Re: Serial Electric Hybrid (Re: The Financial Crisis is much worse than you think....)

Kurt Busiek wrote:
On 2008-11-07 19:48:01 -0800, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" <seawasp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Mark_Reichert@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Nov 6, 2:01 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
<seaw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Scott Lurndal wrote:
Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@xxxxxxx> writes:
Are you familiar with the Chevy Volt hybrid, scheduled for 2010?
Forty miles on a charge, with a gas engine when that runs out. Not
exactly a highway cruiser, but a damn good solution for commuters, and
that's where most gas goes -- commuting.
Or the Aptera, 140 mile range per charge, 300 mpg in the hybrid version.
Ford just showed a 400BHP electric F-150 with 100 mile range (40kw battery).
And I'll be impressed when I can refill them at my local pump station
in the 2 minutes it takes to refuel my Subaru. Shorter cruise range,
hours to recharge, etc., these are major barriers. Yes, I commute short
distances a lot, but I don't want to have to have an entirely different
system just to be able to go to Boston or Cape Cod or wherever.

You are aware that the Chevy Volt is a serial electric hybrid, do you
not?

And? I don't see anything in there that addresses the basic flaws/problems in the technology. Just what looks to me to be a rather clumsy patch. 45 kW-h of electricity (in their example). I run down after X miles (my current car has about a 340 mile range, and I often come close to that range in various circumstances, and they're not offering that range) and I need to continue on; let's say I want to recharge in 2 minutes, like I can with my gas car. That's 1/30th of an hour, so I need a flow of 1.35 MW for two minutes.

No, when the Volt battery runs low, the gas-powered generator starts recharging the battery. Recharging the battery uses a lot less fuel than driving the car, so you're still getting much better mileage (50-150 mpg, depending on the pattern of use), until you can stop and plug in for a while.

The Volt's effective range is 40 miles on electric-only; it's almost double your current car's range on a tank of gas for the generator. So if you exceed that 640-mile range, you put in gas, not megawatts, to keep the generator going to keep the battery going.

Got your flux capacitor and Mr. Fusion handy?

You don't need it. What you need is to keep the generator fueled for longer trips, and the generator runs on gas. Much less gas than a conventional car.

There's also an optional solar-panel roof, it appears. Not a substitute for house current by any means, I'd imagine, and not much use in the winter out where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, but a good argument to park the thing outside in the spring and summer.

I'm sure we'll be be able to find out a lot more about the Volt and whatever glitches that accompany it when they actually roll out, but the problems you're citing seem to be illusory. It's not a car you need to recharge in two minutes or it doesn't work; it's a car you recharge at night, and if you exceed its electric-only range betweentimes, you're burning gas, but much less than a conventional car does.

The real killer for all hybrid systems is the added cost, weight, and complexity. A pure electric car is very simple and efficient, but falls short on perceived range. (Actual range may be adequate for most uses. Renting a different car for the 5% of the time you actually need it might be a solution, if rentals were more convenient.)

The hybrid fixes that, but at the cost of doubling the system complexity of the vehicle drivetrain. In effect, the most cost-effective hybrid drive trains are fueled engines with a load-leveling electric transmission. LLET's are very heavy and expensive compared to a simple planetary automatic transmission with a lock-up torque converter.

The simplest _technical_ solution, to the whole set of problems that the hybrid is attempting to fix, is a combination of high extra taxes on petroleum or coal-derived fuel and on vehicles with poor fuel mileage, and no extra taxes on conventional fuel derived from waste and/or renewable resources. That allows a graceful change-over, without scrapping current vehicles or infrastructure.

Alas, that's not the simplest political solution. Technology is easy; politics is hard. Hence the existence of wacky drivetrains and cars that make no economic sense.

A Prius or Volt owner would have to drive a huge number of miles per year to pay off the added cost of the vehicle. Yet the cars are most attractive and/or marketed to people who drive long distances infrequently. Even at four dollars a gallon, it's cheaper for me to own my Ford Focus wagon* than it is to buy a hybrid. The deciding factor is still initial purchase price and insurance, not fuel cost. Fuel would have to go to roughly $6/gal. to make me want to change. At $2.19**, I barely notice fuel cost.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

* I've always owned about the same sized car. Amusingly, I've owned subcompacts, compacts, and mid-sized cars. Anyone want a jumbo shrimp? Or a colossal olive?
** The price last evening at the several lowest priced stations on US-1 as I was driving home.
.

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