Featured Modern graphics Prius Transaxle

Oh, man.

At first, I thought the self-own in the first 30 seconds might be the worst part.



After all, it wouldn't be the first time somebody goes in for the "it's not a transmission" nonsense but still manages to get some things right.

But for this video, that was more like the high point.

It's pure AI slop. The script (read by an insufferable AI voice) is about the eCVT. But except for the initial short video clips that are on-topic enough to draw you in, the video is just random clips collected from the internet showing things like lithium batteries or Tesla plants or car showrooms. The clips have nothing to do with what the script is talking about at any given moment.

Here we are talking about MG1 (which the AI voice pronounces "emm goan") while looking at a Tesla charger.



And here are some nice showrooms and a building while we talk about MG2.





Ok, now we're gonna get into the meaty stuff. How does that power-split device work? MG1 is connected to the sun gear, shown in green here:



Uhh, where? And look, here's MG2 connecting to the ring gear shown in blue.



It would be about a six-minute video, padded out to 8½ minutes by pretty much repeating the second half of the script another time.

But if you can stand watching all the way through to the end, you do come around to the big question: should Protestants even drive these?



Maybe it's ok, if the 'e' in eCVT stands for 'ecumenical'.


On a brighter note, one of the YouTube recommendations next to that video is an actual recent one on the same topic from the Engineering Explained dude, who does the good job you'd expect from him:

Looks like he put that one out just two months ago.

Interestingly, he shows a physical eCVT trainer device where the gears are color-coded, just the way the script of the AI-slop video was talking about them (where the AI slop substituted random video clips of other things).

So I wouldn't be surprised if it just took less than two months, after he produced his real video, for some AI slop farm to basically come up with a script cribbed from his, throw it together with random video clips, and have it out there getting money from clicks.

Yuck.

Anyway, about the decent Engineering Explained video, he does a good job explaining how the various components' RPMs interact, but doesn't really get into the flow of power at all. (As in, yes, you can achieve a certain engine RPM by having MG1 spin some certain other RPM, but is MG1 generating or consuming electrical power at that moment, and where is that power going or coming from?)

That means the best explanatory video I know about is still the one Niels Blaauw did ten years ago:

Prius Hybrid Drive Explained | PriusChat

His might not have the "nicer video" but what's there is on-topic, not random clips, and actually tells you how the stuff works and why.

The Weber Auto teardown videos by John Kelly are also good. They show you the actual parts and what they look like and how they fit together. He only lightly touches on the actual power flows in operation. The video from Niels is still the front-runner for explaining that.

If I had a YouTube login, I would definitely sign in to downvote, comment on, and/or report this AI slop.

(And I would upvote the Engineering Explained video, and comment that the history goes back further than he thought, even before the 1971 TRW patent that's mentioned in Niels Blaauw's video, as far back as John Godfrey Parry Thomas's patent filed in 1908.)

 

I didn't see any ecvt graphics, what time are they shown?

 

They aren't. The whole thing is AI slop with the whole video content, after the first minute, being random clips from the internet showing car showrooms, assembly plants, EV chargers, the word "LITHIUM", and similar random uninformative stuff.

Within the first minute, you see some nice brief animations of belt CVTs (showing the ratio changing) and of an eCVT (showing unexplained spinny stuff) and of pistons going up and down. Just enough for that first minute to draw you in before it all becomes slop for the next 7½ minutes.

I'm not sure what Bob means by "production values" except in maybe that less-than-a-minute of pretty animation at the very front.

I don't happen to know where the slop farm stole those pretty animations from, but I'd be pretty sure that is what happened: if you look at that opening animation, you see it has been placed in a reduced frame with flickering points of light in the border around it, likely an effort to defeat automatic copyright-violation scanning by having the video not exactly match its original source.

The animation Niels Blaauw did in Blender ten years ago didn't look as pretty, but if you watch it you understand the transmission by the end. Even the script for this AI thing never goes any deeper than handwaving; if you didn't understand the transmission before watching it, you still don't after.

I'm sure Bob's PowerPoint charts were also less pretty but much more useful.

 

A minute or two in to the OP video, I realize I've no hope of actually retaining anything; it's little snippets of info, with entertaining stock video. I bailed after about 4 minutes. The Engineering Works guy's videos I like, reminds me of Khan Academy, with straightforward, methodical explanations, often with white-board diagrams.