Toyota negative on batteries because it has more experience than other others on them

True, but the Malibu hybrid will have 47 mpg versus the comparable Camry hybrid with 41 mpg when the Malibu comes out in the spring of 2016.

It will be interesting to see what the Camry will get with the 4th gen hybrid system.

 

Not to send it to Fred's house of pancakes, but the new Lutz is donald trump. Loud and wrong and some people like him. They say idiot things because people pay attention, and their were many that didn't like the idea of the hybrid they jumped on board. Many don't like the idea of the bev, especially the auto dealers association. Lutz's anti hybrid crap probably cost share holders a lot of money, and many employees their jobs, but it made Lutz a lot of money. It helped him push back against cafe standards (you know the politics), which actually turned out bad for gm, but the board gave him a nice salery to hurt share holder value and help drive the company to bankrupcy. I think these guys at toyota will make out just fine, even if the stupid crap costs toyota shareholders. Unlike lutz, I don't think it will cost toyota employees there jobs though. As Toyota has pointed out they have $60B in the bank so they can blow anouther $3B-$5B on hydrogen hype, politics, and loses on the cars. They actually had engineers learn a lot when building the rav4 ev with tesla, experience they can use for thier next bev or phev, or in partnering with tesla again. Toytoa is really really bad at innovation, they had one, the prius. They are really good at being fast followers and manufacturing. I think they wait to see what nissan/chevy/tesla do for thier volt/bolt/? 200 mile bev/model 3. If they are too far behind they partner again, if they aren't they build a competitor in 4 years based on what they are working on now. That would be around 2021-2023 if they do it in house. I don't expect plug-ins to be over 5% of the market before then so it will be fast enough.

I do think that the toyota chairman really believes that fcv will kill plug-ins, but I don't think the president does but he needs the chairman's support for other things he is doing. The moves are just wrong. That's why when these people at Lexus, Toyota America, and Toyota Japan spout non-sense they are rewarded in the company.

 

it will be interesting to see what the malibu will get...

 

If the Malibu does compete -- great. Even GM should be able to copy a design in 20 years. We'll see.

But MPG is not the entire story, is it ? The car also:

1. Has to compete on price to the consumer
2. Be profitable to the manufacturer
3. Be equally reliable

I'm not holding my breath.

Sorry for beating a dead horse, but consider:

A Prius has according to USB's link a 34% well to wheel energy extraction of source energy while a specific iteration of a FCV reaches 40%. The FCV is around a ~ 17% improvement.

So the Prius has to reach 50*1.17 = 58.5 MPG to be equivalent. If the grid was transport related 17% cleaner and the Prius covered 17% of it's miles with EV the outcomes would be equal. Even the modest PIP blasts past that threshold.

But at what cost, you say ? About $2000 per car (and going down dramatically by the year) and enough PV to fuel the EV miles. Since it is obvious that PV is cheaper than liquid fossil fuel I'll be generous and set the additional cost at $0.

 

Just over 20 years ago a patent was filed in February, 1995 describing the specific design details of what was later sold as the first generation Prius hybrid system. The patent, US 5558595, was from GM.

Toyota was still working away and didn't file their first Prius hybrid patent for over another year in Japan and didn't begin selling the Prius in Japan until December, 1997.

GM extended their original "Prius" design to improve its highway speed efficiency and began selling it for use in transit busses as announced in this January, 2001 press release:

General Motors Unveils Parallel Hybrid Technology For Commercial Vehicle Applications - EVWORLD.COM

Production sales of this new eCVT hybrid system began by 2003. It's still the top-selling hybrid bus transmission system today (now sold by GM's Allison Transmission spinoff). They later downsized and adapted the design for performance-centered hybrid SUVs and pickups in 2008, the year after Toyota began selling the Camry hybrid in 2007.

The 2016 Malibu (and 2016 Volt) hybrid system is an adaptation of the same core ideas from the 2003 bus hybrid design.

So, it's misleading to say "GM should be able to copy a design in 20 years".

 

Many of the ideas are similar, although the positioning and function of M/G2 may not be. That is beyond my understanding of the HSD operation without a review. The patent only suggests parallel operation, which if true explains why it never made it to production. Mild hybrids are just not that efficient. We should also note that the GM patent has not even decided on battery use for the 'fly-wheel' requirement. In short it was a defensive IP submission and no where near any practical application. You can find much earlier Toyota patents with similar intent, which is why there was never any realistic possibility of any US car company suing Toyota for IP infringement.

We have rehashed the history before:

• The seminal idea of an e-CVT to replace a mechanical transmission predated all the motor companies.
• Toyota was motivated to introduce the Prius out of fear that the American PNGV program would lead to a Detroit technological advantage. If you want to show where Toyota stood on the shoulders of great American inventors, start with the work of Wouk. The same Wouk who pleaded with Detroit for 10 years to put his ideas in practice and was rejected. All the leading ideas and concept cars were hybrids of one sort or another. One has been wildly successful. All the imitators to date have been flops.
• Toyota's secret sauce are the control algorithms and willingness to invest in firmware manufacturing. You can see the Toyota H/W S/W advantage to this day in the Volt. GM could not program an efficient mixed mode hybrid so marketing solved the problem by declaring isolated EV mode a good thing (tm), and the "EREV" was born.

 

I feel your pain Bob. But remember when GM paid Art Spinella to publish how the Hummer was more green than the Prius? Same thing here. It took a lot of rebuttal to go against the constant drone of ridiculousness . Even to this day, there are crackpots out there passing on that urban legend - just because they read it on some 2007 GM blog some where.
.

 

The February, 1995 GM patent describes a strong hybrid system with a gas engine, 2 electric motors, a battery pack, hybrid control computers, a single clutch-free planetary gear set, and it describes mechanically and electrically connecting them all together in exactly the same manner as the original Prius design -- MG1 on the Sun gear, engine on the planetary carrier, and the wheels and MG2 on the ring gear. It also describes various other possible arrangements along the same theme. In other words, GM understood the conceptual design at least as early as Toyota and did not "copy" it 20 years later.

Link or patent number citation please....

This is completely false. The first Toyota Prius-like hybrid patent filing cites GM's 1995 patent as prior art.

Actually true. The ~1970 TRW design invented the basic single planetary gear hybrid eCVT idea although it's arrangement for hooking things together was different from the Prius.

Also true.

GM's bus hybrid system from 2003 implements a superset of the same type of control algorithms used in the Prius system.

None of this supports your claim that "GM should be able to copy a design in 20 years".

At best, you could claim that GM first manufactured for U.S. customer delivery an extended variation for large commercial vehicles of the same general type of eCVT implementation in the Prius about 5 years after the first Prius sale in Japan (or about 2 years after the first Prius sale in the U.S.).

 

I showed it to you years ago so I am not surprised you have forgotten.
I'll try to find some time to dig it up again

 

I assume you are thinking of this:

Towing revisited: Weber State | PriusChat

That patent was from 1967:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US3478619.pdf

It has to do with ship propulsion systems and has almost no similarity to the Prius eCVT design.

It does not appear to have been filed by Toyota although it appears to have been filed by someone in Japan. I'm not sure where you dredged it up.

Fail.

 

Yes! How did you find it ? I see obvious similarities but you are correct that it may not be from Toyota.

Here is a Wouk Patent: Patent US4021677 - Hybrid power system - Google Patents
From 1975. As I said earlier, if you want to call the Prius a child of Victor Wouk I have no objection.

Here is a wonderful NYT article on Victor Wouk: Victor Wouk and The Great Hybrid Car Cover-up of 1974 - HybridCars.com

 

I found your old post by googling.

Basically, that patent describes how to use multiple engines to jointly drive a ship propeller. One engine mechanically drives the propeller and a second engine drives a generator which sends its power to an electric motor which can help drive the propeller shaft in parallel with the first engine. The patent then describes several variations on that design theme.

That 1967 ship propulsion patent does not describe a continuously variable transmission and has no planetary gear set or hybrid battery. It has almost nothing to do with the Prius.

I'll skim it again, but the last time I looked at this Wouk patent it did not have much similarity to the Prius design. It is a different approach from the TRW conceptual lineage.

So, no, the Prius is not a child of Victor Wouk. At least not genetically. Wouk was an historically important hybrid inventor but his design was on a different branch of the hybrid evolutionary tree.

 

They gave up on it because their customers didn't want to use it.

If the US government is the one left building out the infrastructure for SAE combo chargers, and not some private entity like Tesla did with the Supercharger, it will be a whole lot cheaper than building out hydrogen infrastructure. The others also have the option of buying into Tesla's network.

In what way are they hybrid cars? Hybrid cars have two motive generators; the ICE and an electric motor in the case of all hybrids available today. FCEVs just have one; the electric motor. In the case that bi-fuel cars are consider a hybrid, a FCEV can only be fueled with hydrogen by the user. Toyota labels their FC system HSD for purely marketing purposes. Which is fine, but it won't fly technically.

That is the first I've heard of Toyota actually helping to build a nationwide network of hydrogen stations

First, a person that actually needs to travel a thousand miles in day won't be buying a BEV. I don't think a long haul truck can go a thousand miles before the driver has to take the legally required rest break. Second, if there are hydrogen stations available, they can only fast fill a car when the fill tank is up to pressure and down in temperatures. When either of those conditions aren't at spec, then it takes longer. Pulling into a station after a rush of other cars can mean a refill time as long as charging a Tesla. Third, a plug in hybrid can do that hypothetical 1000 mile trip just as quickly as any other ICE car while providing the benefits of a BEV and FCEV for most daily driving.

Tesla has been installing solar power in addition to the Superchargers. The country is also moving away from coal. It's percent of the grid has been dropping, and it will be lower by the time a FCEV can drive in a coal dependent state. If natural gas prices increase, the hydrogen for a FCEV may very well come from coal.

As I said, a plug in doesn't need that infrastructure in order to have a positive impact on transportation emissions. That means BEVs can't be used for long trips, but since the cars can cover 80% of a driver's use now, and more in the near future, that isn't a big deal. Especially considering most households have more than one car.

Hydrogen FCEVs absolutely need an infrastructure that is virtually non-existent to be built from the ground up. This will cost more than if we had to build a g

The sad thing is that they really didn't need one. It would have help some back during that gas price spike in 2008, but just having any fuel efficient car that was desirable back then would have helped. They now have such cars, and they are comparable in fuel economy to their ICE competitors. Seeing how the next best selling hybrids may get sales numbers of around half of the Prius, GM really hasn't been hurt by the lack of a Prius competitor. It doesn't seem to have hurt any of the others either. The Volt has given them the green and technology halo that the Prius has given Toyota. We'll get to see how the Malibu hybrid and Hyundai's Prius fight do next year.

 

Ok, I skimmed Wouk's patent again. It's basically similar to the old Honda Civic parallel hybrid with one motor that is attached between the engine and the transmission. It also includes a "thermal reactor" emission system as an alternative to using a catalytic converter. It describes how to control the engine and emission control system without the need to have a modern computer-based controller.

There is no eCVT continuously variable transmission or planetary gear set and there is only a single motor. Not a Prius-like design.

So, to reiterate, there was the TRW patent circa 1970 that used an engine, two motors, a planetary gear set, and a battery. But, it hooked up the components to the planetary gears differently than the Prius and there was no hybrid computer controller so the driver was required to manually control the power flows through MG1 and MG2. This was not a practical product design at the time.

Then there were no closely similar patents of significance until GM filed US 5558595 in February 1995 which exactly describes the Prius electromechanical hybrid transmission design along with other closely related variations.

GM subsequently files several other "two-mode" or multi-mode patents that are derived from their first patent within the following year or two (and continuing on for years after that). These newer patents use additional planetary gear sets and clutches that can shift between different internal power flows within the transmission.

These newer patents allow for an additional eCVT mode beyond the Prius-like (input-split) eCVT which GM can use to transmit mechanical power more efficiently at highway speeds. There are also variations which allow for multiple direct fixed gears and for detaching the engine from the motors during high speed EV plugin driving.

These later patents are the basis for the bus, SUV, and 2016 Malibu/Volt hybrid transmissions.

GM did not "copy" Toyota's hybrid transmission design.

 

t

Sure, now thoughtfully and with engineering expertise combine the patents of Wouk, Severinksky, TRW and (perhaps) Joslin and what do you get ?

 

It looks to me like you are fighting the right battle on the wrong battlefield. The Prius eclipsed what every car maker in a big revolutionary step. But this was not because Toyota had some special engineering knowledge any different or unavailable to all other vehicle drivetrain engineers. What Toyota has was some first rate corporate leadership (at that time) willing to commit the funding, development staff, and accept the high risk of a very dramatic change in a car drive train...from the bottom up in every single component area. This allowed the smart engineering to do something revolutionary.

Meanwhile at GM, Ford, and Chrysler the industry leadership was still stuck in the "We need even bigger SUVs" trap. All the engineering direction at those companies was lead by Lutz types. Their response is still mostly to modify what they have. This avoids the essential step of committing (like Toyota did) to a revolutionary auto. Tesla is the other company with some engineering savvy leadership. Till this day an American hybrid is a rehash of an existing vehicle. The Volt probably being the notable exception.

 

as always, gm has a finger up in the air, to see which way the wind is blowing. they miscalculated on hybrids, and were fortunate to get a bailout. let's hope the leadership learned from their mistakes, or previous leaders mistakes. their engineers are fine i'm sure, but they don't ever hold sway.

will we be saying the same about toyota in 10 years, i could be wrong, but i don't think so.

 

I don't know why this trip down memory lane, but of course TRW first patented the idea. TRW patents were expeired when gm, ford, and toyota used them in their hybrid systems. Toyota and Ford would have included gm in their patent swap if gm had been interested in doing a psd, not much money if any would have needed to change hands and didn't in the case of ford and Toyota.

I think there is only the myth of intellectual property preventing gm from cheaply licensing the same tech that toyota used in its 2003 gen II prius. If they had wanted to at that point, they could have had a good psd hybrid in 2008. What they did was Lutz it. GM thought they couldn't make money on such a car, and they probably couldn't until.... 2008 pr 2009, and that would have required they didn't gm-ize the hybrid, spend a lot of money moving it to lots lots of tiny changes and sell it at lots of dealership, you know a chevy version, a Pontiac version, and a Cadillac version all sucking the wind out of R&D and marketing. GM thought aha, we will put it in big heavy vehicles where we can hide the cost. That's what they came out with in 2008 instaed, all the while talking down the better idea. That better idea might have raised cafe standards and closed the SUV loophole. which might have hurt the companies drive to build inefficient but profitable SUVs. GM had plenty of money to take losses like toyota on the hybrids and ev1 at first, but spent it instead on fuel cell research. That may sound familiar. Lutz later admired killing the ev-1 and not investing more inhybrids were big mistakes. He still maintains that they won't have made gm much money, but hit hurt their marketing and offended customers. Remember it was gm shareholders, taxpayers, and employees that sufferered from the Lutzing of the prius. Bob Lutz made a lot of money doing it.

Lots of parrellels to some of the players trying to get media attention and bonuses for lutzing the plug-in. Some of the pro-fuel cell comments seem taken right out of bob's talking points, but in his book he said he never believed fuel cells would work anytime soon.

 

Toyota also had government funding through MITI from their LEV(low emission vehicle) program, which started in the 1970's IIRC. Part of this was a direct subsidy that covered half the price difference between a hybrid or BEV and the equivalent ICE vehicle.
It was a results of this program, including the low sales, that lead to the Japanese government and auto corporations that BEVs would not succeed beyond cheap, short range city cars. Which might have been true for the time, since these were BEVs of the EV1 era. The best had NiMH packs, and the rest lead acid. Lithium ion may not have been appraised as part of the program.

Ford was starting to change course at this time. Development of the Escape hybrid started during PNGV, and Mulaly(sp?) was brought on as CEO from Boeing to help shake up the company.

Toyota may not have committed without the backing from the LEV program, which had vehicles coming to market as a goal, unlike PNGV.

A pearl of truth in a typo?

 

typo? i thought he meant it.