- posted
18 years ago
Hybrids are pointless if you do mainly highway driving. But they can save quite a bit if all your doing is city driving. Consider in places like LA where you get on the highway and spend 2 hours stop and go traffic and you can see where the drive to go with hybrids comes from.
While battery packs don't last forever, the battery is warrantied at 100,000 miles, if they all fail a year after the warranty expires that will kill the hybrid sales of that automaker. Toyota already took flack on battery problems, they issued a recall for the early model batteries.
One thing that will kill batteries is this quote from the owners manual:
"If you do not use the vehicle for a long time (2 weeks or more), the hybrid vehicle battery and auxiliary battery will discharge and their condition is liable to decline. Therefore, in order to make up for discharging, charge them once in every two weeks for about 30 minutes by starting the hybrid system with all electrical components turned off."
Toyota will not replace batteries under warranty that have been left discharged for long periods of time.
Actually, what I think will happen with a lot of these Priuses is once they age and are discarded by their original owners, they will go straight into fully electric cars. There's already a company doing it:
Ted
The batteries, when you have to pay market price for them, will be the deal breaker.
The cheapest battery that is halfway suitable IMO is a NiCd built from unairworthy turbine aircraft starting batteries. All aircraft mechanic schools have large numbers of these well-cased, separate cell assembled batteries because they are subject to somewhat ridiculous rules and are hazardous waste when scrapped. The key is to get aircraft shops to sell them to you for $1 when they are still very marginally airworthy, or to agree to let you have them for educational purposes with the understanding you will pay to recycle them when they die. I realize NiCd is less than the most desirable chemistry but the price can be right.
Rather than a Prius, I would consider a full sized platform such as a Chrysler New Yorker or Imperial of early '60s vintage, a commercial chassis Cadillac, or even a RR Shadow or Camargue (they can come up cheaply if mechanicals are bad enough!). I would fit a DC motor/axle unit at the rear, possibly a transverse manual minivan or Cadillac manual transaxle, and a small genset in the front. Commercial stationary gensets are out of the question but a Subaru engine mated to a large bus alternator , or a Honda Gold Wing likewise, might do. More exotic alternatives are the small turbine APUs for helo and bizjet use or the Coventry Climax diesel APU used in Brit tanks.
Such a vehicle could carry a really good payload of the surplus batteries.
Yep.
So far so good...
Er...huh? What would this transaxle of yours be for? Surely not for gearing the drive motor...!
The drive motor has to go either sideways or front-and-back. If you want sideways, you will have to adapt a transaxle. Front and back means either heavy motor mounting and a driveshaft or building a flange mount to go on the axle directly. A FWD transaxle could be adapted with not much more work as a De Dion setup if you didn't want A-arms and linkage. I don't think there is an off-the-shelf motor/axle package available.
...unless they're integrated into the hubs.
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