Hybrid pickups

Martin Blank

Thu Nov 15 23:12:59 -0800 2007

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Chevy was(?) selling something sort of like that in California and a few other states, but it was closer to a generator with a driver.  It was able to drive on a limited basis on the battery with ICE supplement, but its big draw was the 120v outlets scattered around the vehicle, capable of running some fairly decent power tools including drills and saws.

Hybrid SUV gets "Greencar" Award

GuyFawkes

Fri Nov 16 02:41:13 -0800 2007

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hmm, keep saying this and nobody gets it.

http://famille.pyrat.net/sites/famille.pyrat.net/IMG/jpg/Peugeot_405_cote_gauche.jpg

Link is an image of my car, not a 3 ton 4x4 no, but a decent sized 4 door 5 seat saloon car, which does 60 miles to the gallon at 60 miles per hour, and stop-start heavy traffic on the monday to friday trip to work maybe a gallon a week, and it's a few miles each way.

No fancy electronics under the hood, ALL mechanical, no turbo, 2 litre 4 pot diesel, will cruise all day on the motorway at 80 mph which works out about 3k rpm at the engine.

It isn't built from carbon fibre or aerogel, it's a solidly constructed car that does really well in the crash tests, and it also has decent performance, eg not as slow as a truck off the line, in real world traffic it keeps up with anything else on the roads and is as fast as a porsche or ferrari in the real world.

typically for a peugeot, it drives well, compared to american cars (and I've owned a few) it drives like it is on rails, and being a peugeot it is also amazingly capable off road for a front wheel drive 4 door family saloon car.

I paid 199 UK pounds for it 2 years ago, put that in perspective, Road Tax for a car is 200 pounds a year, insurance (fully comprehensive) is 300, and filling up the 60 litre tank with pump diesel today will cost me (from reserve) 50 pounds, and I have done basically no maintenance to it, I just get in, turn they key, and drive wherever I am going, could be the 4 mile run to work, could be a 900 mile round trip somewhere, the Pug doesn't care...

Now, this is 1980 technology, not exactly hard to replicate, and while slightly less capacious than a chevy impala it ain't exactly small, not unless you think a 4 door mercedes or jaguar saloon is small, and plenty of americans are quite happy to be seen in one of them.

Peugeot did an estate / shooting brake version of the 505 model, the diesel version got similar mileage, slightly slower off the line performance, and was about the size internally of a chevy caprice estate, I've been looking for one for a couple of years, hard to come by.

HYBRID, no point unless it does something better than the STRAIGHT model, and there is no engineering reason on the planet why the STRAIGHT models cannot do orders of magnitude better than they do...

Given modern computerised engine management systems and sensors, you simply cannot get 21 mpg city fuel consumption unless you DESIGN IT TO BE THAT THIRSTY AND WASTEFUL, and I'm talking, literally, about waste on a factor that makes MS Vista look like Apollo 13 rocket science.

People who design platforms that are that amazingly wasteful from the get go aren't having any epiphanies when they decide to go hybrid, to go back to the computer analogy the Vista coding team didn't suddenly stun the 16k demo scene crowd, this is clippy running ACPI...

Speaking as a mechanical engineer, a personal motorised vehicle with mechanical transmission components needs and engine that has a wide rev range, and it needs to work well across the entire range, and an electrical power generation prime mover needs an engine running at an ideal and constant rpm, the two ideas are mutually exclusive. And it's not like the generator side is simply collecting "wasted" power, it isn't, it would be far more efficient to grab that wasted power and put it into the drivetrain, like my old Pug does.

Bottom line here is this is a dog and pony show, but nobody is calling them on it, still, oil is going up so like in the seventies I'll be able to buy a V12 jaguar with wire wheels for 300 quid, drive it for a bit and then break it for the parts, and get my 300 quid back for the wire wheels alone.

A __TRUE___ hybrid will have electric motors in the wheels and no mechanical transmission, a constant rpm internal combustion engine to spin the gen head, and some batteries, and the split between battery bank capacity and gen head capacity will denote whether it is an urban job or a suv replacement.

A closing thought.

Technologically / Technocratically speaking, compared with my 1980's Pug, your american cars are still stuck in the 1960s.

The Japanese motor manufacturers are synonymous with MASSIVE R&D into electric motors, alternator efficiency, etc etc etc, that's where the future lies.... the sad thing is people like RE Olds would get this.

Hybrid SUV gets "Greencar" Award

Jan Maes

Fri Nov 16 03:21:11 -0800 2007

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I agree. Looking at these consumption figures I must conclude that somewhere along the line, American car builders just don't get it.

"50 percent better fuel economy than a Tahoe powered by a standard 5.3-liter V-8"

Most any car sold here in Europe does the same or better, without being a hybrid.
People here don't generally buy these kinds of oversized engines.
I guess fuel still isn't expensive enough for Americans?

Hybrids are band-aid anyway IMO. We need a better solution, and fast.

Hybrid SUV gets "Greencar" Award

Charles E Hill

Fri Nov 16 06:40:45 -0800 2007

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Gasoline prices in the U.S. are just a bit over $3 per U.S. Gallon on the average.  If I do the math (roughly) correctly, with petrol being about 1 GBP per liter, and there being (roughly) 4 liters in a U.S. gallon, that is 4 GBP per U.S. gallon.  That is over $8 per gallon!

* * *

I can't remember where I heard it, but it is obvious.  When the U.S. entered into our little tiff in Iraq, oil was around $40 / bbl.  Right now it is over $90 / bbl.  The amount of oil used in all forms by the U.S. military operation in Iraq is astronomical.  Thus, all the estimates of costs have more than doubled.  Surprise, surprise.

Hybrid SUV gets "Greencar" Award

GuyFawkes

Fri Nov 16 07:21:15 -0800 2007

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Nearest garage to me is 1.07 UK pounds per litre of diesel.

USA Gallon is 3.785 litres

UK gallon is 4.54 litres

(xe.com) today's exchange rate is 2.05 us dollars to the uk pound.

so.... 1.07 x 2.05 x 3.785 = US$8.30c per US gallon.

at 60 uk mpg that's 12.93 miles per litre, which is 49 miles per us gallon.

So in USA terms my car costs 17 cents a mile @ 60 mph and US$8.30 a US gallon.

21 mpg (us gallon) at our fuel prices is 8.30 / 21 = 40 cents a mile.

3 us dollars per us gallon is 79 cents a litre, which is 0.39 UK pounds a litre, as opposed to our 1.07....

Hybrid SUV gets "Greencar" Award

GuyFawkes

Fri Nov 16 07:24:13 -0800 2007

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PS, the mpg of my old 1980's car is crap compared to what I *could* get from a new car... 80+ mpg is available.

got no choice man

zogger

Fri Nov 16 13:42:40 -0800 2007

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Point is moot, those vehicles are mostly unobtanium over here, especially so many that a good used market develops. We get what we get, and that's it, and ya, tons of folks are aware better mileage vehicles exist *anyplace but* the USA, but it still doesn't matter a bit.. That's why I jumped on the little datsun diesel truck I got, one of the few high MPG vehicles ever sold here (as in 40 mpg or better), plus we need a little truck, actually don't have one yet. There's some other oddballs out there, but in very small quantities and very well used by now, like the old VW rabbit diesels, both sedan and tiny truck. Just rare as can be. Even old plain vanilla VW bugs, the air cooled kind, are now hitting collector car status, cheapest one I have seen around here in a long time is 3500 clams, and they don't even get that good of mileage. The early 70s japanese cars we could get got good mileage but had crap for sheet steel, most of them rusted out before they stopped running.

Hybrid SUV gets "Greencar" Award

David Leppik

Fri Nov 16 10:06:28 -0800 2007

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If you actually haul stuff in the truck bed, the Peugot won't do. We can't simply replace Tahoes with Peugots.

Technologically / Technocratically speaking, compared with my 1980's Pug, your american cars are still stuck in the 1960s.

Not so. They use all sorts of advanced technology in these vehicles. The Japanese have spent years trying to crack this market, and are only now making inroads. The difference is, rather than using the technology to increase fuel economy, they use it to increase horsepower. A lot of these trucks don't even drive like trucks.

The underlying problem is that as long as anybody can buy a truck, or an SUV, or a minivan, some people will prefer them even when they don't need one. If an average American can afford to drive an F-150 to the neighborhood mall, a lot of people will do so.

Furthermore, if you just boost the energy efficiency, people will feel less compulsion to drive sparingly. When gas prices go down, side trips go up. I've noticed that after I replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent bulbs, turning lights off just doesn't seem as urgent. It's hard to actually decrease your consumption if you're not annoyed by it.