You may believe that “global warming” is a fact, as do many others, but that does not make it so. Yes, the earth is getting warmer, but it has done this in the past. We have about 100-150 years of RELIABLE temperature data, but the earth is 4.5 billion years old according to scientists. So we have temperature data for 0.000003% of the earth’s life and we expect to be able to predict what will happen based on that???

The same folks screaming about “global warming” now are some of the same people who were screaming about “global cooling” in the 70s. So, 30 years ago, human activity lowered temperatures, but now it is raising temperatures. Wow!

What it boils down to is the temperature models are flawed and have never been able to accurately predict future weather patterns. Translation: no one knows what the weather will do in 2050.

I concur that the earth is currently getting warmer, I just don’t think that it has ALL been caused by humans. I’m not even sure we have had any discernible effect. There is NOT a consensus of scientific opinion on this matter. Trust me, Al Gore just needs attention.

I want a car that achieves good fuel economy, but I don’t want increased (expen$ive replacement part$) complexity. Automakers can do it, but they won’t, because a non-sexy solution won’t garner the “green buzz” that hybrids/fuel cells/etc do.

Here’s Fred’s 4 point plan:

1) WEIGHT: Keep the lard off automakers! There is no reason automakers can’t come up with a 2,200 pound, 100 cu. ft. interior, sedan. Use aluminum or composites. A lower weight car allows use of a smaller engine. The added cost of light weight components will be partially balanced out my the lower cost of a smaller engine.

2) AERODYNAMICS: A sleek body adds little to no extra cost.

3) EFFICIENT ENGINES/TRANSMISSIONS: Within a class of cars with similar power/weight/performance, certain cars achieve far better fuel economy than others. Some manufacturers pay attention to efficiency more than others. PAY MORE ATTENTION! 5 or 6 speed automatics will gain the average driver another 5-10% improvement in economy.

4) IDLE-STOP: Have AC driven by electric motor powered by oversized conventional battery.

I thought the reason was that the ICE on the Prius is much less powerful than that on a typical car, therefore operating at a higher % of its maximum output at highway speeds, and therefore operating more efficiently, since ICEs are most efficient at high output.

I want to know how you avoided citations all those years. Do you actually obey the speed limit in the BMWs and Corvettes? (With a screen name like zoomzoom I doubt it.)

Are you expert at spotting freeway flyers before you pass them, as they hide behind the bushes by the side of the road?

Do you always have state of the art radar detectors?

What else??? Help your fellow car nuts!

It’s becoming obvious to me (and possibly others here) that no matter what evidences are placed in front of you about the hybrid scene, you have some further (or repeated) objection to the hybrid vehicle, for some reason.

Let’s look at it another way. Had the original automobile been an electric and gasoline hybrid, in the 1890’s, and in the 1990’s, a company had come up with a means of bypassing the hybrid (i.e. invented a manual transmission and clutch, say), resulting in an efficiency 1/2 as good as the conventional hybrid vehicle, how well do you suppose such a car might sell, all other things being equal?

As for “why would plug in hybrids cost so much more” – well, it has to do with the cost of NiCad batteries (and a far larger number of them) versus NiMH batteries. It’s simple economics.

As for recycling, again, I repeat – when Ford Motor Company started buying up “junk yards” in the US, it was found that over 90% of them were profitable. Whereas, neither Ford nor GM nor some 40% of their dealers are at present profitable. My point is – every “junk yard man” knows how to read, and Toyota have been sending bulletins out explaining about how to safety dis-assemble the hybrids (as have Honda, and Ford, I’m sure) – plus I know Toyota are reminding them – there is a $300 bounty on the battery.

Now, my buddy is a body man and at his body shop, they just throw away catalytic convertors (on virtually every car since 1975) when, say, a car is “ass-packed” (as he so colorfully puts it) and bends the exhaust system which requires an entire replacement. They just toss out the PLATINUM filled catalysts, which could be recycled. The catalysts go to the LAND FILL.

Platinum is what, $1100 an OUNCE right now? No smart owners at salvage yards would toss the catalysts away, partner. So much for your argument about not recycling.

As for highway mileage, and someones comment that hybrids are “no better on the highway than are conventional cars” – I strenously beg to differ and offer up my own Prius experiences. How about 63 MPG on several occasions, on a 40-45 mile run (no, it is NOT down hill, rather up & down, on 55 mph 2-lane roads) in my Prius driving between 35 (in towns, the speed limit) and 60 on the highway? Last Friday evening, we made the journey and the car did “only” 56 MPG on that journey, but I used the cruise as I was tired. The AC was on at least for some of the 3-4 times I’d done the same journey and obtained 63 mpg, I might add.

The Prius is super-efficient on the highway, often obtaining at least 50 mpg, or about 22 mpg better than our other mid-sized V6 non-hybrid car can obtain, largely due to the Atkinson cycle engine, and aerodynamic efficiency.

So, when I had to get my wife to Detroit Airport to fly to the UK and had a 5 hour drive to make in 3 hours 20 minutes, we were able to do so with the extra safety margin of my prior driving experience. My largest concern was the increasingly incompetent Michigan drivers who have no clue about driving safely at ANY speed, driving alongside me near Detroit at 95 plus (their normal speeds).

Therefore, I agree fully with you that the Prius is actually a good performance car. Peformance is not “just” 0-60, however 0-60 in 9.7 seconds (per Motor Trend) is about what a normal, mid-sized V8 automatic family car would do in the mid-1960’s, whether it was a Chevrolet Malibu, Ford Fairlane, Dodge Coronet or Rambler Classic.

The Prius is a very capable car in every aspect, and so safe that my horrendously high insurance premiums (not because of MY driving, but because I live in Michigan) actually came down when I replaced a 2002 car which did not have so much safety equipment.

On the merits of hybrids:
I find it really, really sad that a lot of people whom I can only generalize as narrow-minded and old-fashioned are so pessimistic about hybrids. It’s clear that they are just spouting every negative headline they’ve ever seen about hybrids, whinning about battery durability and pollution, mileage that’s less than advertised, quality problems, etc.
The thing is – everyone I know that has a hybrid, everyone I see online, almost every piece of feedback about them…owners are satisfied! Even if EPA estimates aren’t met (honestly, those were *never* accurate, ever), mileage is still decidedly good, reliability for such a technologically progressive machine seems at least average, and I haven’t heard of any widespread issues with batteries (actually I haven’t heard of any, at all).

I’d have to say after the 5 years hybrids have been on the market in NA (almost 10 in Japan), they seem to be holding up fairly well and have lots of potential. Like others have said, stick a hybrid powertrain on a diesel or a hydrogen (or E85 if you so wish) engine and I can see vehicles easily getting 100mpg with very low or non-existent emissions. There is clearly potential still.

This time, I’m keeping my mouth shut. But top on my list is the 4 door Golf GTI which I have driven (A3 version) and like. It may not get great gas mileage, but certainly gets good gas mileage and is one hell of a lot more fun to drive than the Prius will ever be, no matter how many generations the car evolves thru. If VW ever puts a diesel in the GTI, it could be perfect alternative to the Prius and automotive equivalent of purgatory.

In the meantime…there’s also something to be said for extending a car’s service life. It takes a lot of energy to build one, so the longer it runs the better the return on the investment. And it’s cheaper to buy used; I’m pretty sure that, after spending close to $27K on my Maxima, I’m not gonna do that ever again. I’m on the hunt for a Park Avenue, which is a total land yacht, but a great ride.

God, I love cars.

Tree huggers…

1) just because it’s “designed for recycling” doesn’t mean enough incentives exist so that it will be recycled. I mean, Volvo designs their cars and labels all their parts so 85% of the entire car can be recycled, but will it be?

2) Despite your laundry list of features that allow a hybrid to attain higher fuel economy (and BTW, I don’t think anyone was saying that regen is the only way a hybrid recharges its batteries, just the primary way it attains its efficiencies), a contemporary hybrid powertrain still has no significant advantages over, and is dramatically more expensive than, a contemporary diesel.

Also, why do you think a plug-in hybrid would be so much more expensive? The charging circuitry is already there so essentially all it would need is a big AC-DC converter. And no one’s claiming that electricity is free energy, but in most areas, electricity would provide more miles/dollar than gasoline. Also, even coal power plants produce power more efficiently than automobiles — coal power plants run at about 40% efficiency, while cars are only about 20-25% efficient.

IIRC, not all hybrids shut off the IC motor when it’s unneeded. The Toyotas do, not sure about the Hondas. Other hybrids simply use the hybrid motor to add HP to an otherwise anemic IC engine.

I am a former Mazda, BMW, and Corvette owner. I’ve owned other cars too, but I am a two-seater, open-top roadster fan. Balls-to-the-walls, pedal-to-the-metal, wind in my face, and all that. All “catch-me-copper RED”. And only one traffic citation in nearly 20 years.

I currently have a 2004 Prius. 36,000 miles, and I love it.

I will explain the divergence of those first two paragraphs some other time. For now, however; I have a few facts to offer about hybrids, or more specifically about the Prius, just to dispel some popular misconceptions, many of which I’ve seen throught this thread and in other threads here on TTAC.

1. The batteries are Nickel Metal Hydride. They are designed to be recycled.
2. Toyota has been making the Prius for about 9 years now. The battery packs aren’t just dying. The nay-sayers love to point to battery replacement, but it just has not been a problem in real life.

“2″ above is so because of the design of Toyota’s hybrid system. The computer does all it can to avoid overcharging and deep-discharging the battery system. Overcharging and deep-discharging is what shortens battery life. If done regularly, it will kill any battery, regardles of battery type. The Toyota system tries to keep the state-of-charge (SOC) around 50% to 60%, and unless something is BROKEN, the computer will do everything it can to avoid charging to levels greater than 80% or lower than 40%.

If I recall correctly, the warranty on the Prius’ hybrid components is good for 100,000 miles, or 150,000 miles in California. Toyota has been making the Prius since 1997 or so. Nine years. It’s not “bleeding edge” technology. I have not read of problems with the batteries having to be replaced.

3. Toyota’s system does NOT only recharge the battery by regenerative braking. It also uses the planetary gear system (also called “Hybrid Synergy Drive, or “HSD”) to allow the internal combustion engine to drive the wheels AND/OR to provide torque for one of the motor-generators. The computer makes these decisions. And the transition from gasoline to electric and back again is very smooth, almost undetectable to my passengers.

4. Toyota’s system can move the car by the electric motor (MG2) only.
5. Toyota’s system can move the car by the internal combustion engine (ICE) only.
6. Toyota’s system can move the car by both electricity and gasoline at the same time.

7. Toyota’s system can stop the ICE at traffic lights. The air conditioner still runs, because it uses it’s own electric motor and draws energy from the hybrid battery. I live in Florida, so of course a good air conditioner is important to me.

8. The Toyota system can turn on the ICE if the hybrid battery’s SOC falls below the desired range. This doesn’t happen with my car very often, but it does work well. So if I’m stuck in traffic or waiting for a train to pass, the computer can still start the ICE to begin generating electricity to prevent deep-discharge of the battery.

9. All energy for the Toyota system ultimately comes from gasoline. The hybrid components are simply there to capture energy that might otherwise be converted into heat energy before being lost. Under moderate acceleration, the Prius can convert up to 28% of the ICE’s torque to electricity for later use. This is energy that might otherwise have gone to waste. When stepping on the brake pedal, the regeneration feature will convert the inertia of the car and contents into electrical energy, again for storage for later use.

10. The Toyota Prius is being used for taxi cabs and police cars. It’s not a high-speed vehicle per se, but it’s working out very well for this self-avowed sportscar driver. The Prius’ good gas mileage and low emissions (PZEV, or “Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle”) makes it ideal for campus police departments, security teams, or community outreach programs, or for people like me.

11. I’ve observed that there’s a lot of hype with the idea of a “plug-in” hybrid. There’s even a group that will convert your Prius into such a plug-in vehicle for a rather princely sum.

However, with Toyota’s system, creating a “plug-in” hybrid is problematic on several fronts:

— a “plug-in” hybrid will certainly cost more to manufacture. I’ve heard figures of $20,000 and upward. Over and above the cost of the car, that is.

— a “plug-in” is likely to encourage overcharging and deep-discharging, which will shorten the life expectancy of the NiMH battery pack or any auxiliary battery packs that might be added as part of the “plug-in” conversion.

— We invalidate the measurement of “mileage.” How do you calculate “miles per gallon of gasoline” when you are also using so many kilowatts of power at night? All you’ve done is offset your personal fuel source with a municipal fuel source, and along the way, you’ve convinced yourself that you are “saving” resources.

I submit to you that we need a CONSISTENT FORM OF MEASUREMENT for energy usage, or else the consumer is left disadvantaged.

Okay, I’ve blabbed on and on too much for my first post. Sorry about that! But hey, the question did end with “what do you think?”

Keep in mind that as much energy as it takes to accelerate to a given speed, normal (non-regen) braking just throws away in heat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Look, if in the future battery technology is improved such that EVs will behave like gasoline cars, and you can recharge in a few minutes at the pump, then fine — that mitigates the problem, and electric cars would be a viable choice. But that’s emphatically not the case now, and no gas station would install an electric charger any time soon because no one is going to camp out there for 6 hours to “refuel” — doesn’t make sense. And that is the state of today’s technology.

A quibble with something I pretty much agree with: we won’t hit a wall, because as oil prices rise, other sources of energy become competitive (this is why we’re hearing so much about ethanol these days). But the risk of global heating is a definite wall. The way we are going, the planet will be 20 degrees hotter and civilization will be kaput by the end of the century. Just three degrees of warming will throw agriculture into a tailspin.

One problem that doesn’t much get talked about: overpopulation. The US, which has the biggest per capita production of greenhouse gases, in the ’90s grew by the equivalent of four New Jerseys a decade. That rate of growth has increased this decade. All that bodes ill for the future of driving. 90% of population growth this decade is due to mass immigration (it was about 75% in the 1990s).

OTOH, the regen braking is what charges the battery to allow this mode of operation, so I suppose ultimately you are right. This would be the benefit of being able to plug in the battery — extending the electric-only range of the vehicle.

But you are correct in that highway mileage is no better than any comparable IC vehicle. The electric assist will give it a little more shove than would be typical from such a small displacement, low-power engine, but that’s all.

Windmills and solar panels will be quite dispersed. My roof is big enough that once solar electric comes down in price, I could probably supply my own electricity, and have some to sell back into the grid. Solar electric cells will undoubtedly go on top of a lot of commercial buildings as well, maybe in median strips on interstates, use your imagination. They’re not like nuclear plants in that you can put them in small amounts in dispersed locations all over the place. You don’t need to knock down a forest to have a big solar plant.

The bird problem is true in some areas with windmills but not in other areas, including Nantucket Sound where hopefully the Cape Wind project will soon be built. It is not hard to figure out for any given site whether bird deaths will be a problem or not. Mass Audubon is quite supportive of the project, and as I said earlier this one project would supply most of the electricity for the Cape and the Islands.

I’m pretty sure that 20% is average output. But nuclear is the one with the really high capital and maintenance costs. That’s why there haven’t been any new ones ordered in 30 years!!! Meanwhile, wind power is growing quite fast in the US and around the world.

There are also mining costs, and environmental impact of mining, terrorism risks (for example, fly a plane into a nuclear plant, etc), the risk involved with waste storage (more terrorism possibilities among other things), the potential for aggravating nuclear proliferation. The environmental impact of solar/wind is utterly trivial compared with the much much greater environmental and sociopolitical impacts of nuclear plants.

>>Like solar power, windmills can sort of work as long as they are surrounded by a very reliable power infrastructure that can take over when it gets cloudy / the wind dies down. The bottom line is, solar and wind, unlike a nuclear or coal burning plant, do not have a controllable power output. You would have to build a vastly oversized system to match peak demand during nonideal conditions – and then the rest of the time you???d be emitting huge quantities of waste heat. It might actually worsen any global warming problem.

A widely dispersed system of solar, wind, biomass and natural gas fueled electric power generation would be plenty reliable. You would have plants scattered around every state. For that matter, you would probably be storing some of the energy thus produced as hydrogen, and hydrogen powered fuel cell cars (I’m now looking a couple of decades intot he future) could be plugged into the grid when not in use, so cars would be fuel storage devices among other things. (Of course you’d have to keep those delinquent teenaged unpluggers away.)

I would buy and drive and eletric car in a heart beat, but it must have 4 things:

1. A real world 200 mile range. This mean up hills with the AC on. My commute may be only 90 miles a day, but it also has a 3,000 feet elevation change.

2. A 100,000 mile battery warrenty.

3. A price tag Under $25,000. No, I am not willing to lease the car.

4. A decient size. Make it big enough that I don’t feel like a rabbit amongst the wolves when I am driving down the interstate.

When the electric car finally arrives, I don’t think it will come out of detroit. I will more than likely come come from some one like the guys at Tesla Motor, whom are not tied to the old ways of doing buisness.

There are a LOT of stoplights in my town and they’re inefficient (fully signaled left turns, mostly, and all the freeway interchanges are diamonds or folded diamonds). The “green time” for any approach is nowhere near 50%. On a 1.4 mile trip (both Target and the grocery store are within that range), I will typically stop 4 times and wait 3 to 4 minutes at 6 signals. I drive a car that’s rated 34mpg, City, and I typically get 25-28mpg with it, although I normally drive to maximize fuel economy.

For the right kind of trip, hybrids make a lot of sense. For multi-car families, buying one hybrid and using it for the trips to which it is best suited is probably very much a winning proposition.