PRIUS+ Technical Summary updated and available

[felixkramer]

PriusChat Members

We've been reading through and consolidating in one place the email postings on the technical issues involved in creating PRIUS+ -- adding Nickel Metal Hydride or some kind of Lithium batteries and recharging to the 2004 Prius to demonstrate the benefits of grid-chargeable, pluggable or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs).

That document, updated for the first time in a month, can be found at
http://www.calcars.org/PriusPlusTechPosts.doc (it's about 300K).
The past month's posts include discussions of Toyota's external grid charger for Prius batteries, some interesting new strategies and brief status reports from Wayne Brown and others about their current experiments.

The source for these postings is primarily:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Prius-2G/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gridable-hybrids/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Prius_Technical_Stuff/
as well as private emails that the authors are willing to make public.

We hope this document will make it more convenient for people who don't follow the discussions at those groups to see what all the excitement is about -- and get involved. In the spirit of Open Source software development projects, we feel the more expert and imaginative minds apply themselves to this project, the better!.

Here comes the advertisement for our volunteer, non-profit effort: we also hope your enthusiasm will lead you to help the California Cars Initiative -- we need participants, sponsors and even patrons.

Briefly, our plan is to create a proof-of-concept vehicle and show it around to early adopters, especially '04 Prius owners from the ranks of high-wealth entrepreneurs and celebrities who can afford to risk voiding their warranties. Their efforts can help commercialize an advanced generation of hybrids that may never see the light of day without public demonstrations of driver/buyer interest.

The goal is for all of us to be able to buy full highway-capable PHEVs from Toyota and other car makers.

You can read all about it, including links to recent interviews at EV World and NPR's Living On Earth, starting at
http;//www.calcars.org/priusplusdetails.html or the URLs below.

[richard schumacher]

Before building a prototype, spend some effort on simulations of operation strategies. A spreadsheet can be a cost-effective start. These will help point out and perhaps answer questions that might not be obvious (or worse, ones which have obvious answers that are wrong). For example: is it really best to top off the battery from the wall plug at home? How much gas is saved or pollution reduced under the *best possible* scenario? (That last question can be addressed even if it's impossible to implement the optimal strategy; that is, the ideal operating strategy may require the driver to anticipate the total energy requirement and power useage profile of a trip.) You may find that even under infeasibly good conditions the actual benefit is simply not worth the bother.

This isn't as sexy as lobbying or fund raising or tinkering with hardware but it will make those other efforts more effective.

I'd bet a dollar that Toyota has already worked on this, but they are not likely to give away their results.