Last week I saw a Prius with a big sticker on the back that said that it plugs into the AC outlet and can get 100 MPG.
Then yesterday I had some business at Stevenson Toyota and happened to mention it to a sales manager. I asked if they were selling those that way.
He said no, that there's currently a company in Boulder that's converting them for $10k each ( pretty stiff for what? Adding a power supply/charger to the thing? ), but that Toyota is planning on selling them starting in the
2012 model year.
Wow.
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E
Elmo P. Shagnasty
You haven't been paying attention, have you.
GM spent a long time talking about how the gasoline engine is just a generator, but a couple of weeks ago they announced that that's not exactly true. The gasoline engine in fact drives the wheels directly under certain circumstances.
It is not a fact that the gasoline engine "never drives the wheels directly" as GM initially stated and/or as some people inferred from listening to GM.
What GM did was take Toyota's basic "very expensive and complex" (not!) engineering of a planetary drive and re-jigger what pieces are attached where. This re-jiggering, plus a bunch of batteries, creates a plug-in hybrid--that can run legal freeway speeds on battery, and have decent commuting range on battery.
Toyota can re-jigger their drive system to achieve exactly the same effect.
To repeat: GM's drive system is no different than Toyota's. Toyota's isn't particularly "complex and expensive". It's ingenious. And GM studied it and made it work on a plug-in hybrid basis.
The Volt is a hybrid. Period.
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