture -- Bush promises to dump
billions into the hydrogen economy, which is still decades away. The
Space Shuttle should have been retired or evolved away ten years ago
minimum, but we needs our bipeds in space. Our biggest threat now is
loose nukes, but we spend pennies on that while pissing money up a rope
to build our magical missile defense space shield. Instead automakers promise
hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars
won't be widely available for years and would require a vast
infrastructure of new fueling stations. "They'd rather work on something that won't be
in their lifetime, and that's this hydrogen economy stuff,".
"They pick this kind of target to get the public off their back,
essentially." But Ron Gremban says that such a car is parked in his garage, right now.
It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid,
but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret — a stack of 18
brick-sized batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra
electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel.
Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car.
Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel
efficiency by harnessing small amounts of electricity generated during
braking and coasting. The extra batteries let him store extra power by
plugging the car into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco
suburb — all for about a quarter.
He's part of a small but growing movement.
"Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen
known experimental models have gotten up to 250 mpg. With mass-production, the high battery cost would come down a lot.
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Green Car Congress writes about
a very cool project by Canadian engineer Steve Lapp who modified his
2001 Prius by installing solar panels on the roof. It is admitted that
the car is still a rough prototype, but so far the fuel economy
improvement are of 10%, a respectable figure; for reference, Honda completely redesigned the Honda Civic engine for the 2006 model
and achieved a 6% increase in fuel economy (the comparison is not quite
fair, but I just want to point out that it can take lots of engineering
efforts to gain even a few percents). "Lapp’s modelling predicts a
10%–20% fuel efficiency improvement for the 270 watts of PV (to be
bumped up to 360 watts with the additional of a fourth panel)".
...the fact that [current Toyota hybrids] can run on electricity
alone, with their gasoline engines off, offers the opportunity to
provide them with more electricity and therefore drive further with the
gasoline engine off.
Electricity can be provided from the electrical grid by charging
an onboard battery, and depending on where that electricity comes from,
it will have various emissions associated with it. [The plug-in
concept.] However if it is provided from renewable energy sources, such
as photovoltaic panels, then it is "green".
This begs the question of why not put the PV panels directly on a
hybrid car and generate electricity onboard while the car is parked
outside, or even while driving. The general reaction of people to this
idea is that there could not be enough energy striking the roof of a
car to provide enough electricity to drive any meaningful distance.
This is where the incredible efficiency of the hybrid car must be
taken into account. To drive a hybrid car about 1 km, takes about the
same electricity as to light a 150 watt bulb for one hour! The point is
not to drive the car using only solar power, but to effectively use
solar power to improve gasoline fuel efficiency.
How much gasoline can this photovoltaic hybrid car save? Well let’s
look at the energy available from the sun on the roof of the car. For
June and July in Kingston Ontario, about 6 kWh of energy from the sun
strikes each square meter of horizontal surface. If we install 2 square
meters of photovoltaic panels on the car and we collect 10% of the
energy from the sun as electricity (well within present PV efficiency),
we can theoretically go about 8 km each day on just the sun’s energy.
If we drive 24 km on a sunny day, that is enough to reduce our gasoline
consumption by 33%. This would take the Prius from 5.0 l/100km [47 mpg]
to 3.3 l/100km [71.2 mpg].
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While the big focus today is on battery-assisted hybrids, research is going into the use of
supercapacitors to offer a regenerative power boost. Able to quickly
charge and discharge, supercapacitors could be used in place of
batteries in some applications, or as an additional energy source to
add power when a vehicle is climbing hills. Check this article for more info. Meanwhile, we’re waiting for the übercapacitor, on which Bosch is working with Doctor Emmett Brown.
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Our man Bruno, at the University of
Michigan’s Automotive Research
Center, hipped us to the fact that the EPA has been playing around with
hydraulic drive systems for a while. He notes, “They work especiall
well for larger vehicles, where batteries are becoming very expensive.
Also, the large mass of SUVs & delivery trucks requires a very high
rate of energy charge & discharge, which is where hydraulic
accumulators excel in comparison to batteries.” We still wonder why
this system hasn’t been adapted to cars, as it seems to us that while
hydraulic fluid can be made recyclable, batteries inherently cause lots
of waste. Not to mention that the electrocution factor’s a lot lower
when hydraulics are involved.
Of all the inanities uttered by former Bush press secretary Ari
Fleischer, perhaps none was more inane than his May 2001 assertion that
burning fossil fuels was part of the "blessed" American way of life.
Those driving giant cars, he suggested, were not only exercising some
fundamental right of citizenship but proclaiming American
exceptionalism.
After 9/11, Hummers became a cocky symbol of American greatness.
Driving the biggest, baddest, least-fuel-efficient car on the planet
was tantamount to giving the finger to environmentalists, Arianna Huffington,
and all those who suggested that the involvement of Saudi citizens in
the attacks should lead us to rethink our dependence on foreign oil.
You could be an active home-front warrior by buying an expensive
Hummer—imitating our troops in Iraq and stimulating the economy at the
same time. (Hummers also come in handy in case you need to mount a
motorized assault on the Stop-n-Shop.)
Comparing the Prius and the Hummer is like comparing apples and oranges, or apples and watermelons. Since the new 2004 model was introduced in the fall, the Prius has
been stomping the Hummer. In November 2003, the Prius outsold the H2 by
a 2-to-1 margin, according to Autodata. In January 2004, Prius sales
were up 82 percent from January 2003.
For the 2004 model year,
Toyota initially boosted production 50 percent to 36,000. But demand
has been strong enough that production has already been increased to
47,000. And that's still not enough. My Toyota dealer doesn't have a
Prius on the lot and says that interested purchasers must put down a
deposit today and wait six months. By contrast, my local Hummer dealer
has several on the lot.
The demand for the Prius is pushing Toyota to install hybrid technology
in other models, including SUVs. Also, it's spurring other automakers
to adapt hybrid motors. Apparently, there's even a hybrid version of
the Hummer in the works.
