SAE Article on Prius PHV

With an abundance of facts and well reasoned opinions and a almost total lack of soundbites and hysteria, this article is going nowhere. It is a nice read if you like journalism, and miss it.

 

The key points I saw in the article

 

Spot on.
Including the $2500 tax credit, Toyota can price the PHV about $3500 over a similar trim HV Prius and have a chance at mass adoption. However, given the way the US EV tax credit works, I think Toyota will be better off with a longer range EV.

 

This is a second source I have seen of PHV Prius' EV range dropping only about 1 mile when using heater after preconditioning. For reference, Volt's EV range drops by 10 miles even with preconditioning.

It is great to see that Toyota is listening. We did not like how the pack2 and pack3 unable to take regen power once they are disconnected (drained). Making it a single pack should also cut down the weight.

 

The cool thing about the PHV, is that it uses a heat pump to heat as well as cool the car. This means that the pack-cost of heating (w/o a preheat) goes down probably by a factor of 2.

Why they didn't put this in the Leaf is beyond me, it's basically just a reversing valve and some software enhancements.

 

That's the first time i've seen mentioned that the "HV" pack is not charged at all by the mains. it sort of explains why the EV range is only 13 miles, because that's on 3.5kwh not 5.25kwh. i guess that also means you could finished drivng with a depleted pack and get the HV pack down to the equivalent of 2 bars, charge the cars EV packs, turn on the car, wait for it to refill the HV pack, then turn off and recharge the EV packs again.

Or alternatively they could just let you charge all three packs from the mains, then your EV range may be closer to 20 miles.

 

The article does not mention that. The full capacity of the battery is not used b/c deep discharging (aka discharging it all the way) it reduces the battery life much more quickly than partially discharging it.

 

It does.

"EV-operation batteries charge directly from the household outlet. The third one charges through the inverter, a protective strategy appropriate for its operating mode (hybrid vs. EV) and therefore state-of-charge vs. the others."

The inverter is not active while the car is not in READY in the existing versions, so if that remains the same then the total in the mains charged packs is 3.5kwh, allowing 270wh/mi for 13 miles at 100% DOD, or 215wh/mi for 13 miles at 80% DOD.

If the production version gets a full 5.25kwh to play with, at the same 215wh/mi and 80% DOD we get 19.5 miles of range. Fingers crossed!

 

215wh/m or 4.6 m/kwh is quite high and won't be the EPA rating. Leaf is EPA rated at about 3.5 m/kwh.