Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicles

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

It's unclear as to what they did.
I assume this is a conversion with a battery like the Hymotion system, and the Hybrid drivetrain remains. Otherwise a larger electric motor must have been dropped in, or the acceleration would be glacial.
Too bad the author didn't ask more questions, instead of leaving us speculating.

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

Here's a paragraph from another source from back in Sept. Assuming they continued with this, it's really a PHEV, but yes, the reporter didn't get or understand all of the details.

Sen. Maria Cantwell has sponsored bipartisan legislation with Sens. Obama and Orrin Hatch to provide a $7,500 tax credit toward the purchase of plug-in electric hybrids. Locally, Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon has directed his staff to look into adding plug-in electric vehicles (PHEVs) to the county's fleet and to support pilot projects to demonstrate their value. Local auto dealer Buzz Rodland says the Toyota Prius has a fierce loyalty among his customers and he has a growing waiting list for plug-in Prius versions that get three times the mileage a standard Prius does. Toyota and General Motors intend to sell PHEVs by 2010, and other manufacturers are working overtime to catch up.​

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

I can tell you exactly what it was. That was when The Green Car Company sent their two technicians to do 13 Hymotion conversions a few weeks ago. Here is an article about it.

The Wenatchee World Online - Regional Priuses take part in national road test

I believe Green Car Company has done over 80 Hymotion kits so far and have at least another 300+ in the backlog for the Pacific Northwest.

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

I would get mine done there if I was able to get it done at all. They sell the Vectrix too don't they?

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

It is too bad, but it wasn't hard to guess what happened as others have already. Just a PHEV Prius. Although the Author should not have used the 'fully electric' though as that causes confusion.

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

Yes. The Green Car Company in Bellevue Washington is doing all of the Hymotion batteries for BC government vehicles. Canadian cars are brought down to the Seattle region for now. I believe they are expanding to open a location in Vancouver BC by the end of 2009.

They also sell the Vectrix there.

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

I find it interesting that there will be monitoring equipment on-board.
I would have thought that there is a lot of data about the Hymotion conversion, and fuel usage at this point, from dedicated hypermilers like PeakOilGarage. It seems to me the only remaining data to collect, is in regards to longevity of the batteries.
I am thinking that the driving style of county employees in fleet vehicles might not achieve the mileage quoted by Hymotion and by private Hymotion owners ("nothing less than 99.9"), and that might give telling data. Our local Toyota dealer has several Prius buyers who are complaining that their car gets disappointing mileage, worse than promised by the ads and the sales staff, probably because of short trips and constant acceleration.

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

You are exactly correct. Many of the fleet vehicles are installing a V2Green GPS tracking box. This records all of the relevant data and sends it back to the database via a cell or satellite signal (I forget which). The V2Green box costs about $3,200.

That is also correct. I personally think that fleet drivers are the wrong people to be gathering data from. The motor pools for different entities (cities, counties, ports, etc) all have different levels of dedication in terms of training drivers or recharging the vehicles. Quite often the cars are not being recharged at night.

Also, the drivers are complete newbies. Anyone can check out the Plug-Ins. My numbers improved dramatically after one week of experience. I was initially around 85 mpg for a few days. Now I am easily at 120+ mpg on average.

We are now going back to all of the fleet buyers and getting them to install the ScanGauge II so that the fleet drivers can see their RPMs and get immediate feedback on when the engine is actually off/on.

We have found that this simple data input improves MPG by 20%. When driving at 35 mph, you figure out really quick that by dropping down to 32 mph the engine goes off. From the vibrations on the road, it is not obvious to the driver and the Prius energy screen does not display it.

 

Re: Snohomish County has converted two of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to fully electric vehicle

Vancouver, eh? Awesome.