Hybrids: 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid w/ Navigation - Magnetic Pearl
Posts: 50
Re: hybrid plug ins
I am not sure I would be in the position to advocate for plug-in hybrids. First, I don't know how much it would cost in electricity (=dollars) to fully charge the car? Second, electricity still being produced mostly by burning fossil fuels. What would be the incentive(s) to have the have the car being "plugged-in"?
The research i have done has indicated the electricity would be about $1 to recharge the battery, which was pegged to have a 40 mile radius before the ICE kicked on.
Folks insist that we can put less pressure on the grid by plugging in overnight -instead of during the day or peak hours. As for fossil fuels, its true today that 2/3 of our electricity is made from coal etc . However, the emmissions etc are small potatoes compared to cutting our vehicle emmissions by 50 % or more.
more important than the savings though, is the peace and quiet in rush hour traffic, the stagnating smog in major centers from bumper to bumper congestion, and GETTING AWAY from the middle east and foreign oil.
How much money would we save right at this very momemt if we did not need foreign oil? About 2 billion a week for the war in Iraq for starters.......
rich
lets face it. most of us drive under 40 miles on a daily basis. Even folks who commute more during the week probably could go gas free on the weekends. I think some auto maker is going to give it a shot.
almost all of us understand that we will probably never fully recover the price of our hybrids in gas savings -but still bought them. We will never save $1000s of dollars on regular maps, but still buy the nav system anyway.
so why would we not pay a couple of thousand extra on top of hybrid prices to get 100mpg??? They could do it now without developing further lightweight batteries.
You don't have to sell me on a hybrid or a plug-in hybrid ... I have no problem with them ... BUT prefer tax dollar not be spent upfront in their development.
You don't have to sell me on a hybrid or a plug-in hybrid ... I have no problem with them ... BUT prefer tax dollar not be spent upfront in their development.
Some of us think it is a national security issue and worthy of smart tax support.
the whole issue with coal burning electricity can be replaced by solar panels on the house. i am certain you can get the solar batteries charged enough to charge the plug in overnight. There are other ways to harness electricity as well.
but as for vehilces, the safety, convience and price, electricity is by far the best choice of any fuel. I agree that yes , its worth putting tax dollars into. Or should we just keep putting billions of tax dollars per week into foreign wars obviously targeting at american interests in the middle east.
Should we keep meddling in foreign affairs over oil so that millions of innocents over there continue to loathe american interference into their lives , thus structure hate groups to retaliate in terrorist violence? Hybrid cars as they are today dont go far enough to begin to solve this unsavory cycle. But they are a start.
I can almost guarantee you that electric cars will win the alternate fuel war.
Last edited by tomdavie; 05-20-2006 at 06:48 PM.
Reason: forgot to finish thought
the whole issue with coal burning electricity can be replaced by solar panels on the house. i am certain you can get the solar batteries charged enough to charge the plug in overnight. There are other ways to harness electricity as well.
but as for vehilces, the safety, convience and price, electricity is by far the best choice of any fuel. I agree that yes , its worth putting tax dollars into. Or should we just keep putting billions of tax dollars per week into foreign wars obviously targeting at american interests in the middle east.
Should we keep meddling in foreign affairs over oil so that millions of innocents over there continue to loathe american interference into their lives , thus structure hate groups to retaliate in terrorist violence? Hybrid cars as they are today dont go far enough to begin to solve this unsavory cycle. But they are a start.
I can almost guarantee you that electric cars will win the alternate fuel war.
Hi,
Sorry to play devil's advocate, but in the interest of honing the ideas some more and being realistic...
What are solar batteries? You may mean solar power cells that are connected to a battery grid. So you have panels on your roof (assuming you live in a house with a roof, not an appartment where you would have to share the roof with other's panels) and a huge battery pack in the garage. You charge that battery during the day and then use that battery to charge the car battery at night. Not terribly efficient but maybe do-able with a significant investment in money and space).
What are the ranges of an electric car? 50, 100 miles? As the early manufacturers have found, there is not much of a market for a car that has a <100 mile range. Fine for many commutes, but not terribly practicle for trips. Most people don't have the space or money for two cars, a commute car and a long trip car, and most people don't want to have to rent a car for trips (even those with 2 cars would be reluctant to divide them that way). It is all about the product fitting the need of the consumer. Until the consumer puts not poluting at the top of the list and is prepared to make huge compromises on range and/or cost and convenience, EV won't get accepted into the mainstream until somoene bulds a much, much, much better battery.
Until then, 100% EV will not alter the industry. It has been around for a long time and has not yet.
As for a plug-in Hybrid... Hybrids are currently a careful balance between weight and EV power and the cost of haulling the battery around. You can put a bigger battery in the Hybrid and plug it in, but once drained, the battery is dead weight and increases fuel consumption. If you look at Hymotion for the Ford Escape for example, it takes up half the cargo bay and weights a ton. If all you do is drive 50 miles to work, this may work, except that the electric motor is too weak to get the car above above 30mph so it is of limited use (you tend to wind up in ICE mode). Every time you divide the consumer market to fit your product (like those who commute less than 50 miles in constant stop and go traffic and never take trips vs. the rest of the world), you limit your market and the overall viability of the product.
Don't get me wrong. Electric vehicles have a place, but until a better battery comes around (or we come up with a better way to generate electricity on the go) or we run out of oil, EV will be a niche market sor some time (how many Ed Begley Jr.s are there in the world)?
Perhaps you didnt read my post correctly. First off, solar panels to charge a battery , generator , or connected to the grid is fine. Solar panels on the vehicle is so far at any rate probably not practical. Just throwing out another idea to avoid needing coal to make electricity
But more importantly, we are talking about 30-40 miles per hr until the ICE kicks on. We are talking 30 of 40 mile distance on the battery . Even more importantly, we are talking about a hybrid plug in -not an electric vehicle. The topic is HYBRID -not full electric vehicle.
Therefore there is no problem with the how far you want to drive. It converts at some point back to a regular hybrid when the batteries are depleted to a certain level. The ICE kicks on to recharge the battery. You dont drive into electric mode until the battery is completely drained. When the battery reaches a certain level -the ice kicks on to recharge it. Its not dead weight. The whole point is for short or average trips where you wont go far enough to drain it in the first place -so instead of the ICE kicking on -you take it home and recharge it. Thus the now over 100mpg.
The size of the vehicle adds a lot of weight to the vehicle. The weight equivillant of 2 fairly large men. IMHO , that extra weight does not drown out the benefit by any stretch of imagination. But you are right, It will work better when newer lightweight batteries are championed.
The whole deal is to drive small trips in town or around town off the highway within a 30 or 40 mile per day radius. Most drivers in the country commute this distance a day or less round trip.
Again, the plug in is to exend the time driven in electic mode -not to REPLACE any capability the hybrid already has. The plug in is therefore an OPTION -not mandatory.
With most drivers driving mildly within those limits, they wont need any ICE or barely any , and a full charge to recharge it plugged in vs having to charge it with the gas motor is very cheap indeed-about a dollar. Think of all the emissions saved as well
Last edited by tomdavie; 05-21-2006 at 07:19 PM.
Reason: more info
The last sentence of your last post (which I quoted) states that "I can almost guarantee you that electric cars will win the alternate fuel war". I interpreted that we were moving away from the plug-in concept to all EV. Sorry if I got that wrong. I commented on both possibilities any way .
The probblem with a bigger battery is weight, and how usefull the battery is on the Hybrid. Fore example, I rarely find myself in a situation where the ICE turns on just to charge the battery because the FEH relier on the ICE for most of its locomotion. The issue is balance. In the case of the Ford Escape for example, the electric motor is only useful at getting the car to about 30mph, then the ICE kicks in because the electric motor was not designed to be powerful enough to do more. This is because it was designed to be paired with a battery of a certain capacity. If you put in a bigger battery, many people would not see a difference because the battery is not often the limiting factor in how much electric mode you can use. In my case, it would ultimately lower overall efficiency by ading weight without changing the usage balance between the ICE and electric motor. If you increase battery capacity, you will need to restore the balance by increasing the capacity of the electric motor so you can make use of the extra juice. This is my problem with the Hymotion idea. Unless you can upgrade the motor, it will not appeal to many Hybrid drivers.
Maybe the other Hybrids would fare better if their electric motors were more powerful (in relation to the weight of the car).
. . . So you have panels on your roof (assuming you live in a house with a roof, not an appartment where you would have to share the roof with other's panels) and a huge battery pack in the garage. You charge that battery during the day and then use that battery to charge the car battery at night. Not terribly efficient but maybe do-able with a significant investment in money and space).
But what is efficient is that during the peak use daylight hours, PV arrays can spin the meter backwards as they dump power back into the grid - easing the load on the public utility until recapturing that energy overnight. Essentially not really storing the energy, but helping to balance out the load.
Re: hybrid plug ins
.
