Re: Hybrid Cars Are a Swindle

Although most of Nomen's post is a pile of crap, Hybrid cars make very little difference in the rate of consumption of fossil fuels. For highway use, their gas mileage compared to standard economy cars is almost the same. Take for example the much-vaunted Toyota Prius, compared to the Toyota Echo:

Echo: 41MPG with a 1500cc 100Hp engine, Prius: 51Mpg with a 76Hp 1500 cc engine.

It's pretty obvious that the primary reason the Prius gets better gas mileage is that the engine has LESS HORSEPOWER. So it burns less fuel. If you knocked 25 HP off the Echo engine it would probably get the same mileage rating. And that's not even assuming the Echo weight was lightened up to that of the Prius's.

If you were to buy an Echo and drive it highway, like an old grandma, gentle accelleration and not put your foot in it, the mileage of the Echo would probably be the same as the Prius. And do you know why? It's because most of the gas savings of a hybrid are due to the energy of braking being put back into the batteries, then used later.

And let's look at the math, shall we?

The Echo lists at $10K, the Prius lists at $20K. Assume the longevity of the cars are the same - 150,000 miles. Assume gasoline is $2.00 a gallon. That gives fuel costs for the Echo at 4.8 cents a mile highway miles, for the Prius it's 3.9 cents a mile highway miles.

Thus, for an Echo to reach it's service life on highway miles will cost you $7,200 in fuel. For a Prius to reach it's service life will cost you $5,850 in fuel costs. That's a difference of $1,350

So, in summary, assuming repair costs are equivalent and both cars are used for highway commuting, your going to spend $10,000 extra for the Prius in order to save $1300 in fuel costs, over the lifespan of the car.

Pretty stupid.

It's clear that hybrid technology is really a waste of money for small economy cars. Where it makes the most sense is if your going to be using massive, heavy, SUV's and such for city driving, because in that situation, due to the weight, the amount of energy lost to braking is enormous compared to a lightweight economy car. But I challenge anyone to do the math - the savings aren't what you think they are going to be.

There is also the question of the fossil fuel used in the manufacture of the vehicle, and of the parts used by the vehicle during it's service life. Remember, all batteries self-discharge over time, and as a result, they gradually degrade. Battery pack replacements for the Prius, far from the manufacturers optimistic assumptions, are going to be time-based. It is unlikely that the number of charge/discharge cycles are going to have anything to do with it. The Prius uses battery packs that store a huge amount and the amount of energy scavenged from braking and fed out again is only a small percentage of the capacity of the battery, as a result the battery hardly notices it. A typical NiMH battery is rated for at least

1000 charge-dischage cycles, but that rating assumes a complete discharge and a recharge from ground zero. In a hybrid car that is used 4-6 days a week, the battery pack isn't ever going to go below 80% capacity, it's not going to approach the rated number of charge/discharge cycles in 200,000 miles. Instead, what your going to see is that every year the battery will get weaker and weaker, and the car's computer will compensate for this so the upshot is that the only thing you will notice is that your gas mileage gets lower and lower. By the time you realize the battery is shot, it's going to be past the 7 year mark on the warranty and your going to be paying for a new battery pack. If you are driving that 150,000 miles in 7 years time, then great - your going to have the car beat to shit by the time the battery pack is shot. But if your like everyone else and you do your 150-200 miles over a decade or longer, then your going to have to assume that your going to have to do at least 1 battery pack replacement during that time. And I have to ask, how much fossil fuel is going to be consumed making a new battery pack and recycling the old one?

If you really want to break the fossil fuel dependency for vehicle fuel, the only way to do it is to switch to a renewable fuel source. Alcohol isn't it. If every car in the United States ran on pure alcolhol, our entire food crop would be going into making alcohol and we would starve. And the food crop that makes it depends on fertillizer - which is produced from ammonia which comes from - you guessed it - fossil fuels (natural gas and air) - and from mining. So once again, you are dependent on non-renewable resources.

hydrogen also isn't it either. Hydrogen comes from the decomposition of water and that is done either by fossil fuels, or by electricity - which has to come from somewhere. To manufacture enough hydrogen to support motor vehicles in this country we would have to burn an enormous amount fossil fuel, we couldn't get it from solar cells.

Consider that every time you manufacture a fuel from the burning of another fuel, you have a huge efficiency loss.

The only real solution to breaking the dependency on fossil fuels is the electric car. Electrics make the most sense as we already have a power distribution network that at night is running at a very low capacity. Vehicles can easily be charged at night and used during the day, the power grid can easily support it. Of course, you still have the question of where does the extra electricity come from - but nuclear energy is the obvious choice here, that is why France has a big breeder reactor program. It is probably likely that we will develop a usable fusion reactor in the next 100 years. Even wind power if we put enough wind farms in, could probably generate enough electricity for motor vehicle travel in the world. There has also been some ideas for generating power from the temperature difference in the water in the ocean, the higher layers of water are warmer and the lower layers are cooler, and it is possible to build a generator that makes use of this.

And additionally, all of this is completely ignoring the issue of what about air travel? The problem here is that only a liquid fuel like jet fuel has the amount of power in the lightweight mass that makes air travel a commercial possibility. That is why nobody has built an electric plane. We are going to see fossil fuels become far more valuable as aviation fuels than as land vehicle fuels, long before we actually run out of oil.

Ted

You forgot to add the 67 hp from the electric motor. What is the performance differential between the two cars? Wouldn't that be a more important statistic that how much horsepower the engine has?

No. It doesn't run the engine while you are at a stop sign, stop light, etc. That's why it gets better city MPG numbers.

So it burns less fuel. If you

The Prius is a much nicer car than the Echo. The Ford Escape hybrid is about $3000 more than the standard version and are claiming a serious improvement in fuel economy over the standard model.

Most people don't drive on the highway everyday. A better comparison would be city driving. How much "highway" driving are you doing while bumper to bumper on the highway in LA?

If people can argue about a 0.03 MPG reduction by the use of daytime running lights, saving $1,350 in fuel doesn't seem unreasonable.

Then I guess Toyota, Ford, GM, etc have it all wrong. They must like throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars.

And just what are the resources that are used and in what quantity? If you're really concerned about resources used in construction, wouldn't it make the most sense just to build less cars?

It is unlikely that the number of

Why not? These batteries don't have a memory like NiCads do. Battery technology is rapidly improving. In 5 years we will have smaller, lighter batteries with higher capacity.

And you know this how?

By the time you

Everyone else? I live in the motor city. Hardly anyone drives a 10 year old car around here. Where do you think all these new cars they are making go?

How much? Maybe a lot, maybe a little. You don't know.

$3000 subsidy? can you provide a source for this information?

I only am aware of an individual US income tax deduction of $1500 for a purchase of a Honda Insight, Honda Civic Hybrid, or a Toyota Prius in calendar/tax year 2004. Depending on your income tax bracket, that equates to maybe $150-$525 off of your income taxes for that year. See IRS Publication 535, chapter 12, for information on the Clean-Fueled Vehicle tax deduction. or:

I know that Toyota has stated that they are making a profit on each Prius, and there is typically a several-month waiting list at dealers for a new Prius, which sells at MSRP or at some places with an "availability surcharge" of several thousand over MSRP.

Oh, and at least try to compare similar cars... A manual-transmission Echo, which is an LEV and is only a Compact sedan, really shouldn't be compared to an eCVT Prius, which is an AT-PZEV and a Midsize liftback.

You probably won't make many friends by advocating nuclear power, but it is a proven, efficient, reliable and (mostly) non-polluting source of energy. It still relies on non-renewables--even with breeders or with fusion--although the limits far exceed the available fossil fuels. Getting people in the US to accept nuclear power as the primary source of energy--and it makes a lot of sense to go that route--is going to be as difficult, though, as getting them to give up horsepower, which is a big selling point in most car ads today and always has been.

The simple fact is that electric cars will have to depend on batteries, which just don't have the energy concentration per unit of time over a long time period that internal combustion engines do. In other words, they may be able to provide 300 horsepower or more, but only for a few minutes. Then you'll have to recharge them. That was the problem with the diesel-electric submarines that could crawl around, submerged, for 24-48 hours on battery power but couldn't maintain high speeds for more than a few hours before being forced to surface to recharge their depleted batteries.

Getting back to nuclear power, I have an old physics book from the '50s with a picture of a scientist standing next to a reactor built for the home. It stands about 10 feet tall and about 7 feet wide and, in the wide-eyed optimism of that era, was actually proposed as a viable individual power source for the everyday homeowner. Although quite possible and even reasonable--given the times--it never got to market, for some reason. ;^>

Anyway, you make some very cogent points in your post, most of which will probably not be very popular. But those points have to be made if we're ever to wean ourselves from our appetite for fossil fuels as energy sources, which we will eventually have to do. Oil is simply too precious to be burned.

The electric motor is driven from power generated from the gas engine, and yes you are correct it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

heh. The entire example was on highway mileage, not city mileage. Yes the Prius gets better city mileage - if you make a whole bunch of assumptions about city driving, the primary one being that your spending a huge amount of time at stop signs and lights. This may be true of LA but not all cities.

And even in how you drive in a city matters. If you have a one way grid with synchronized lights (as in many cities) and the lights are synched at

25Mph, and you drive either a prius or a gas car at 25Mph through them, the fuel used will be the same. If you however stamp on the gas and drive 50Mph for a block then slam on the brakes, wait a few seconds for the light to change, then stamp on the gas and slam on the brakes through the next block, and you keep doing this through the 20 or so blocks you are traveling through, why then the Prius will use far less fuel.

That is an extreme example of course but the point is that driver habits in city driving account for a great deal of the lost gas mileage in city driving.

:-) I get this logic though - it's in the same family as "save $100 on the new TV set (that normally costs $500)" when our existing TV set is perfectly good. So I spend $400 to save $100.

I do understand that the majority of the US population has bought off on this poop argument, though.

Ah, the old argument of "well the automakers are spending a lot of money on hybrids so they must know something we don't" Well, yes, they do.

What the automakers know is that sooner or later they will be forced to remove SUV's from the light truck classification and put them in the passenger car classification, which is where they should have been years ago. Then CAFE will come down like a ton of bricks.

Hybrid technology is really aimed at the larger SUV's and such, for one thing with a larger and heavier car the benefits are increased over pure gasoline, and for another the price difference isn't as great, and economically it makes more sense. Detroit's game is to fight any demand to raise CAFE and once they get all their SUV's hybrid, then they will be ready for a reclassification of the SUV, and it won't shut down production.

But none of this means hybrid vehicles are anything more than a bridge technology.

Yes, it would make perfect sense. If everyone did as I do and simply maintained their vehicles for 20 years/250,000 miles minimum, instead of towing them to the wrecking yard at 175,000 miles because they need a new engine, we would save a whole lot more energy.

The wrecking yards (at least here) are full of vehicle bodies that have blown transmissions, blown engines, and paint falling off, but the interiors are still good and are stright, having never been in an accident.

You can go to a yard and buy one of those for $400, tow it to a tech and have the engine and trans replaced with rebuilt units for about $5000, and then drive it to a body shop and have it repainted for $3000, add tires for $500 and misc suspension and other misc bullshit parts for another $1000, and for a grand total of $10,000 you can have the equivalent of a new vehicle. And you can do this with just about any body style, size, make you want, and have it done in any color you want, they are all represented.

If people did this we would reduce a huge amount of energy consumption, we would also greatly enhance our own local economies because that money would be dumped into local instead of being sent to an oveseas automaker for a new car.

Commercial have been doing this for years, you don't see wreckers littered with semitrucks, do you?

But your dealing with people's perceptions. Most people that are buying cars don't understand how they work. So they won't do this, even though it would save them money and get a better car.

Which simply builds the case for going all electric and dispensing with hybrids alltogether.

Part of my job is dealing with a lot of equipment that uses many different batteries. This is stuff that I have to know for that, and what I have observed as well. And it is all information that is readily available on the Internet if you just look for it. There ain't any big secrets here.

Sure, maybe the new Lithium Ion batteries are going to turn out to be the miracle batteries we have all been waiting for. But as for NiMH, forget it. It's not that much better than lead acid. And the worst of it is that each new battery chemistry that comes down the pike is more and more picky about how it's recharged. Gone are the days of just hooking a transformer and diode to a timer and plugging it into the battery.

The Rust Belt. But Detroit has a fixation that the rest of the country consumes cars at the same rate that the Rust Belt does.

Why do you think the salaries on the East Coast are higher anywhere else than perhaps California? Outside the Rust Belt and CA, the rest of the country doesen't have the economy for everyone to buy a new car every 7 years. Don't forget that while salaries and expenses in LA are higher than many other places, a new car sells for the same dollar amount there that it does in those other places. So, if your in LA or in New York it costs you less of a percentage of your total income to buy a new car, than it does for someone in someplace like Boise, ID for example.

Neither does Toyota, or anyone else. Nobody I have seen has done any kind of detailed analysis of this type. Everyone seems to assume that the only way to reduce dependency on foreign oil is to increase gas mileage of vehicles. Nobody wants to look at things like mandating smaller vehicles, reducing the number of miles the average person drives, (doubling or tripling fuel prices would do this, as Europe has discovered) decreasing the volume of used cars going into the waste stream, etc.

Ted

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Energy, yes, but not liquid fuel - unless your willing to accept the terrible conversion losses of decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen then burning it again in a vehicle. Of course with nuclear, you have so much extra energy that you can probably tolerate that.

There isn't going to be a choice. Once the Saudi fields are pumped dry

- which will happen ultimately, as the oil reserves there are not infinite - your going to see gasoline in the $10/gallon (in todays dollars) range. Petroleum products will become more valuable for their lubricating qualities than for fuel.

When that happens, we will switch over our oil-fired power generators to our coal reserves, as polluting as they are, to take care of the electric power generation problem. And heavy freight movement - ie: rail - will probably end up going back to use of coal, after all, they all originally were coal burners in the beginning. Most likely the environmentalists will screech at this one, because you won't be able to fit a full set of scrubbers on a train engine, but they won't have much choice.

And as for air travel, that's probably going to end up splitting into 2 factions - hydrogen burners that don't carry an oxydizer and use atmosphere, and are prop-driven planes, that is where the business travel, and individual travel will end up. It will be slower, yes, but it will be affordable. And hydro burner jets that carry an oxydizer, that will be the only way to get enough power for a jet. There may be a few specialized ground-to-orbital planes that carry one-shot solid propellants, and such but that will be niche. And this is also where biodiesel might come into play, if it could be refined into jet fuel. Air travel is really going to be a big question mark when petroleum runs out.

But as for car and truck vehicle travel, that is a different story. The US population will then be given 2 choices:

1) Nuclear power plants that create enough power to generate the huge quantities of liquid hydrogen, that will serve as motor vehicle fuel. That can easily do all vehicle and truck traffic - but if you have a serious accident on a freeway and someone's liquid hydrogen tank gets compromised, it's going to explode and take out all vehicles in a 1000 yard radius, totally incinerate them. Also, all gas stations will have to be retrofitted, it is likely also that self-serve fueling will be gone, as the chances of a spark in the vicinity of a hydrogen refuel will be too serious to allow the general public to touch it. I could go on, but suffice it to say that there are some serious issues with hydrogen powered vehicles.

2) Wind plants that pour enough power into the grid so that we can go to all electric vehicles. You will see curtailment of large semitrucks for interstate traffic, a lot of that freight is going to end up going to rail. There will probably be a big increase in short hopper electric railroads, as well as commuter railroads and subways. bus service will probably be curtailed as governments try forcing people into rail and subways. And on a personal note, your going to see extremely serious attention given to vehicle parking spots. Gone will be the days where some irresponsible bozo can pop up a 50 unit apartment complex that has no assigned parking, and tell people to stick it out on the street parking.

And if battery technology hasn't quite made it yet, people will have to do some serious planning of trips, this will force everyone to be more regimented about driving.

diesel-electric

Given a choice between the personal freedom of owning a car, or being dependent on mass transit, people will take a car even if the only way they can take it is to accept that they simply cannot drive more than 200 miles without a 6 hour recharge.

Battery technology isn't as bad as you think. The GM EV-1 with the NiMH battery pack was rated at 75-130 miles per charge. And recharge time was

6-8 hours at 220 volts. They could have easily designed it so that you could put in a secondary battery pack to double the range, if you gave up your trunk space. And by increasing the charger to 12 kilowatt they could have kept the 6-8 hour recharge time even for the secondary battery pack.

Granted, this was a 2 seater. But you can see that even a minivan the size of a Grand Caravan could be done up as an electric vehicle with todays battery technology, if it's intended use was purely in-city driving.

And it's finite. There is really no point in continuing the fossil-fuel infrastructure for vehicle traffic once we found out that it isn't sustainable over the long haul. There's a very great number of people in the rest of the world that are not anywhere near the level of vehicle usage that the United States is. The longer we put off switching away from fossil fuel dependency, the more of them are going to be like us, using the same fossil fuels, and the quicker that those fuels are going to be pumped and dug out.

It really would have been far better for all concerned if the amount of recoverable oil in the world was far, far less than what it is. If we had pumped the US reserves to a trickle back in 1925, and the rest of the world had run nearly dry then as well, one could possibly argue that Nazi Germany would never have been able to develop the industrial base that enabled them to trigger WWII, and the world would not have had the fuel to power such a war anyway, the US would never have developed the network of road infrastructure that it did, and that we would all be riding across the country on bullet trains. Additionally, fertillizer production would have been far less, as a result global food production would have been far less, and it might be that the world's population would still be at 1950 levels.

Ted

While I agree with your sentiment, this just isn't true. A car has many components beyond the drivetrain and suspension. My 1996 GV is still on its original drivetrain and most of its suspension pieces, although I just replaced the sway bar bushings and one ball joint at 154,000 miles. However, the rear washer is inop due to a dead output on the body control computer, the cassette player doesn't work, the dash is now developing a few squeaks and rattles, and I have to make at least a couple of repairs a year now on various accessories (wiper motor just a couple of months ago), etc.

I drove OTR trucks many years ago and, yes, the major components are rebuilt and the trucks run for 20+ years and well over 1,000,000 miles. However, I also spent 4-8 hours EVERY Saturday working on little things on the truck to get it through the next week. Lights, switches, wiring, hoses, door handles, etc. Something needed work every weekend in addition to the normal maintenance we performed on the weekend.

I believe in running cars until they virtually collapse, and it is cheaper dollar-wise to do so, but at some point my time becomes the more important factor. The reality is that a 10 year-old car takes more time to keep on the road than a new car, unless you get a real lemon. And a

20 year-old car takes even more time, on average.

Matt

Based on my experience in big cities (Baltimore-Washington DC, Minneapolis and Detroit) it's a logical assumption that you are sitting around a lot. This is obviously not true if you live in a rural area.

Only if you're not also constrained by the 800 cars in front of you.

Possibly. But it's my opinion the "bridge" solution is better than nothing at all.

This is exactly what my grandfather did with his last car. It's what I did with my first car. It's a lot of work.

The big problem I see with this is that you have to deal with a repair shop. Most people have a hard enough time getting one thing fixed right on their car. Now imagine what is going to happen when they need the whole car rebuilt. Who do they go to when something goes wrong?

But a semi costs a lot more than a new car, hence there is more incentive to repair/maintain what you have.

I know that after about 10 years, I'm ready for a new car. Sure, I could replace the drivetrain, but I'm still stuck with a 10 year old car. It still has 10 year old rattles, 10 year old smells etc.

After 10 years I'm about ready for a new car too. Only in my case it will have 18 year old smells and rattles

My current van had 275,000km on it when I bought it and replaced the engine, and shortly after, the transmission. It is a 1996 model, and by 3013 I'll definitely be ready for something different.

My wife's last car was six years old when we bought it ten years ago. New cyl heads and transmission over the years, but it's still in pretty good shape. With any luck someone will get another 5 or more years out of it. It won't be me or my wife. Bought an 8 year old car to replace it. Should keep the missus happy for another 5-10 years.

I have a 1995 T&C which as you know is very close to your GV. I know what your referring to - in ours, we just had the passenger electric lock start getting intermittent. No doubt pulling apart the door and greasing everything up would fix it. It's got 102,000 miles on it.

But you have to keep in perspective that if you read through the new car complaints that tons of new car owners have the same kinds of minor complaints too. These accessories just simply are much more unreliable on their lifespan. The only difference between you and them is that they are under warranty so the minor problems are someone elses's problems, not yours.

Ted

Well, I've owned about an equal number of cars bought new and kept a long time and cars bought used and kept a long time. Without exception, my cars have given me more nuisance problems as they age. From a purely economic perspective, the older cars are cheaper to operate. However, as someone with precious little spare time, spending time working on my cars or getting them into a dealer for nuisance item repairs is simply ... a nuisance. There comes a point, typically at about the 10 year age that it just isn't worth it for me anymore. So, I pass my cars along to someone with more time and less money and they can probably get another

10 years out of them (my father-in-law is still driving my 1985 Jeep Comanche). But he's retired and has time to fiddle with it and doesn't mind that the AC doesn't work, etc., etc.

Matt

Well, there ya go, that's the heart of it. Either you regard a car as purely a box to take you from point A to point B, for the cheapest price you can get, or you regard it as something more - I guess you might say you regard it as both transportation and entertainment/pleasure/whatever. The latter view of a vehicle is what sells $50K sports cars, and is where the so-called "american love affair with the automobile" comes from.

I think that as long as fuel costs are as cheap for the US public as they are, that people have the choice of looking at a car from the second perspective.

I would guess that when the oil runs out eventually and fuel prices skyrocket, that only the rich will be able to afford to not view a car as purely a box to move from point A to point B. This is how it is today for air travel. Most air passengers care only about how cheap they can get the ticket for.

A/C I regard as a non-nuisance repair. :-) During the summer here, a non-A/C vehicle is a safety hazard, the driver is in danger of fainting.

Ted

I'm somewhere in between, but closer to the point A to point B transportation as inexpensively as practical. However, to me the time spent dealing with nuisance problems isn't worth it at some point. I'll pay money to save my time. It has nothing to do with considering a car as entertainment, etc.

Well, here in PA, there are only a few days a year where AC is REALLY important for driver comfort. It's main use is to make the defroster/defogger more effective, especially with all of the rain we've had this year.

Matt