A Hybrid for the Future - 1979

That video is too cool (and a little too long for 2012 - we like 15-sec sound bites now). Wow DOE were right on top dead center, even looks like a PiP, and one participant went home and did it (Japan). Sort of like wind energy, we let it get away.

 

Very interesting. Some questions:

What happened to this project? (hope we can avoid a political debate).

Did they build any of these?

What kind of fuel mileage did they get?

Was this before the advent of neodymium magnets and nickle metal hydride batteries?

Who chose that crappy music?

 

cool video.

 

You will note this happen during the Carter Administration. Reagan took over in 1980 and apparently, Reagan undid some of those projects during his time, which also included Solar Panels on the White House.

As for the 'crappy' music, remember the era... At that time, that was decent music for that time in an informational age. Much better than some of the other 70s type music.

 

They were very accurate in predicting fuel savings.. "(it will) slash fuel consumption from 40%5-55% for a typical driver."

IIRC- the auto industry was in crisis in the early eighties (1979- Oil Embargo, 1980 Chrysler bailout, etc...) which may be the reason this project never took off.

Consumers didn't start seeing NMH batteries till the early 90's so that 1979 hybrid would have had to rely on lead-aid or Ni-Cad (yuck!) batts for EV propulsion.

No on-board computers back in the day either- so it would have had to be done through discrete circuit boards, relays, etc...

Maybe it was better it didn't happen back then

 

Actually, it would have been better if it did happen. That would have been also 20 years of pushed improvements in the Hybrid design and we would be at least 5 years ahead on electric car and battery designs as well.

Remember some innovations are pushed by necessity. Cellphones, for instance, have changed a lot from 1997 to now. And 5 years prior to that, even more so. Had we seriously had 20 years of focus in Hybrid car development, we would be sitting on much more efficient Hybrids or even actual electric/fuel cell based cars.

 

IIRC, the battery technology just wasn't up to the task at the time. Briggs and Stratton made a hybrid concept then, and it had to rear axles, so 6 wheels total, to support the weight of the lead acid batteries in the trunk. NimH wasn't available until the time of the EV1, and not even right away. The first EV1s had lead acid.

Some beat me to the punch.

Don't forget the influence of gas prices and the public's short memory. The embargo was soon forgotten by most, and gas was under $2 a gallon up to when the Insight and Prius arrived.

 

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1]General Motors EV1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

This quote I narrowed in on as important for one thing... The regret here was axing the program too soon, even with the problems with the battery technology, as they would have been 'side by side' with Toyota hybrid wise. The fact they axed the program, they lost years of development time that the Volt would have been out sooner instead of the last two years. When you look at some of the stats, the car, even with the Lead Acid battery, was even 'faster' than the volt is now, as far as acceleration.

The problem here, is that in the 80s, alt fuel based technologies were abandon by Reagan because his mandate was more for pushing for other things and bolstering the defense at that time than worry about fuel and alt power issues. In the last 20 years now, we went back to worries of fuel with the Iraq/Kuwait issue and then again in 2001 with concerns with the Middle East due to Al Qaeda. In the 20+ years, we focused a lot on other things, buy left car technology to stay about the same engine-wise for a long time. We also went as far as just 'bigger is better' and ignored other alternatives save the more adventurous or experimenting types who wanted to try something different, but those have been more personal hobbies versus full mass production or focus on actual full on production level goods.

 

I couldn't watch much of that but...

Yes they built one in 1982, it was a vw and they claimed 100 mpg. I don't know how they measured that. It used lead acid batteries. It was a luxury 5 passenger car. The program then shifted back to pure evs. The next was a ford.

Let's get the record straight. The biggest thing Regan did to make this program fail, was remove the oil price controls that nixon had put in place, and carter had only partially dismantled. They were responsible for the carter gas lines, and underinvestment. Once those were gone and the mishandled iranian crisis was gone, gasoline naturally dropped in price and increased in availability. Even today with much more expensive gas and years of hybrids, there are not many phevs on the road. Higher cafe standards, a gas tax, and incentives would have been needed to get them to take off. Bush/Obama have added two of these.

It was a solar water heater on the whitehouse that leaked. That really is a symbol of many of the carter policies. If reagan had fixed it, and the solar policies I'm not sure how much of a difference it would have made. Instead he dismantled them. It was up to clinton to remove the carter policies to favor coal power plants.

 

The failure was not push in the '80s it was lack of pull of technology in the '90s. The 1980s really were a time for R&D. The technology really was too expensive to commercialize. The problems of programs in the 1990s are outlined here.
http://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/3781_FreedomCAR_Final.pdf
Feel free to agree or disagree. But certainly instead of a "moon shot" the government could have gone with more modest goals along with higher cafe standards and incentives. These things only started to get implemented in the mid 2000s, unless you include the SUV tax deduction that came in 1997

 

I'm sorry - but I let it bug me when folks come along and infer being 'the first' at something when in fact things often took place long before the "look what I did first" crowd . . . one might consider googling Victor Wouk's master piece built basically by his brother and himself - a half decade prior to the OP;


If I remember, Wouk won $50,000 for his proof of concept ... something like that. See the building in the background? Good ol' EPA. They sponsored the concept. True to form though, they didn't have the cojones to force the implementation into production. Why should they, gas was what ... 79¢ a gallon? Better to wait until peak oil production, and $4 a gallon I say.
hwell:

Even prior to that? Of all companies, it was forward thinking GM, w/ it's Opel hybrid:

Of course, true to form with GM ... and like the EV1 ... they decided to kill it in the womb ... never to be sold ... just showing off what they could do, but wouldn't do. More money in making cars on the cheep.

Even decades earlier, I believe it was V/W or porsche that had hub motors in wheels as a hybrid. But I digress.

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Let me see if I understand this project....

A U.S. Government DOE funded project. Managed by JPL in Pasadena. Prime contractor is GE. Subcontractors in the US, Germany, and Japan.

A 30 month project to produce a working mule prototype hybrid automobile. This video produced by the DOE at mid-project - 15 months. Looks to be on-schedule.

Can you guys imagine trying to do a project with this number of contractors today??? It would never happen in 30 months. It would take that long just for the DOE to write the basic design specification and select the prime contractor....

It appears that in 1979 the Government took the same approach as they did for NASA space program projects -- which was highly successful in getting things done in a minimal amount of time with minimal cost over-runs.

Pardon my editorial, but NASA appears today to be on the junk pile of government institutions. From the 1960's - 1980's it was probably one of the most successful government institutions ever created. What happened???

Keith

 

Maybe the DOE would struggle ... but the DOD and it's trillion dollar budget (defending our global oil interests ... whoops ... I mean, 'defending freedom') do it all the time. You buy hum vee's that have insufficient armor (for a quarter million) then you retrofit with armor withing 180 days (for another quarter million) and only loose a few hundred GI's in the interim. The industrial military machine - sucking us dry, a trillion dollars at a time. But I digress.

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That car looks like the Triumph Lynx (that never was);

File:TriumphLynx.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Don't forget the EV-Electrovair concepts in 1964+ as well.

 

Lead acid would not have been that big a deal. A hybrid only needs 0.5-1kWh to do a decent job. The batteries used in the original EV1 were 39.8 lbs, and at 12V x 53Ah were 0.64 kWh each. Would not have been hard to design a 100 lb PHEV pack in lead acid. They were much better suited to PHEVs than EVs

You'd also be surprised what can be done without digital computers. I was always blown away by the late 70s design of the SAAB "Automatic Performance Control" turbo analog controller. Allowed dynamic optimization of turbo boost pressure with quality of fuel, so you didn't have run premium but still got the best possible performance. All basically done with passives (resistors, capacitors, etc) and amplifiers. The design was still in use up through the mid-90s, and according to many pretty much revolutionized turbo-charging into the mainstream.

 

Actually, it would have been better if it did happen.

 

Development History of the Hybrid Test Vehicle
Hard to read, but they used 10x 12v volt batteries designed by Johnson Controls for the program. It was an 800lb 12.5kwh pack. My dad worked at Johnson Controls, but I was too young at the time to see the car, but vaguely remember later seeing the various r&d efforts with electric cars and motorcycles. It had a peak 34kw motor and a 74hp ice. The car was under complete microprocessor control. They also did not try to go electric with accessories but used conventional car components. I'm sure the toyota engineers looked at some of the JPL results of this car when designing the prius.

 

While patting all the numerous hybrid inventers, I almost forgot another of my hybrid heros ... a certain ex soviet engineer by the name of Alex J. Severinsky:



Toyota, as defendant, fought him for well over a half decade in court claiming that Toyota did NOT copy (rip off) his hybrid ideas. In short, the courts held otherwise - ordering Toyota to pay Mr Severinsky $25 a piece for each Prius, HyHi, Camry, and the various Lexus branded hybrids. Each time Toyota would appeal, Severinsky would add another patent infringement. It's a great read - on par with the David versus Goliath story. As Toyota faced more and more liability against Severinsky, Toyota eventually decided to cry "Uncle!" ... settling out of court.

The Hybrid Inventor Who Sued Toyota – And Won
The Hybrid Inventor Who Sued Toyota - And Won | Autopia | Wired.com

Who ever thought we'd owe so much of the Prius, to an ex-soviet anti tank weapons developer. Truth is way stranger than fiction.


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