I Have Seen The Next Generation Prius

[enerjazz]

Honda and Toyota are both working on carbon fiber.

Quote from an interview:
LOVINS: So I think that policy will now be reexamined. But I don't actually think the marketing will be a big problem. As soon as the automakers have cars made of this stuff--BMW may have it as early as next year; Honda and Toyota are in the carbon airplane business, not for amusement but to migrate the technology to cars--they will be marketing the safety of that stuff just as Honda successfully does now. And we have light cars, mainly imports, that are very safe, sell very well, no problem.

http://www.cfr.org/pub7553/amory_b_lovins_..._innovation.php

RMI spun off a for profit company - initially called Hypercar, but later changed to FiberForge (http://www.fiberforge.com/PAGES/home.html) after they realized that developing affordable carbon fiber technology was where the action is.

This site covers quite a bit about carbon fibers:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/1320/

Amory is meeting with the developers of the Prius soon. I told him to give them a big hug from me.

[Tideland Prius]

it's 0-60 in 3.2 secs Dave :P. It has fans underneath (not sure if they're active or free-spinning) to help with aerodynamics. I just got all this info from a Top Gear clip from the early 90s

[D'Tan]

Well, I'm involved in a project here at school where we're building a fuel-cell powered vehicle (we used to do solar cars, but we're going on to other power sources). The chassis is made mostly out of carbon fiber. There are metal reinforcements in some areas like where the suspension connects and the roll cage is metal. Don't recall what's steel and what's aluminum (and I don't care that much; I'm on the electrical side of things).

If you want to see how the panels were laid out, go here: http://www.und.edu/org/sea/

[Tadashi]

The book is very interesting and worth the read. They discuss the economic trade offs and show a vehicle that was in an accident (weight is extremely important in aircraft). The composite vehicle only suffered scratches and the normal car had to be towed. At low speeds I can understand this but the author failed to address what would happen at high speeds (as mentioned before no crumple zones). Unless the industry uses a layered mix of metal and composite.

He talked about a a high production automated method at 80% quality of hand methods at 20% of the cost. I remember doing graphite composite for a plane. We layered several layers of graphite cloth in different directions to account for different stresses. I do not remember baking it. We used epoxy and resins and left at room temp to cure. It was exteremly messy and time consuming.

Making the car lighter would be a problem. In El Paso we have 30-60 mph gusts from Nov - Apr. I get thrown around a bit already in my Prius. I guess they can semi-enclose certain areas of roads to accomidate this problem.

[richard schumacher]

I'd bet on titanium instead. A new reduction method should soon make it about as cheap as aluminum.

[Ray Moore]

Aluminum isn't cheap.

[200Volts]

I interface to the aerospace industry and there is a big carbon fiber material shortage right now. Carbon fibers come woven or in strands. The woven material is used like cloth is in fiberglass and the strand material is wound around mandrels to create complex shapes.
Titanium will never happen in high volume. Racers nicknamed Titanium "unobtainium" because of the expenses for raw material and machining. It's relatively brittle compared to Aluminum or Steel. Some small parts are made of Titanium now (like A arms on the corvette, I think).

The big Audi has an all Aluminum body and the commerical shows 2 men holding up the body by themselves.

[DaveinOlyWA]

Tideland Prius;

you must have specs on the slow one. the one i read about does 0-60 in 2.1 sec

Next generation Prius?



570 kg !!


Less than half the weight of the current Prius! 8)

[kidtwist]

Next generation Prius?

570 kg !!

That looks like a cross between a Prius and an Insight. I'm all for a next-generation Prius, but I hope it doesn't look like that.