Hybrid cars a safe buy?

Like I said - gutless.

I really don't get it when it comes to the batteries. There is evidence that the large majority of the cells in a battery stack should last the life of the car. I doubt there's going to be any mass failure of the cells. It should be more like light bulbs. There might be a few early failures here and there that would fall under warranty repair. Even after that, I don't get the scare tactic that all batteries are doomed for failure in rapid succession.

I could see a cottage industry of businesses that buy out old batteries and test/recondition them. I can buy systems for consumer electronics batteries that do a similar function. At that point, I think most people will be looking to squeeze just a few more years out of the old heap rather than look for it to last another 150,000 miles.

I think another thing that might be noted is that the majority of the current hybrid buyers like new cars and probably will be moving on to the latest technology in ten years. Some people get attached to their cars and put more money into their repair than it's worth. That's the nature of most older vehicles that aren't collector's items.

Some people have stated that NiMH cells are legal to dispose of in landfills. I think that's possible in some jurisdictions, but I wouldn't advise it. There is some mild toxicity with NiMH batteries, but a lead-acid battery is WAY more toxic. More tailpipe emissions over the life of a car are also way more toxic. In any case, the means to recycle NiMH batteries is fairly common even today.

Exactly.

What you don't seem to get is the fact that the life of the battery pack

*IS* the life of the car. If the pack lasts 10 years that is the life of the car. Once the pack fails the whole car has little more than scrap value.

With the conventional economy car you simply don't have this catastrophic end of life scenario. The conventional economy car gets just about the same mileage, costs less and has a longer viable life span - win, win, win.

You comment of "gutless" is also not really true as anyone who has driven one of the old Subaru Justy 3 cylinder conventional economy cars with the ECVT transmission can attest. Those little 50 some odd HP glorified golf carts would go like a bat out of hell thanks to the ECVT matching the little engines power output to the drive train needs and their extremely low weight.

Add in the recently refined variable displacement technology for conventional engines and you can get the 200 HP kick when you mash the gas with little MPG penalty when all you need is 20 HP to cruise the highway.

Like I said - the individual cells can be replaced. The individual cells won't die off all at once. 250,000 miles and 15 years shouldn't be out of the question for the large majority of the packs in a stack. I would imagine that there will be some mechanics that might specialize in overhauling hybrid batteries. NiMH technology has been around for a while. Equipment to analyze and recondition batteries should be available, as exists now for consumer electronics cells. I see the sale of reconditioned battery packs like we find rebuilt engines or starters. Of aftermarket drop-in modules.

The battery pack isn't a single module. It's not as simple as the entire pack being scrapped just because one or two fail. The hybrid systems seems to do a fairly simple thing that maximizes the life of the battery stack. Just keep it from being completely drained, but keep it from being completely full where it might be overcharged. With that type of use, 15-20 years doesn't seem to be out of the question.

Who cares. This is just an option, and not everyone will try to get 250,000 miles out of a car. If someone is really intent on getting 250,000 miles out of a hybrid, I think it can be done for less than the price of a complete battery stack.

And you're still hauling around that weight and heating up a full-sized engine block.

Well, you actually DO. Most economy cars are pretty much Bic razors with wheels. Reliable as hell for the first 100k miles, then not worth fixing when the typical Asian car "massive organ failure" starts happening somewhere in the mid-100k miles range. Sure, there are isolated cases of Civics and Tercels going 200k or more, but the vast majority get turned to beer cans long before then. Not true of larger/higher end cars. Seriously, when was the last time YOU saw a Civic (or similar car) more than 5 years old on the road? I see a 10-year-old Neon in the office parking lot every day, but man does it ever stick out, because that's the only time I ever see a tiny car that old!

If someone would ever bother to produce an economy car with the ruggedness and longevity of a high-end car, there probably would be a market for it. But right now, "economy car" is so closely correlated with "minimal intial purchase price" that they simply aren't built to last.

True.

True, however the individual cells are all the same age and have seen the same usage so they will all die within the span of about one year.

In commercial taxi service perhaps. Not for the typical consumer.

Pretty unlikely given the state of mechanics today. The bulk are nothing more that parts changer with little understanding of how things actually work and minimal troubleshooting ability beyond what the decision tree in the manual tells them to try. The few good mechanics that actually understand a vehicle are mostly employed by racing teams.

It exists, but it isn't cost effective in most cases. Spending $100 on a charger / conditioner that will get you an extra six months of life from a $10 battery just doesn't make economic sense. Applied to hybrid battery packs it still doesn't make much sense due to the minimal life extension it might provide.

Take a look at the most comparable battery market, one that has been around many years - electric forklift batteries. They don't generally get reconditioned, they get recycled since the effort of reconditioning them does not provide enough extra life to be worthwhile and the unpredictability of that extra life and the inconvenience and down time it causes costs more money than the potential savings.

Not relevant. The battery in my forklift is composed of 12 individual cells in a big steel case (whole thing weighs 1,571#). You simply don't replace an individual cell, when one fails the others aren't far behind.

It might not seem out of the question, but it vastly exceeds the service life of pretty much any Ni-MH pack in use today in other applications. I know I have quality Ni-MH packs on tools that are approaching 10 years old and they are showing signs of impending failure such as reduced capacity.

Correct, it can be accomplished by driving at least 25,000 miles a year so you reach that mileage mark before the battery pack fails since it's service life relates more to age than use. That way your service costs will be tires, brakes, wheel bearings and oil changes, all far less expensive than a battery pack.

No comment on the Subaru Justy? It was a 3 cylinder 50 some odd HP conventional IC economy car that had plenty of pep, proving your gutless claim false.

The heating part is utterly irrelevant since unless you do all your driving in the arctic the radiator is busily dissipating heat constantly after the first few minutes of operation. Having more thermal mass to heat does nothing more than add one or two minutes to the warm-up. As to weight, that is minimal for a car engine and is less weight than the battery pack the hybrid hauls around.

If you rely on a dealer for service and install new parts, sure the uneconomical point could be in the 100k mile range. If you have a decent independent mechanic or do the work yourself, and use salvage parts from the junk yard / recycler that uneconomical to maintain point will be a lot further out.

I really don't see that happening. I would expect that a few might fail here and there; more like a increasing distribution rather than a cliff. Possibly one might go next month or three years down the line. It's not like a bad apple where the one failing one alerts all the others that they need to execute some massive die-off.

I think of it more like an older house that's been well taken care of. I live in a 50+ year old house with some of the original wiring. Some hardware has worn down with age and needs to be replaced, but the house as a whole hasn't fallen apart. When older components fail, they can be repaired as needed. We don't walk into the house expecting that all the original doors are going to start failing in short order if just one needs to be repaired or replaced.

The biggest enemy of NiMH battery life are excessive heat, overcharging, and deep-discharge cycles. The latter two are handled by the system design. The stacks are fan cooled. Most of the tools I've worked with use simple dumb chargers, and I'd expect that the batteries would show the signs of overcharging and or deep discharge use after 10 years.

I'd expect to see semi-automated equipment. Break down the old battery and insert several cells into the analyzer. Analyzer gives a report and the cells are marked and/or graded. It might not even be all that different than the equipment that the manufacturer uses to test new batteries.

I only bring a "conditioner" as an example of the technology out there. What I had in mind was an analyzer to detect which cells are likely to have a long, useful life and to discard (i.e. recycle) the cells that might fail.

Typically lead-acid batteries that aren't fan-cooled during the charge and discharge cycles, right? I expect the failure characteristics of a fan cooled NiMH battery (that's kept well between fully charged and fully depleted) to very different.

Again - how many applications are designed to keep a NiMH battery from being deep-discharged AND fully-charged? While being fan cooled. That environment is far more conducive to longer life than a tool battery pack.

Now I don't expect that every last battery pack in every car is going to be perfectly reliable over the course of 15 years and 250,000 miles. That's unrealistic for any car part. I do believe that these hybrid systems are set up to maximize rechargeable battery life better than almost any other use to date. I wouldn't expect that amount of monitoring/cooling would be worth it for typical consumer electronics where I could get another set for less than $10.

No room for other parts failures? I had a coolant hose go at 110K miles. The radiator tank cracked at 130K miles. There were also other little things that probably needed servicing. It was stolen, recovered, and declared a total loss. I got a great settlement that was more than I could have sold it for.

I remember the Justy. That sucker was tiny.

I thought the typical weight difference between a V8 and an I4 is about

200-250 lbs. A battery pack is about 100-120 lbs. The battery can be placed anywhere you can find it, while a V8 would require more volume under the hood.

It's a predictable electro-chemical thing, no analogy whatsoever to home electrical.

If they have dumb chargers you're using cheap tools. The quality tools have smart microprocessor controlled fast chargers and the battery packs have built in temperature sensors. Some battery packs have built in intelligence as well with flash memory to track the packs history.

You can analyze and grade all you want, but you're still going to have a

90%+ reject rate because all the cells will be about equally worn out in almost every case.

Look at some of the battery management chips from Microchip and Dallas Semi. The intelligence is intended to be built right into the pack. Helps maximize the life expectancy of a pack, but either way, all the cells will be near death at about the same time.

Yes, big honkin' lead-acid, but not relevant to the point about not replacing individual cells in the pack.

Quality tools have smart chargers and the battery packs have internal temperature sensors. Indeed my packs and chargers are all indoors in a relatively controlled environment, not bouncing around in a car in the Texas heat.

The Ni-MH packs for quality tools are typically around $70.

Those are simple, inexpensive failures and the hybrid is equally subject to them (a pure EV wouldn't be).

I don't think a stolen vehicle has much relevance to this discussion.

Tiny yes, but inexpensive, peppy (chirp tires at will) and pretty reliable. Rather comparable to the mini cooper, but without the hype or price tag.

Perhaps comparing an aluminum I4 to a cast iron big block V8. There is a great variety of V8 engines out there covering a huge weight range and huge displacement range. There are also very nice aluminum V6s that are more appropriate in a car.

An aluminum V6 with variable displacement is probably not more than 50# heavier than the engine and electric motor in a hybrid.

The battery pack may be 120#, but the framework required to hold it and give it some protection in an accident adds a lot more weight. Again, an aluminum V6 is more applicable to a car than a cast iron V8 which belongs in a truck.

Still - typically no fan cooling which is rare in most applications. Most people have different expectations for rechargeable batteries. Charge the battery to full capacity and try to get as much use out of a single charge is the most typical pattern.

Depends on the expectation. Much like there are reconditioned batteries for low/medium-duty forklifts, I'd expect that there might be different grades of used batteries for people looking to get the last 3-5 years out of a hybrid car. The usage pattern is also way different with only a shallow discharge. I would retire a set of camera batteries if they were down to maybe 50% of original capacity. For a hybrid car battery that stays between a small window of charge/ discharge, that might still be acceptable. The meaning of "failure" is considerably different. The way the batteries are used leads me to believe that the large majority should be adequate for the intended duty after 15 years and 250K miles. Those that aren't can be replaced with known good cells matching the condition of the original ones.

Again - a much different usage than the fully charged then discharged pattern that's typical with most consumer/industrial electronics cells.

You forgot the part about the battery cooling fan.

Just an example. The 7.2V NiMH battery pack for a Canon 1D-MkII is about $150. However - I think most people can understand what I was getting at. The expense of replacing a single battery pack for a camera is considerably less than an entire stack for a hybrid car. I still contend that the average owner isn't going to need that full replacement down the line. Those who do will likely have options other than a complete, brand-new stack that will get it in working condition for several years.

The Honda Insight battery is rather interesting. I know the car is rather small, but still an interesting battery design. Essentially 120 D-cells selected specifically because it was a standard size with the likelihood of multiple sources down the line.

I was comparing an aluminum block I4 (typically around 200 lbs) to an aluminum block V8 (400-450 lbs).

So far I haven't heard of any. I thought it was mostly used in the large V8s in GM SUVs. I thought that Cadillac's early attempts were massively unreliable.

to the point that it is an insignificant cost.

Recycling/disposal fees seem to already be figured into the cost of doing business. Toyota actually has a toll-free number on their batteries for recycling information and will currently pay dealers $200 for any "retired" battery. At this point, it's probably only for batteries recovered from totaled cars. I would venture that Honda, Ford, GM are at the very least taking batteries back at no cost.

I was looking into this a little bit further. The original poster specifically mentioned the 2007 Saturn Vue Green Line. That only uses a 36V NiMH pack, which should be less expensive than the larger packs in other hybrid vehicles. There's also less risk of injury from the battery pack.

I remember an article I read about three years ago.Someone in Florida was letting their Chrysler (or whatever make and model car it was) electric/hybrid car's batteries being charged up overnight.The car caught fire and burned the garage and a large part of the rest of their house down.I think the electric/hybrid car manufacturers have a ways to go yet as far as safely recharging the batteries is concerned. cuhulin

ok,maybe it was a Daimler/Chrysler electric car.I found that website when I did a

search for, Chrysler electric car burns down Florida home cuhulin

not to the point that it is an insignificant cost.

Interesting, I had a long chat Friday with my battery dealer about this very issue. (we buy lots and lots of UPS gel-cell batteries from them)

He is of the opinion that for virtually all the hybrids on the road, once their traction battery fails and it's out of warranty, the cars will be scrapped.

The economics make it impossible to cost-justify replacing the battery.

The only way he's ever heard it work from an economic perspective is to convert the car over to all electric, using 6 volt lead acid golf cart batteries. He actually has one customer that has done this with several cars. The vehicle top speed is no more than 40Mph and the range is around 30 miles - but it's extremely cheap to run, cheap to build and works perfectly for city-only driving.

Ted

There's the Gem electric car sold by Daimler-Chrysler. It's really not all that different than any number of electric golf carts or service vehicles.

The National Park Service had a couple of them catch fire at Golden Gate National Recreation Area. One was a service vehicle on Alcatraz, while the other burned down the Warming Hut, which is a snack bar in San Francisco's Presidio. It sounds like it might be a design defect. These vehicles are available for rent by the hour in San Francisco, and you can see tourists tooling around Fisherman's Wharf in them.

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The economics make it impossible to cost-justify the purchase of a current hybrid in the first place. Someone who is really attached to a vehicle is likely to put more money into an old car than it's worth.

Again - I don't know exactly how much that 36V Saturn battery costs, but I would guess that it's far less than the thousands of dollars quoted for the Toyota or Honda replacements.

Really - this is considerably different than the typical battery usage pattern. Most batteries are either regularly topped off to maximum charge (12V car battery, laptop, cell phone) and/ or drained almost completely (like cameras or power tools). If you can avoid both, there's an excellent chance that a battery can easily last the extended life of a car. I've read enough that suggests that NiMH batteries don't suffer the same age-related breakdowns that Li-ion batteries have.

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Well, he also said that too. Actually, since the various governments involved heavily subsidize these, I think it is a wash in costs for the consumer - right now. But your right the true costs make hybrids more expensive.

I don't believe this for a second. For starters, what other types of usage patterns than your describing CAN you have and get any useful work out of a battery?

Is there any point to running a vehicle on a battery that you never drain any power from?

For a vehicle battery to be useful in a car it needs to work like a fuel tank. You charge it up, and in between charging intervals you drain it.

If you run it fully charged and try to store regenerative braking energy in it - well all your doing there is creating heat - the battery is fully charged and won't store any more power. If you run it at 80-90% of capacity well right then, your fitting the model of a "battery that is regularly topped off to maximum charge" If you allow it to be drained then your fitting the model of "drained almost completely"

I have a drawer full of NiMH D, C, AA, and AAA batteries and a charger specifically designed to charge them with their weird-o charge curve. Harbor Freight sells these batteries pretty cheaply.

I have run some of these batteries by running them till they were drained dry then recharged. I've run others in a mode where I keep them charged all the time with short periods of usage. Trust me, NiMH suffer age-related breakdowns the same as any other rechargable battery.

The big reason that NiMH has attracted attention is that they weigh less, and they are environmentally friendly.

Ted

It's fairly simple and well documented. The battery is much larger than needed than for a fully charged and drained application.

Energy is drained. About a third of the usable capacity is typically used. Many owners seem to refer to this range as "the sweet spot".

Read up.

"Another factor is the duty cycle. In consumer electronics, you charge the battery all the way to the top and then discharge it all the way to the bottom. Yet the worst things you can do to degrade the condition of these batteries, because of their chemistry, is let them get hot, charge them up to within the top 10% of charge, and discharge them to within the bottom 10% of charge. As a result, the life of batteries in these applications is typically less than a thousand cycles. If you can keep the state of charge of the battery in the middle it lives a lot better.

Obviously a life of a thousand cycles will not work for a car that you may keep for many years. The duty cycle of the Prius? Nickel Metal Hydride batteries is such that they operate in a state-of-charge from 45% to 75% (the ?sweet spot?). Therefore, due to its design, you will experience hundreds of thousands of 5% cycles and hundred-to-zero cycles (note that the graph on the Prius? in-car display is showing usable state-of-charge, not actual state of charge)."

I've mentioned several times in this thread that the ICE stops charging the traction battery at about 65-75% capacity. This prevents it from overcharging and leaves charge capacity for regenerative braking. The recharging typically starts at about 40-45%.

Again - you're fully charging them. I've heard suggestions that electrode/electrolyte life is lengthened if the battery is never fully topped off (esp Li-ion types).

You're judging the life of rechargeable batteries by what you've experienced in consumer or power electronics. Most users want the batteries topped off and/or completely drained. That's not how a typical hybrid battery is charged and discharged.

That kind of usage would probably result in maybe 1000 cycles (or less) of useful life. These hybrid battery systems are designed to get an exponentially longer lifespan by not using that typical duty cycle. There's been several Prius taxis that have gotten hundreds of thousands of miles on their original batteries.

NO.Me little doggy,she told me so. cuhulin

I said before - it's an oversized battery and the charge is intentionally kept between 40-75% of total capacity. That's in addition to the fan system that heats them when cold and cools them to prevent overheating. That's about as easy a life as any rechargeable battery is going to see.

Toyota, Honda, Ford, and GM seem to be able to use batteries that don't use the full capacity in order to maximize battery life. They are able to get useful energy out of it between 40-75% of capacity.

I have heard of cases where a battery has been abused and batteries weren't replaced under warranty. The Toyota hybrids have a different system where it sometimes runs only on electric, such as gentle acceleration, before the ICE kicks in. There's apparently a "limp" mode that can kick in if the tank is empty or extremely low. It's supposed to warn the driver, who then should try to get off the road to avoid completely discharging the battery or maybe to a gas station a couple of blocks away. The cases I heard were of someone who literally "limped home" for several miles in this mode to the point where the battery was discharged below 20% or more. Of course the on-board diagnostics keep track of all this and Toyota has a good case that the instructions weren't followed.

If I had a Prius, I would certainly try to avoid getting the tank that close to empty. If I did, I would pull out my cell phone and call AAA for a gallon of fuel to get me to the nearest gas station.

I don't consider such abuse any different than a transmission that can only get into 1st gear. If someone then uses 1st to get home and blows up the engine, then who's fault is it really?

I've got three Maha PowerEx chargers. They may be among the best consumer chargers on the market, but they still charge to near full capacity. I'm sure using them is better than other units for the overall life of the batteries I charge, but

Apparently nickel is somewhat toxic. However - there are recycling systems already in place. Toyota will pay dealers $200 for every spent Toyota battery pack that is returned to them.