Featured Next Gen Prius will be revealed in Japan on 11/16!

..or a missed Botox treatment

 

You have to remember who Tiny Tim was.

Plus the Prime looks to double its ev range and the straight hybrid will bump the mpg significantly.

 

And it would also be expensive. If that could be done cheaply, it would have been done already.

 

It's not a lot different from a new Chevy Bolt.

 

Too bad carb doesn’t mandate the 10yr 150k warranty on BEVs like they do PHEVs

but million km degradation is pretty neat if true

 

If there is a Prius BEV to be announced with the gen5, the work has already been done with the existing platform.

The indirect replacement for the Bolt will be the Equinox EV for 2024. Target for starting price is $30k for a car on a new platform with at least 150kW charging. The range for that one is likely not much more than the Bolt's current. GM is already using the platform and technology suite in other vehicles.

If Toyota does rush a new EV platform, and then tries recouping the cost upfront, they'll just wipe out the reason for rushing the platform.

CARB doesn't exactly mandate that warranty. Having it is a requirement for the cars to have access to subsidies. A manufacturer could choose to stick with the federal minimum. The reason CARB could do anything in regards to warranty is that it falls under emission regulations. Those don't apply to BEVs.

Qualifying for the million km warranty requires annual battery inspections at a dealer. Without that, the warranty is about the same as others.

 

So it’s like car shield in that if you don’t have your wiper blades replaced at the dealer every 3 months your engine warranty is void.

Wonder what a battery inspection entails

 

$ $ $ $ $ lots of it - to the point you'd often be better off to replace it yourself w/out their regular / huge inspection fees.

 

From the creative311 website comes new information about which trim will be for sale to the general public and which is for commercial or their KINTO/lease contract only and applies to the Japanese market only. Not sure what it means for the US market but we may not get the 1.8L HEV unless they are trying to differentiate the Prius from the Corolla in the US. I would be very hesitant to believe anything until the actual reveal.

https://creative311.com/?p=148970

Partial webshot of Creative311 website:

 

Is there any verified doc showing the BZ ev battery capacity claim of 71kWh is usable? Wondering - because there are articles claiming stated range is not achievable even under regular drive scenarios - and by amount of juice discharged, upon recharge - it might be that actual usable capacity (not counting lower & upper buffers) is in the 60's kWh range. So IF that's the case (for example) & the pack has 68kWh usable .... you'd have to be below 48kWh's before being entitled to warranty replacement. That'd leave some pretty paltry range. Anyone seen warranty language stating whether that get's you a new battery? .... or (& yes it's been done before by some manufacturers) .... do you get a rebuilt battery that still has something above 70% ???
.

 

Not impressed with its 56 MPG. If they really wanted to boost Prius sales, they’d release a 60+ mpg.

 

The laws of physics can be annoying that way.

 

Not the entire battery is usable. Here's a quote from the European site (I bolded the keyword):
"The high-density lithium-ion battery comprises 96 cells and has a 355.2 voltage rating. Its gross capacity is 71.4 kWh and it has an ambient temperature operating range of between -30 and +60°C."

Couldn't find a usable capacity, but here's the European efficiency rating:
"The front-wheel drive model will achieve up to 516 km on a fully charge battery, with an efficiency rating of 143.2 Wh/km (7 km/kW); the all-wheel drive version has an official range of up to 470 km with 158 Wh/km (6.3 km/kW) efficiency."

Don't bother calculating those numbers, you would need a 73.7 kWh battery to get the range they quoted at the 143.2 Wh/km.

 

By design hybrid battery packs will not have full use of the maximum capacity. NiMH batteries are limited to, IIRC, 20-80% SoC. Lithium battery packs are a little better at 10%-90%.

The NiMH battery in the Prius isn't typically drained below ~50% in normal driving. The hybrid ECU will disengage EV mode and start charging it.

The Lithium battery is allowed to go lower than that to about 30%, from my observations, before the ECU disengages EV mode and starts charging it.

Manufacturers will almost always only report the maximum capacity and never the useable capacity.

 

Automakers actually already have technology that can do 100+ mpg. They just don’t release it right away. They reserve it for future generations otherwise they wouldn’t have anything to sell in the future. Even cellphones like iphones they already have technology for iphone 20 and so on. But they’re not gonna release all of it. It has to be slowly released sales and business wise. Feature by feature.

 

The Prius Prime goes down to ~12% of charge.

 

Try taking off the hat. The tinfoil one.