3 ms·

I have a 4000 lb 4-door sedan that gets 38 mpg highway, real world, not a hybrid. So this is really table stakes.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
By point of reference, the Prius and the Honda insight came onto the market in 1997 It is a tragedy of humanity and the environment that the world regulatory bodies did not look at the design of those two vehicles in mandate that was in 10 years. All consumer vehicles should have a hybrid drivetrain. Modern table stakes for a car should be a plug-in range of 50 miles, 40 mpg+ highway, and 40+ mpg city. The fact remains the vast majority of ICE vehicles are still sold without a hybrid drivetrain. So is they toot around cities in stop and go traffic they're wasting all of their kinetic energy in brake/friction heat and not reusing it for the most energetically expensive thing it does: acceleration. Most people don't even think about the sheer waste involved with a stop sign. The amount of mechanical work we waste with brake friction and the amount of energy to reaccelerate. If any were reading the discussion about repurposing ICE engines for home generators, you can see that the design right there. You basically can't use an ICU as a generator for anything but like 10% of its output sustained because all it's cooling is designed around intermittent high power acceleration to get the car up to speed. Think of all that wasted weight in the engine in the ICE drivetrain to do all that acceleration when much more compact hybrid drive trains can produce better torque and acceleration for most of that use case in consumer transportation. If in one of those decades the US since the Prius was introduced, it's simply mandated the industry go over to hybrid drivetrains especially plug in ones, we would have been so much more resistant to fluctuations and petroleum costs. And I don't even want to think about how long ago we actually could have done some sort of hybrid drivetrain in cars. This 1997 the formative arrival of the battery sufficient to be used in hybrid drivetrains? Perhaps it was with notebook batteries in lithium ion, but could nickel-cadmium or lead acid also done the job?
- dublinben 3y ago
  The mythical General Motors EV1 also came out in 1997. It used lead acid batteries to achieve 55-78 miles of range. Some models with better NiMH batteries like in the Prius increased that range to 105-142 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

By point of reference, the Prius and the Honda insight came onto the market in 1997 It is a tragedy of humanity and the environment that the world regulatory bodies did not look at the design of those two vehicles in mandate that was in 10 years. All consumer vehicles should have a hybrid drivetrain. Modern table stakes for a car should be a plug-in range of 50 miles, 40 mpg+ highway, and 40+ mpg city. The fact remains the vast majority of ICE vehicles are still sold without a hybrid drivetrain. So is they toot around cities in stop and go traffic they're wasting all of their kinetic energy in brake/friction heat and not reusing it for the most energetically expensive thing it does: acceleration. Most people don't even think about the sheer waste involved with a stop sign. The amount of mechanical work we waste with brake friction and the amount of energy to reaccelerate. If any were reading the discussion about repurposing ICE engines for home generators, you can see that the design right there. You basically can't use an ICU as a generator for anything but like 10% of its output sustained because all it's cooling is designed around intermittent high power acceleration to get the car up to speed. Think of all that wasted weight in the engine in the ICE drivetrain to do all that acceleration when much more compact hybrid drive trains can produce better torque and acceleration for most of that use case in consumer transportation. If in one of those decades the US since the Prius was introduced, it's simply mandated the industry go over to hybrid drivetrains especially plug in ones, we would have been so much more resistant to fluctuations and petroleum costs. And I don't even want to think about how long ago we actually could have done some sort of hybrid drivetrain in cars. This 1997 the formative arrival of the battery sufficient to be used in hybrid drivetrains? Perhaps it was with notebook batteries in lithium ion, but could nickel-cadmium or lead acid also done the job?

dublinben 3y ago
The mythical General Motors EV1 also came out in 1997. It used lead acid batteries to achieve 55-78 miles of range. Some models with better NiMH batteries like in the Prius increased that range to 105-142 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1