Another Stab At Sorting Hybrid Hype From Reality 633
Attila Dimedici writes "Eric Peters makes the case that hybrids have been over-hyped. His argument is that in order to sell people on hybrid cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of hybrids in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given. He refers to a recent case where an individual has chosen to forego membership in a class action law suit and has instead chosen to go to small claims court. He suggests that there is a significant chance that she will win there and that this will open up all of the manufacturers of hybrid vehicles to similar lawsuits.
The article was on a rather partisan website, so I am curious what factors he has chosen to overemphasize to make his case. (Or what factors he has chosen to ignore to the same end.) I know that Slashdot has a large contingent of hybrid and EV supporters who are well educated on the subject (as well as a large contingent of those who are not so well educated)."
the article seems a bit muddled (Score:5, Informative)
Hybrids are probably overhyped, but I thought most educated consumers these days realized that they got the biggest efficiency gains in two types of driving: 1) lower-speed, stop-and-go city traffic, where they can mainly use the electric drivetrain, and sometimes turn off the engine entirely for brief periods; and 2) constant-speed highway travel, where they mainly use the gas engine, but one that can be made smaller due to being able to rely on the electric assist when needed. Yes, if you frequently accelerate at higher speeds, you'll use both the electric and gas engines and not save much. Do people not know this?
I can counter his example with my own (Score:5, Informative)
I bought a 2011 Prius IV, and it works exactly as advertised. I drive about 15 minutes each way to work, about half highway and half road, and I get about 49 MPG, which is exactly what was advertised. The idea that you have to stay below 50MPH and never accelerate or go up hills is just silly (I live in Cincinnati, OH, which is fairly hilly as well). I have learned to not slam on the gas when I am taking off, but that is because it shows you your efficiency real time, so it's easy to see what you are doing to your mileage when you take of like a race car. Generally, I drive it like any other car, although the information it gives me allows me to drive a little better than I did in the past.
And I'm sorry, but no car will get the advertised gas mileage if you are going up mountains. This has nothing to do with hybrids and everything to do with that fact they don't take into account extreme driving conditions when they calculate mileage. This is actually the first car I have ever owned that gave me the gas mileage it advertised.
Re:Listen to the users before bashing (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly!
I can only speak for Prius since its the only hybrid I've owned, but the fuel economy has never been an issue. Battery life is well over 150,000 miles ( by other users notes ) also. Adding in the fact that belts are nearly extinct on the 2011 model engine and it's beautiful. This articles BS.
The lack of timing a timing belt is a big win and almost makes up for the cost of a battery pack.
On my conventionally powered car, I just had the timing belt (and water pump and a few other associated parts) replaced for $1600 (at 105K miles). The Prius has a timing chain instead of a belt.
My neighbor has 120K miles on his 2002 Prius and the battery is still fine.
I smell bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
We own a 8 year old Prius, we get slightly over 40 MPG, something the author claims is difficult. When the car was newer, we got over 42 MPG.
To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg.
We drive on freeways like everyone else, routinely driving 70-80 MPH. I'm not a lead-foot accelerator, but I drive like most people. I don't practice any exotic hyper-miling techniques.
There are also hills. Hybrids work best on a perfectly horizontal plane.
We also happen to live at the top of a large, steep hill (Berkeley Hills), which we go up and down every day. And yet we still get 40+ MPG, unpossible! The hybrid engine is great for recapturing some of the potential energy that would otherwise be lost.
Also not their decision (Score:5, Informative)
The EPA defines how energy efficiency numbers are calculated, and those numbers have to be displayed on the car. The car companies could advertise a lower number, but there is no simple one number that tells the whole story, and you can't give a full technical report in a 30 ad. By all using the same system to determine the fuel efficiency at least the numbers are relatively meaningful even if the absolute value isn't directly true for all circumstances.
Finally, good luck suing a company for false advertising when the numbers they are using are determined by government testing, not by the company.
Re:Hype in Advertising (Score:4, Informative)
they use Imperial gallons
WRONG. we use liters.
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. Although the younger crowd might stomp on the gas at every light, the adult crowd tends to outgrow such things. I have two hybrids and one common gasoline engine and the hybrids normally average the expected gas mileage that was on the sticker. No idea where TFA gets the idea that the claims are vaporware when my household seems to have no problem attaining such figures. I live in a large metroplex so the bulk of my driving is city driving which also happens to be the ideal condition for a hybrid.
Perhaps the author didn't understand the environments where hybrids shine and the difference between that and simple highway driving?
Such efforts would do better to require that the EPA redefine the monroney sticker/MPG standards to be a bit more realistic. If the auto manufacturer's comply with the requirements for the posted ratings, I don't think this will go anywhere. They recently revamped them to better reflect the (then) today's driver. I want to say it was about 10 years ago, prior to the influx of hybrid and electric vehicles. Sounds like it's time for another review.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
And once the batteries are depleted, the car can no longer shut down its gas engine...
I live high in the hills, and by the time I'm at home the battery is usually on its last couple of bars. This is normal and it has no ill effects. In fact, the battery still retains about half of its charge at that time.
The author is clearly avoiding the truth here. Any Prius owner knows that his claim has nothing to do with reality.
By the way, the climb uphill is usually at 15 mpg, but the descent is at 100 mpg, and the average efficiency is about 43-45 mpg. If I stay in the valley for a long time (say, a whole day of driving with a meter reset) the efficiency will be about 52 mpg. That's with a 2005 (Gen.2) Prius.
For me, though, one of major selling points of Prius is not just its efficiency but it's CVT. The ride in Prius is the smoothest I every encountered, which is not a surprise because it has no gearbox that would switch anything.
Well duh. (Score:5, Informative)
From the above, it's pretty clear that hybrid drivetrains are just a piece of the fuel-efficiency puzzle -- yet ever since those first two cars hit the market, manufacturers have been tacking electric motors to otherwise ordinary cars and selling them to gullible consumers as the saviors of Earth. The electric motors are a little more efficient at low speeds, but everywhere else they're just additional dead weight that the gas engine has to drag around. Is it any surprise that these half-baked hybrids don't perform as advertised?
My 2004 Prius still gets close to the EPA estimate (Score:5, Informative)
I have a 2004 Prius with almost 200,000 miles on it. I have a 70 mile per day commute, 60 freeway/10 city, in Southern California. I drive at normal freeway speeds (for California), and had the carpool sticker which was discontinued last July. In the carpool lane, I was able to average between 75 and 80MPH during my commute, which has a few hills, but nothing major (I-405 South from 55 to San Juan Capistrano and back).
I have been averaging about 48MPG on this commute since the day that I got the car.
I am by no means a hypermiler, but when my wife drives the car, she is lucky to get 40MPG in the city, since she has more of a lead foot than I do. On a long freeway trip at 80MPH, she can get about 45MPG. I can get a higher mileage if I drive slower (65MPH or below). In that case it goes above 50MPG. If I get caught in traffic on the freeway, the mileage improves (during stop and go traffic).
My previous car was a Plymouth Neon that got 24MPG, so my MPG has been doubled for the last ~200K miles. According to my rough calculations, at that mileage, I purchased about 4166 gallons of gasoline since February of 2004. If you figure an average price of $3 per gallon (which is really not that far off for Southern California since 2004), that is $12,500. If I was able to keep my old car (which was going to require extensive/expensive repairs in order to continue operation), I would have paid $12,500 more for gasoline over that same time period. So therefore, I have saved $12,500 so far. The premium that I paid for the Hybrid system was less than that, so it has more than paid for itself. I ordered a Prius with none of the extra options except the side-curtain airbags which are now standard, so I paid quite a bit less than the fully loaded Priuses that they were selling at the time.
Hopefully my next car can be a pure electric, if I can make my Prius last that long. Maybe a plug-in Prius or Chevy Volt would be a reasonable alternative. That carpool sticker saved me thousands of hours of time as well (over the years). I really miss it!
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:5, Informative)
The big part is that a lot of the "savings" on a Hybrid assume you are driving it like a Hybrid should be.
Bullshit. The problem is that the manufacturers have no say whatsoever in how those mileage ratings are derived. The tests are very precisely specified by the EPA, and the manufacturers are not allowed to deviate in any way, nor publish any mileage information other than the figures from those tests.
The manufacturers have actually been quite open that the current tests, designed long before hybrids existed, tend to overstate the mileage for hybrids even more than they overstate mileage for regular cars. However, the EPA has not revised the tests, and the manufacturers are stuck with the mileage ratings from the government-specified tests.
And this of course pretty much dooms these lawsuits...
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:4, Informative)
Incorrect information on CVTs (Score:5, Informative)
CVTs have not only been implemented on a number of popular cars, they are almost ubiquitous in some applications.
- Many of the Hybrids on the market either come standard with a CVT, or have it available as an option.
- Virtually every modern Scooter on the market is equipped with a CVT.
- Several motorcycles are available with a CVT (Aprilia Mana comes to mind,) although it hasn't caught on for marketing reasons.
- Several full sized cars are available with a CVT, or come equipped with one standard (Nissan Murano being the best known.)
Renault actually built and tested a CVT Formula 1 car, the FW15C, however it was banned before it ever saw competition.
http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2007/05/03/banned-continuously-variable-transmission-cvt/ [f1fanatic.co.uk]
http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3966 [f1technical.net]
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh. So much garbage in one post.
So, I drive a Toyota Prius. It does get that good gas mileage advertised on the sticker. Yes, I do floor it from time to time. Yeah, some of the time I drive like I'm carrying eggs to the Czar, but I did that with the car I had before this one, too. Mostly, I just DRIVE THE CAR.
In no particular order:
1. The Prius does implement a CVT. It's electric, not with belts, and it doesn't slip. Power in vs. power out is no better or worse than a standard automatic, or maybe even a manual. Advantage: It allows the engine to spin at its most efficient spot for the power required.
2. The Prius's engine isn't, technically, an Otto cycle engine. It's Atkinson. Atkinson's have better fuel efficiency than an Otto, but they got lousy torque. Oh - look at that: There's a couple of electric motors in the drive train! These>do have torque, and lots of it. So, maybe this car doesn't leave rubber strips behind it when it gets floored. On the other hand, neither did my old Civic. Or the VW I had back in the day. On the straight and level this engine pulls 55 mpg at 65 mph, better at slower, worse at faster.
3. So, up and down? The engine on the 2010+ Prius has about the same horsepower as any car its size, so there's no trouble climbing hills. Yep, you do get less gas mileage when doing so. But, when you're going downhill, the Prius isn't shy about cutting off the fuel to the engine and dumping some energy into the battery. Yep, you only get some 30% of the energy back after taking all the losses in the electronics into account - but that's better than the 0% with a conventional car.
4. Braking. After the round trip through the batteries/electronics you get 30% of the energy from the stop. That's still better than the 0% that a conventional car gets.
In general, hybrid cars are just getting started. A good deal of the losses in a hybrid have to do with the silicon MOSFET transistors in the inverters that take energy out of/put energy back into/ the electric motors on a hybrid. In the near term silicon carbide transistors are coming. They have less RDSon (less resistance), switch faster, and can tolerate much higher temperatures than silicon. So, there's better electrical efficiency right off, hence cooling requirements are less, and, with the higher temperature tolerance, the transistors don't have to kept as cool. Therefore, the energy required to move all that cooling fluid around the inverters gets reduced by large double-digit percentages and the weight of the additional cooling gear also goes away. 70 mpg, anyone?
If you want to point fingers at idiots, then point them at the engineers and marketing people at other car manufacturers who, when faced with the Prius, built cars with stupid little electric motors bolted in the same place where one would put a starter motor, rigged said motor to give a bit of a power boost on acceleration, resulting in "Not Much Change", then had the gall to call such cars "hybrids". Even when the blame things got worse gas mileage than their non "hybrid" brethren.
If you want to have real fun, think about the gas mileage on a Toyota-style hybrid diesel. 90 mpg, anyone?
Remember: It's not just the more efficient Atkinson engine and battery combination. It's the energy recovery and the ability to go medium to short distances on battery alone with the engine off. The Prius really was a break-through. Everybody else is just playing catch-up.
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:5, Informative)
Your mistake is you haven't read anything about automotive technology since 1985.
CVTs are in tons of cars, granted smaller ones. The Suburu Justy had one way back in the 90s, and they're coming in larger cars now.
Finally, drivetrains are much more efficient than they used to be, thanks to the lock-up torque converter that another poster mentioned, better shifting algorithms and transmission control computers, but more importantly the DSG transmission that tons of VWs and Audis (and a few Fords) now come with. They have consistently better efficiency than manuals. If you don't know what a DSG is, I suggest you consult Wikipedia and catch up on technological developments over the last quarter-century you've apparently missed out on.
Of course, since you used the term "standard transmission", that shows that you're probably over 65 years old as that term hasn't been used in decades, so maybe that's why you're so out-of-date.
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:5, Informative)
The one in a Prius does very well. The old style belt and variable pulleys are not what I consider long life. The planetary gear set in a Prius with the pair of motor generators to implement a CVT has reduced the weight and complexity of a transmission to the point where all friction components (clutches, bands brakes) are eliminated along with all hydraulics. All mechanical shifting is gone. It has no clutches or gears that engage or disengage. This is true from freeway speeds forward to reverse. The only mechanical part that is shifted is the park cog.
I have over 160K miles on mine. At 100K I changed plugs. Other than that, it has needed only normal oil changes and such. With regenerative braking, it is still on it's original brakes. For a zero breakdown car with no mechanical issues, I have no complaints. The milage is less then the EPA estimate, but it is way ahead of any other car I owned. My lifetime average MPG is 45.3.
I have no reason to sue the manufacture for this. All cars by all manufactures did not do as well as the EPA estimates in 2002. Hybrids are no exception.
Never changing any belts, alternators, water pumps, brakes bulbs, etc in a decade of commuting is a great trade off. I have had to change the small 12 volt battery a couple of times, ~5 year intervals, and tires about every 60K is not a problem.
The gas savings over my old car with 160K of driving is considerable. The cost savings in maintenance is a bonus. Not meeting EPA guidelines on MPG, not a surprise for city traffic. Stoplights and traffic kills millage. I'm impressed it does as well as it does.
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:4, Informative)
To some extent, gasoline engines are designed for maximum efficiency and clean burning (slightly fuel lean) at below maximum throttle. At maximum throttle, the engine gets extra fuel to ensure that all the air that can enter gets burned. That lowers efficiency.
There are other factors that reduce efficiency at full throttle: more tire slip, more slip in automatic transmission's torque converter, and pumping losses in the crankcase and alternator (and anyplace else that there's a fluid) which are proportional to the square of (rotational) speed.
Although it seems counter-intuitive, obstructions like the throttle plate don't really substantially affect efficiency beyond what the Carnot law demands.
Re:First Anecdote! (Score:4, Informative)
the filling stations change the diesel mix for winter to account for the cold.
This actually goes on everywhere in the world, not just places with a cold winter. A 10degree shift in temperature is enough to allow a change in blends of diesel and gasoline which allow crude oils to be processed in more efficient ways.
Even in places really hot like northern Australia during the summer where it's 45degC and in winter when it's 25degC the standards allow oil companies to change the Residual Vapour Pressure and do things like put more butane (cheap and difficult to sell product) into the petrol. In the summer this would cause high pressure in petrol tanks and the butane either needs to be sold or processed into something else.