Featured Upping the volts will make hybrid cars much cheaper

Well this has changed my mind about 48V systems. Let's retrofit their homes and businesses to 48V, DC. If DC was good enough for Edison, let's put the writers live on 48VDC systems. Of course this is nonsense ... power-point engineering.

Let's start with a rather modest, 10 hp, system. It takes ~746 W to make 1 hp or roughly 7.45kW:

	metric	12V	48V	202V	360V
1	amps	622	155	37	21
2	wire gauge	2 x 0000 ga	1 x 0 ga	1 x 6 ga	1 x 8 ga
3	diameter	2 x 0.46"	0.33"	0.162"	0.128"

Champion, an auto-supplier in Europe, is pushing 48V. But it scales so badly compared to ordinary high voltage systems today, it just doesn't make sense ... except as a way to extend the life of diesel and gas engines a little longer. It means a new inventory of non-12V compatible accessories, a maintenance and logistics nightmare. Worse, it keeps the manufactures of house lights and systems, 120/240 VAC, suppliers out of the OEM market. There is nothing wrong with a 5,000 BTU air conditioner being the same hardware as is found in a car ... except Champion won't have a market to itself.

Any automotive engineer who signs up for this has pretty well shown themselves to be incompetent. As for the 'liberal arts' writer to copied from some PowerPoint charts ... well we don't expect much from them.

Bob Wilson

 

Upping volts to 48V won't make a car hybrid at all. Those cars have Start-Stop, it is a stretch call that a mild hybrid, which typically runs at 100V + (Honda Insight 1gen and 2gen).