Dashboard Feb-May 2013

Curious, do you know how that deal with the drag loss from the permanent magnets in the EV motors. These model process from a roll down are normally measured in "neutral", but not clear if the car is on or off. But the loss from a permanent motor varies depending on how if off (so all energy goes to heat), if its energized (netural in a volt is energized and actually using power) or if its in a regen mode and power is used to generate power for the battery. Is EV motor lost in the linear or velocity term?

 

Bob more power to you for making the calculation, but, there is a huge flaw in trying to assume initial adoptrs of plug ins value oil and electricity equally. At least the last 8 presidents and most americans would rather use more domestic electricity and less oil. You need to use a utilitiy function then to compare them. The plug in buy in California probably doesn't care at all about the solar supplyed to the car, but does care about the imported oil from the oil sands and opec. The same is probably trure about the texan that feeds the plug in with wind, or the West Virginian politician feeding it with coal.

Before you try to sell these folks that shorter range is better because it is more efficient, you should ask what they value about the energy they use. That is the fatal flaw about pushing small batteried plug ins and fcv to Americans. These preferences seem rather easy to evalute, and I think Toyota has started hearing the market feedback. IMHO the next phev should have a larger battery even if it uses more gas when the battery is empty. For the folks buying these vehicles is about gallons per year, not miles per gallon on long city trips. I would assume that most efficient buyers have a bias for toyota versus say chevy or tesla. That must mean their vehicles if made by toyota might sell even better. I think in the future toytota will try to better address this market segment instead of attempting to do a less expensive car before tax breaks.

 

^^ I'm not convinced, party line notwithstanding.
I loitered around Gm-volt.com for a while, and almost invariably when the question came up, the people who advocated for the Volt owned GM gas guzzlers.

Drinnovation is an outlier (which probably explains why he hangs out here.) Most Volt owners are hypocrites.

 

The question of Volt (in)efficiency is hard to pin down exactly across the different motive modes, but at least for EV the EPA can offer a comparison to the LEAF, which is rated 129 MPGe in the city. If we assume 15% charging losses and 33.4 kWh Gas gallon equivalent, the energy per mile from the battery is

(33400*.85)/129 = 220 Wh/mile.

Alternatively, just comparing combined MPGe between the two cars the Volt uses ~ 18% more energy/mile.

 

While I may be an outlier, I don't think the data supports that most volt owners used to own GM gas guzzlers, that may just be a confirmation biases since those folks may annoy you more.

There definately are some but from this thread/poll over at gm-volt.com
one can see that the number one prior brand was Toyota/Scion (35) followed by Other (32) (which unfortunately includes honda which was left off the list) then chevy (26) then BMW (12) then Volkswagen (12) then Caddilac (11) and Subrau/Suzuki (11) . Overall only 18% (37/205) were GM owners of any type. Given the approximate GM market share in the US is 18%, its suggests that owning GM is neither more or less likely to result in buying a Volt .

 

I don't think you are an outlier.
I formerly owned a Prius. A fellow Volt owner I know had a Prius as well.
I am sure there are a number of former GM owners, and hopefully lots of former gas guzzlers as that would result in more gasoline savings.

 

And PPI uses the same amount of extra energy as the Volt in electricity, plus the energy of 0.2 gallons of gas.

EVs will nearly always be more efficient than a PHV in EV mode. They don't have the weight and drag losses of an engine and more complex transmission to contend with.

 

Will Toyota do this? If so, when?

This basically what you asked of Volt owners in the past. Simple car owners sharing data and experiences found they had to answer for GM corporate's past actions and supply info on their future products.

Kinda hard to know if they are on ignore.

 

The disagreement is on the limitation of Lithium battery in the plugin hybrid application. It appears you see no limit in packaging, cost or weight.

 

I fear that we have become terribly diverted in this discussion. I only wished to answer the quetion of why the prius phv was lagging in sales, and what toyota could do in the future. IMHO this is clear that they should give the user a more EV driving experience and cut gallons per year, even if mpg city decreases.

IMHO people don't really care that much about efficiency. Really a leaf getting 115 mpge versus a prius phv getting 95 mpge isn't enough electricity for people to choose one over the other. The prius phv gets about the same mpge as the 60kwh tesla S. The key is how far you can go with a charged battery. The 2013 leaf if you charge to 100% goes an epa 85 miles, the prius phv epa 11 miles and to get there you burn some gas. Up it to a 20 mile range and the comparisons look less skewed. I think people would happily pay to carry an engine around to be able to occasionally go on long trips, but 11 mile charge depletion range is just too low.

 

You can't make a blanket statement like that. I have been getting 132 MPGe on my PiP EV miles. The newly optimized 2013 Leaf is rated 115 MPGe. The 2012 model is rated 99 MPGe.

PHV "cherry pick" the driving condition for the EV miles but pure EVs can't. For example, I can drive PiP EV mode purely in city traffic. Leaf has no choice since it has to handle all driving conditions with the battery.

 

Incorrect. Per EPA:

The Volt uses 35 kWh of electricity to travel 100 miles (wall to wheel.)
The PiP uses 29 kWh of electricity and 0.2 gallons of fuel.

Since we are interested in vehicle efficiency and not the charger, I'll remove 15% of the electricity used. Now
The Volt uses 29.75 kWh to travel 100 miles
The PiP uses 24.65 kWh to travel 100 miles

If we assume 36% average ICE efficiency for the PiP, the 0.2 gallons of petrol = 33.4*0.2*0.36 = 2.4 kWh for a total electricity equivalent of 27.05 kWh. The Volt uses 29.75/27.05 = 10% more energy/mile than the PiP.

 

The 250 lbs comes from ford's extra weight in the energi versus the hybrid. Real world data. I am sure that the toyota engineers aren't going to go back to the heavy prototype and can achieve what ford did, or even a lighter weight. Since the gen IV prius liftback is supposed to drop 150lbs, a gen IV prius phv should be even lighter than a gen III even with the bigger batteries.

We know that Toyota was talking about the cost of the battery going down to these levels by 2015, when the next generation comes out. I really don't think toyota is paying panasonic more today than Ford, and ford's costs are in line with the prices I gave you. Now we don't know. Toyota could have signed a long term contract and are paying too much, but those guys seem pretty savy. We should be around $500/kwh, on the way down according to the DOE to $300/kwh around 2020. It would be foolish to make a trade off based on 2008 costs of batteries, when new data says toyota and everyone else is paying much less than they estimated back then.

As for packaging, I simply was taking the volume of the prototype prius phv, and the size of the production pack. If the production pack was allowed to take up the volume in the prototype, we get around 6kwh. None of us have seen the new prototype, but if they designed the platform for both liftback and phv, 7kwh (18% more) should be easily achievable.

 

I think part of the reason is the inaccurate account of online reviews started with the prototype model.

I have seen these:
- Gas engine starts every time you start PiP
- Gas engine starts driving up the garage ramp
- The benefit of the blended (EV-BOOST) mode is downplayed or never reported. i.e. Once the gas engine starts, it defeats the purpose of a plugin
- The perception that highway driving on EV mode is a must-have feature for a plugin hybrid

All of those misconceptions do not help with the sale.

 

Point of order: He used the qualifier "nearly" to avoid a blanket statement.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

 

I agree with the possibilities with the next gen PiP.

The conversation started with the current PiP and the tax credit per kWh battery. You have expressed frustration with Toyota why they did not put larger battery in current PiP and how engineering compromise could have been made, etc. That was where I was disagreeing with you.

 

I would agree with this as part of the reason too. The press seems to like distorting plug-in vehicles.

 

I don't think I am the exception.

A more accurate statement would be "PHVs will nearly always be more efficient than a EV in EV mode".

That's because PHV can cherry pick EV miles and can be lighter than EV. An example would be PiP and Leaf.