I'm quite exited about this car, because it's constant speed motor is much more efficient than the other Hybrid systems...
Not necesssarily more efficient: any time that you transform power/energy, there's going to be transfer losses (see "Laws of Entropy"). As such, when you convert fuel to heat, to mechanical motion to electricity to chemical energy (battery), back to electricity, back to mechanical motion --> 7 sources of efficiency loss instead of just 2.
And even when pulling from the grid: convert fuel to heat, to mechanical motion to electricity,
... and also add in "power transmission losses" here ... to chemical energy (battery), back to electricity, back to mechanical motion --> 8 sources of efficiency loss, if we assume that there's zero losses from AC-DC or voltage transformers (fat chance!)
Besides, another huge issue that is overlooked with electrics is that in northern climates, the waste heat of the traditional internal combusion engine is what provides heat & defrost in the winter months. Sure, you can burn electricity with a resistance heater wire, but that consumes "mileage". As such, an electric car that can go 40 miles in the summer may not even make it 5 miles in a snowstorm.
Drive to work. Drive home. Plug in for an overnight recharge. Repeat.
Yeah. Stick it to OPEC, stick it to Big Oil.
But now you simply have a new master, known as 'Big Coal'.
Because the whole point of the phrase "miles per gallon" is that it implies the efficiency of using the gasoline...if you want a statistic on that, it should be a meaningful statistics, like the number or fraction of kilowatt hours at the electrical plug point the car will consume per mile.
On the right track.
The metric of comparison you want is "Cost per Mile".
And FYI, you can use this metric to normalize out a lot of areas where there's differences.
For example, there's difference in fuel type costs (gas vs diesel). Similarly, when you deal with hybrid mechanical systems, they're more complex so there's differences in maintenance costs. On this latter one, the lifecycle cost of just the battery pack in a Toyota Gas-Electric hybrid reportedly is roughly $3000 for 100K miles, which works out to 3 cents per mile.
So what you do from an analysis standpoint is to take its MPG rating and convert it into cents/mile, then add in $0.03/mile to account for its higher lifecycle cost, then if you want, you can convert it back to "Effective MPG" for comparison purposes.
For example: 40MPG @ $4/gallon = $0.10/mile. Add in 3c --> $0.13/mile. Convert back to MPG = (1 mile/$0.13)($4/gallon) = 30.7
effective MPG.
The bottom line is that the new technology is superior only when it actually improves the consumer's real bottom line costs of operation. The current hybrid systems in the USA simply don't yet cut it, even if we can ignore their higher purchase price.
Does anyone realize that the car needs to be plugged in to an outlet in the home overnight to charge the batteries.... and that will in turn drive your electric costs up?
Yes, but this cost is being trivialized, which is a warning sign for smarter folks who know to look for the
whole picture.
Correct on the drain on the electric grid.
But remember, the recharging will occur overnight, during low demand.
Demand does go down at night, but the question is if it drops off "enough" for popular marketplace conversion to occur without major infrastructure upgrades to the electrical grid. Do keep in mind that the average daytime load is currently running at 98% of maximum capacity of our infrastructure...that's not much of a safety margin, especially when everyone comes home and plugs in for a recharge at 5:30pm.
The bottom line here is that we're already behind the power curve on our investments to our electrical grid infrastructure even before we consider the potential impact of electric cars being added to it.
According to
this site it's about $1 to charge a plug-in hybrid.
I checked that page - they conveniently fail to clearly document how many Kw-hrs worth of energy they're talking about, or the Utility's rate that is being charged. There's a lot of variables here. For example, IIRC, my local Utility's rate is over $0.20/kW-hr and will probably go up by another 15% next year.
Park it outside, and get a couple of solar cells for the dashboard top.
Not enough room on the car to mount enough panels for what you need. For example, a standard 180W panel is roughly a half square meter ... not too far removed from the useful area of a car's roof ... putting it under theoretically optimum conditions for 8 hours, you get 0.180 * 8 hours = less than 1.5 kW-hr. Now how far will this car travel on that much energy? My guess is maybe 5 miles and pragmatically, probably 1/3rd of that (2 miles/day), after all of the real world conditions (on solar collection rates, etc) are taken into account.
And don't forget that in order to get this, you have to pay for the solar panel & charger; I'd SWAG this at around $1000, since retail on the panels are around $900, although since automakers like to have big markups on options, I'd expect them to try to charge a lot more. If you want two panels, double this cost. For three panels, triple it and so on.
-hh
