HyMotion and Prius Life Expectancy

I personally think that increasing electric usage would not extend the life of the car, because I think the engine in a Toyota is not the limiting factor to vehicle longevity. But I also think that the Prius is not the ideal vehicle to try to convert. It is already so efficient that additional efficiency increases would not have enough benefit to balance out the costs and risks of the (unauthorized) modification. If Toyota adopts this kind of improvement, on the other hand, the entire vehicle will be redesigned to be compatible with it, and any additional batteries will have proper safety measures. Also, it's much cheaper to design features into a car than to add them as aftermarket mods.

As for pricing, I believe that Toyota is making a profit on the Prius, because it's in the business of making a profit, like any other company. But I also think it is keeping its profit margin low in order to penetrate the market with its new, proprietary technology. It's going after market share for the long term. And it's competing with the whole range of conventional and hybrid cars on the market.

(Elsewhere I've seen arguments about whether Toyota is or is not a "green" company. No company is "green." But Toyota is filling the growing market niche for a green car. And doing it better than any other company, judging by market share for green cars.)

 

dbermanmd you do have some valid points and I hope you're right.

I personally wouldn't pay $9000 just for the plug-in option. In fact you can buy a new Chevy Aveo for about $10k or a used car for that amount. (I've even seen used old prii go for around $14k) Most people may find it more practical to just buy another car or spend the money on gas. But there's always those who will buy it for the high price, and you have to thank those people since they will be the ones "paving" the way for the technology to improve and become lower priced.

I'd personally like to see the plugin option at around $2000. Maybe Toyota is already planning a Package 10 option with plugin for 2008.

 

An electric motor or generator can only function as long as the metal inside it maintains its pool of electrons. Once the electron pool is drained, the guts will have to be rebuilt with 'fresh' metal chock full of electrons. Mechanical wear due to friction may or may not kill the device first.

If there's a formula for how long one can expect a given size motor to last based on the weight of its guts, I don't know it. All I can assume is that Toyota tested enough to think their equipment will last as long as their warranty. Beyond that may just be luck...

 

This may be completely off --
I thought the common breakdown is degeneration (cracks, melting) of the copper windings.

 

There's a distinct possibility that once metal looses the majority of the free electrons it started with, it tends to fall apart. They were there, then they got ripped out to use for power. Why wouldn't the metal complain?...

 

Wth? :lol:

 

In a way I think this is true. An EV car (like the GM1 or Rav IV) probably required a lot less maintainence then a normal car does and Electric engines as far as I know are not expensive. So the expensive part would be the batteries themselfs... I think Li-Ion will where out after 6-10 years, maybe that can be improved but they will probably be the first thing to go and they will cost several thousand to replace.

Still I'm willing to pay upwards of $6000 just for the coolness factor of an EV car!

 

While at least one other poster finds this theory amusing, where else does a generator get its supply of electrons? They have to be ripped out of the metal inside the generator, and that must eventually have an impact on the metal.

Also, as metal conducts electricity, it would be silly to assume that only the generated electrons are moving along the wires. Certainly fewer electrons are dragged out of the wires than are coming from the generator, but to say 0% of the electrons ending up at a lightbulb came from the wores leading to it sounds silly. Resistance must involve the loosening of some electrons as current passes through. Superconductors sock their electrons into an order which keeps them out of the way of oncoming electrons, so they would be experiencing a 0% electron loss.

A motor, which (usually) gets instead of gives power, would suffer less from electron decay but eventually its metal would be affected. A Prius bounces back and forth, so the decay would be more profound, and relying on regenerative braking will eventually lead to electron depletion.

Again, how long it takes to drain a given amount of metal so that it can't generate electricity isn't something I can tell you, but it will eventually happen. Weakening of metal involved in a generator may be a sign it happens quickly. If other mechanical problems will kill most generators first, then that's why the issue seems laughable...

 

I apologize, but while I do see where you're coming from there, the motor gives and gets the electrons to and from the battery. While metal may be affected eventually, I would think that mechanical engine problems, other mechanical problems and body rusting etc, would kill the car first.

 

I'm just hoping for 200,000 miles, which will be 10 years at my current pace.

I'm expecting that if I maintain this car, the standard auto parts might tough it out that long. Hybrid-related stuff could be iffy for someone (not me) who rides their brakes and finds out how tough the generating equipment actually is when it cranks out current far more often than Toyota anticipated...

 

excellent stuff... for anyone who wants it.. I compiled these into a word doc.

 

Wow.. thats alot of stretching to get your figures to work?
We started out with a 1.3kwh battery that got shrunk due to computer rationing and purposes of longevity all the way down to .3kwh!.....

That would mean we are only using 23% of our total battery?.... If your figures have foundation, then I see your rational.... but I would like to see the facts for that.

.3kwh = 300 watts for an hour.. it takes about 2 minutes to go 1 mile at 30mph.
So if you take your 300watts you claim is the usable power for one hour of our existing battery, the you muliply it times 30 (to compress the one hour worth of energy down to 2 minutes), you get 9000watts for 2 minutes to deplete the battery and get you one mile.

9000 watts divided by 740 (watts that equal one horsepower) you get 12 horsepower for 2 minutes to deplete the battery and get you one mile.

I'm not too good in math due to careless mistakes.... But does all this sound about right?

 

... electrons ripped out of the generator ... blah blah ...
.
Absolutely. Snug down that tinfoil hat good an' tight, now...
.
_H*

 

202 volts times 6.5 Ah gives 1300 Watt-hours (1.3 kWh) for the total battery capacity.

The maximum charge available is 81%, and the minimum available is 41%.

(See here for more details of the Prius battery).

The green / pink / blue bars you see do not correspond to exact percentages of battery state of charge (SOC).

(See this graphic, courtesy of Wayne Brown http://www.seattleeva.org/wiki/Image:Index.54.jpg ).

Green 2 - 81%
Green 1 - 70%
Blue 4 - 60%
Blue 3 - 54%
Blue 2 - 51%
Blue 1 - 48%
Pink 2 - 45%
Pink 1 - 41%

If you had all the bars available (max green to bottom pink) you could extract 40% of the battery's charge (520 Watt-hours), but that rarely happens. Typically, from, say, one green bar to the bottom blue bar (when the computer is more likely to kick you out of EV mode), you only have 22% available, or 286 Wh - a good bit lower than the 5,000 Wh you might get from the secondary pack.

hope this helps!

 

mikepaul: Are you playing with us, or have you actually gone insane? I presume it's the former. I have a friend who's insane, and it's really sad.

Assuming you're playing with us, I'll play along:

A generator does not supply electrons. It just gives a push to the electrons in the wire. They'll bunch up at one end and be scarce at the other, creating a voltage potential. If there is a complete circuit (a path from one end to the other) they'll flow through the circuit, continuously round and round, and because of the voltage "push" they can do work (in an electric motor) much the way water flowing downhill can turn a water wheel.

A motor is just the opposite of a generator: electrons flowing through it (which, again, requires a complete circuit, and something to "push" them, i.e., a generator or battery) push the wires in the coil, causing the motor to turn. The main difference between a motor and a generator is which is being turned by an outside force, and which is being turned by the current flowing through it, thus the Prius has two motor-generators, either of which can be either a motor or a generator, regardless of direction, depending on how the computer applies voltages.

Since a motor/generator has so few moving parts, it has the potential, given good design, to last longer and be more reliable than a combustion engine. On the other hand, as dbermanmd mentioned, jet engines last a very long time. And I do not know just how fast (if at all???) the flow of current through a wire degrades the integrity of the wire. Does it become brittle? Does it flow, leaving thick spots and thin spots? Do the atoms of metal break off and diffuse into the insulation? Does the little man inside the computer go insane from the work load and squirt toothpaste into the wires? Not being an electrical engineer, I do not know the answers to these questions. But the generator never "depletes" its supply of electrons.