User 169775

Are Hybrid Vehicles Worth the Price?

On 2008 Nov 22 06:00 PM lesceil wrote:


> 2. Battery lifetime has not been proven by a long history, but for
> all I have experienced with rechargeable batteries before, they get
> stale quicker than advertised.

You don't understand how the battery in a hybrid car works.

They last VERY long because they are NOT deep-discharged like your rechargeable batteries.

Rechargeable batteries wear out because of all the full-charge-then-full-... cycles. Hybrid car batteries DO NOT do that.

The Prius hybrid computer is always trying to keep the charge state of its hybrid battery between 60%-80%, where it has a life span measured in decades. Even when you see the charge state in the Prius MFD display a low charge state of just 2 red bars, the battery is still 60% charged.

Purely Battery-powered electric cars like the Tesla do go through full-charge-then-disch... cycles, which is why their battery life is problematic-- Tesla recommends replacing the battery pack in the Roadster after 5 years. Non-plug-in hybrids do not suffer from this problem because they don't deep-discharge their batteries.

Latest on Hybrids: Toyota Yaris for U.S.

This is nothing new...

Between 1997 and 2003, Toyota had a compact hybrid built on the Echo/Vitz platform (the platform from which the Yaris is developed on).

What was this Yaris-sized compact hybrid?

The first-generation Toyota Prius! :-)

I can see how it will complement the now-much-bigger midsized 3rd-generation hatchback Prius though.

Are Hybrid Vehicles Worth the Price?

Hybrids compare favorably in terms of performance to their conventional counterparts.

For instance, the Ford Escape Hybrid has a combined output of 196hp from its I-4 engine and electrical motor. The regular I-4 Escape has 171hp.

Are Hybrid Vehicles Worth the Price?

Replacing the battery pack is not an issue. All current new hybrids sold in the U.S. have an 8-year / 100,000-mile warranty on the battery, and the warranty is extended to 10 years / 150,000-miles in the 8 states with California-standard emissions laws.

If it fails within the warranty period, the cost of replacement is FREE.

That is assuming you didn't do anything stupid to void the warranty, like crash the car, tamper with the hybrid system, etc.

Failure of the battery pack in the 2nd-generation Prius within warranty terms is virtually unheard-of.

Brand Names: Important, But Not Key to Investment Decisions

...Except even though people thought the Japanese cars in the 70s and 80s weren't well-built, they still bought them in droves because they got BETTER FUEL ECONOMY.

This year it's history repeating itself-- People buying Toyota Corollas that can get 30mpg COMBINED (not just highway as GM and Ford have been advertising) because of $4/gallon gas.

Ford and GM needs to realize that not only do they need to build cars that are put together well, they also need to make cars that are MORE FUEL EFFICIENT than the Japanese if they want to regain market share in North America.

The situation in Europe for Ford is not applicable here in North America. Ford is doing well in Europe because they have less-stringent emissions laws, which means Ford's fuel-efficient diesel cars are a big hit there. They can NEVER sell those diesels as-is here, because they don't meet the EPA's Tier2 emissions standards.

The situation for GM in China is also NOT applicable for the North American market-- GM is doing well in China because gas is still cheap there at $2 a gallon, and the noveau-riche Chinese middle class don't mind buying gas-guzzlers because of that.

Until one of the Big Three can produce a 50mpg car that is street-legal in the U.S. with comparable reliability and cost about the same as the Toyota Prius, they are not going to gain back market share in the era of $4/gallon gas.

(Don't bother mentioning the Chevy Volt. Sucker is going to cost $40,000 and by the time it comes out Toyota will have its 3rd-gen PHEV Prius with similar 40-mile-electric capability in the showrooms for $30,000.)

Chrysler's Rebadging Plan: Strategic Blunder for Nissan?

@211293:

Agreed. Toyota has left the door open for Chrysler to introduce a hybrid minivan for the past 5 years. And Chrysler has not taken advantage of it!

The window of opportunity is closing fast. Toyota has been selling their Estima Hybrid minivan in Japan for years, and in the next couple years they plan to bring it to the U.S. as the Sienna Hybrid.

The opportunity is there.. It's just Chrysler is doing everything they can to flub it!

The Electric Car Battery Battle

The compressed air to be used in the MDI car is going to be pressurized to 4500PSI. Personally, I'd rather not sit in a car with a tank pressurized to 4500PSI in the back. If that sucker ruptures, whoever is sitting in the driver's seat is going to become hamburger.

Objectivity is right. Imagine the amount of power needed to compress that air to 4500PSI. When you buy a fillup of that air at 4500PSI, you are paying for the gasoline to run the compressor to compress that air to 4500PSI. Sorry air-car fans, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

General Motors: General Malaise

Right now American consumers don't care if a GM car gets JD Powers awards for quality coming out of the wazoo. Right now they care about fuel economy, and that's where the Japanese cars are trouncing GM.

Chevy's commercials say they have a line up with more cars that get 30mpg than other makers, but that's misleading. 30mpg HIGHWAY only. If you factor in city mileage, even the Chevy Aveo (which is made by Daewoo in Korea by the way, not here in the U.S.) gets only 25mpg.

Meanwhile, Toyota has Yarises and Corollas that can get 30mpg COMBINED, ditto Honda with their Civics and Fits.

Why should the American consumer keep buying GM cars if they can't match the fuel economy of foreign cars to prop them up so GM has no incentive to change? That's corporate socialism at its very worst.

Is There Any Hope for the Big Three Auto Makers?

I think the 1980s Federal bailout of Chrysler created a bit of moral hazard here. It's a bad thing to have GM and F think that Uncle Sam is always going to be there to clean up their mess no matter how badly they misbehave.

Considering how the Fed handled the Bear Stearns crisis (arranged for JPMorgan Chase to buy them out), I think more likely Uncle Sam would probably try to arrange for some private equity firm to take over F or GM if they should fail, though I have a feeling a lot of private equity firms have looked at Cerberus's experience with Chrysler and would probably politely refuse. :-P

F does have a takeover candidate lined up though-- Kirk Kerkorian's Tracinda Corp. Uncle Sam would probably guarantee a loan for Kirk to take on the unsavory job of salvaging Ford's collapse if that does come to pass.

Don't know about GM..

Some Consequences if Oil Prices Stay High

@ Barry's Pharmacist:

I think the chief objection to using a rocket to shoot nuclear waste into space is that rockets are only 98% reliable. Which means for every 50 launches, there is going to be 1 failure where the rocket blows up in the atmosphere during its booster stage.

A rocket filled with nuclear waste blowing up during its booster stage would not be good for the folks living in Florida. :-)

Is There Any Hope for the Big Three Auto Makers?

Up until last week, I believed the Chevy Volt will be GM's savior... No longer.

Some Chevy spokesman had said the Volt is going to have an MSRP of $40,000. People are already whining about the price premium of current hybrids like the Toyota Prius, and the Prius costs only $21,500 MSRP. If those prices are true, the next generation Prius is going to absolutely KILL the Volt in sales.

Things look grim for GM.

Is There Any Hope for the Big Three Auto Makers?

I wonder if Kirk Kerkorian is still harboring dreams of gaining control of Ford, considering that he bought his few million shares at $7 only to watch it fall to $4. Well, at least Ford has someone who may be willing to pump more money into the company.. Not sure if GM or Chrysler can say the same.

Will Toyota Lose Its Edge?

Gotta ask:

The atkinson-cycle engine in the Prius is different from the Otto-cycle engines in a regular car. It does NOT have a timing belt because the valves work differently. The engine does NOT have a starter either because the normal starter/solenoid system because it relies on the Power Split Device to crank the gasoline engine to speed on-the-fly.

Also the Prius does NOT have an alternator. The Power Split Device switches the traction motors between electrical generation and torque generation depending on need.

The Toyota Hybrids are mechanically LESS complex than a normal car, including your mother's HyCam. It's the electronics that are more complicated, not the mechanicals.

Like I said, no timing belt, no alternators, no starters, and the transmission has just a single gearset. It's LESS components to maintain. You might be impressed about your mother's HyCam, but apparently you don't know much about it.

Will Toyota Lose Its Edge?

I agree with 98101 on the reliability of the Toyotas.. Drove a Toyota for the past 10 years, and just picked up my Prius late last year.

I can go one better than 98101-- My Prius has no alternator, starter, or timing belt to go bad, and since it uses regenerative braking, it does not need a brake job until 100,000 miles. Try that in a regular car! :-)

GM Looks Beyond Oil

jackkreg: Reprocessing nuclear fuel will not solve the nuclear waste problem. It will actually make it worse.

Trying to recover fissionable material from spent fuel rods requires an enormous amount of equipment and chemical reactants, all of which will be radioactively contaminated over the course of the fuel reprocessing and will end up as nuclear waste that requires long-term storage.

Check out the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State where they have industrial plants that produced Plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program by recovering Pu made from Uranium-238 in breeder reactors. Those facilities are so badly contaminated with radioactivity that they cannot be safely demolished when the DOE stopped producing weapons-grade Plutonium there. Those facilities will remain hot zones for thousands of years.

What the nuclear physicists and engineers need to do is figure out how to produce energy via nuclear fusion. That presents a much smaller danger in terms of radioactive waste.