In an effort to make my car ever more econmic/eco, I have wondered about converting the petrol engine to LPG. I live in the Highlands of Scotland so a conversion would have to be duel fuel to take petrol if needed (incase I get stuck in the back of beyond where no LPG is available).

Has anyone any experience of doing something like this? I bet Toyota wouldn't approve.

 

Can't say in a Prius but when I lived in south Texas in the early 70's some farmers and ranchers (yes they were) would take their pickups to a propane place and they would convert them to duel fuel. The main problem back then was the LP would shorten the life of the valves. kevin

 

There is just too much going on with the Prius, in terms of computer control to know what propane will do. Propane has less energy per unit than gasoline when used as an engine fuel. Don't ask me how much because I don't know. However propane does make a good motor vehicle fuel when you design the fuel management system to change fuel metering and fuel/air mixture to more propane friendly values.

I don't want to say that a propane conversion of the Prius cannot be done, however I'm convinced that it would require Toyota's intervention to have the software updated to handle the very different qualities of that fuel. However, the Prius really isn't a good candidate for a propane conversion because the vehicle only has an 800 lb load limit and adding a pressure tank would take up a lot of space and would also significantly encroach on that load limit reducing the number of people you could carry or the amount of luggage you could carry.

Consider that the Prius achievers using regular gasoline what even a propane powered vehicle may not and that is an AT-PZEV emissions rating.

The value issue with propane converted vehicles had more to do with the manufacturer and their engine manufacturing process than it had to do with the fuel. GM was notorious for not using hardened valves back in the day. So, if you were buying GM vehicles and wanted to do a propane conversion on them you had to special order the vehicle as a "propane ready" vehicle, which meant that GM installed hardened valves in the engines of those vehicles.

Ford on the other hand has always used hardened valves, so any Ford product could be converted to propane with no issues associated with valve wear or deterioration.

 

So it's trickier that I first thought. I don't want to do anything that would stop Toyota looking after my car. Though apparently T was pretty calm about people finding ways of re-charging their cars with mains power. That would also be a neat trick.

 

And Toyota's specific line about doing any type of recharging of the HV battery outside of the vehicles own capacity to do so is highly frowend upon. The battery on these cars is not designed to be fully charged or discharged, but kept charged at a happy medium which the car actively manages on its own.

 

Before you do that check out this link

http://www.greencarcongress.com/lpg/index.html

Then scroll down to the prius story..

Its a really cool idea though..

Any modifacations you do to your car can result in voiding the warr.

If your going to modify wait until after the warr expires

 

I think the Yahoo group "Prius-Europe" had something posted about a month ago about a French Prius converted to use LPG. I don't know any other details.

I had looked at adding a natural gas option for warm-up and home use but after checking the $/btu of natural gas vs. gasoline, it didn't make economic sense for warm-up. We have a lot of hydroelectric power and it makes more sense to electrically pre-warm our Prius than use a dual-fuel option to bring it up to operating temperature.

One of my plans is to use the Prius for off-grid power. Right now, it provides emergency storm power, which I used just last Saturday when a substation failure left us power-less for over an hour, 36 (F). I plugged our gas furnace into the Prius and we had plenty of heat until the power returned. I even had power for a laptop and light.

Bob Wilson