Featured Gen 6 Prius engine will be a “game changer,” achieve a 53% thermal efficiency

On their mystery number, I agree. However, their highway numbers are close enough. My previous Prius experience:

• First drive wait 1 minute - it typically takes 45-50 seconds for the catalytic converter to get hot enough for feedback, mixture control. If you have an OBD device, look for the catalytic converter temperature. Just wait at idle until it leans out.
• 63 mph - matches the highway numbers. Faster is less, slower is more.
• 22 mph +/- 3 mph - peak efficiency. The slowest cruise control setting, 26-27 mph. Find your minimum and add 2 mph for longest, most efficient speed.
• one hour minimum - this is long enough to reduce the startup and initial inertial load to less than 10% of the trip

These simple rules are how I got my 1,000 mi tank. Don't fiddle with 'feathering' or 'engine off' nonsense but rolling in "N" works on very long, shallow, downgrades.

Bob Wilson

 

I find them to be sand-bagged. Pessimistic. De-rated to lower than actual, outside of foul weather.

Maybe I don't speed fast enough?

Agreed there.

 

Ran into the same. I recalled the adjustment might have started a year or so after the start of the requirement, but left it off the post for brevity,.

These energy efficiency numbers are for their thermal efficiency. It is the amount of the fuel's thermal energy gets turned into work. The lower the percent, the less fuel the engine uses to turn the crankshaft. The rest is wasted in terms of the engine doing useful work.

You are moving beyond engine efficiency into vehicle efficiency. These are two different, but related, things. An engine can go into numerous different vehicles. All with different shapes, weight, equipment, and features. Put a car together wrong, and even the world's most efficient engine will return crap fuel economy.

Without knowing the specific car, talking vehicle efficiency of an engine is pointless. Knowing an engine's thermal efficiency is important because it sets the bar for a car's potential efficiency. The air drag, rolling resistance, drive train efficiency, etc. all subtract from it to get to the vehicle efficiency. All else being the same, putting a more efficient engine into a car will yield better fuel economy. It's how the OP of this thread estimated 75mpg for a Prius using Toyota's new engine, which is going into the new Corolla.

 

absolutely agree. I am sure they are getting these figures in the the lab, but when it goes into a real car cost, pollution controls, and reliability usually drop this figure except in rare examples like the vw XL1 which never got an epa rating because all 250 were presold outside the US.

 

Well fine, just be logical. And keep it up!

I hope that 75mpg does become a reality soon. That would be awesome. I've been driving around a vehicle these past few days that is averaging 13.8 mpg.

 

It sounds like the next Corolla will be the first model to use these new engines. We'll see how much of an improvement then.

The US will likely have to wait until after Japan and Europe gets it though.

 

Thats gotta hurt, especially if you've got a 20 gal tank or larger. Not fer nothing, but - is the early 80's I was hurtin pretty bad in the wallet and my '72 gold / white vinyl top Charger / 318 was gettin 10. $3 at the pump would get me 25 miles.

 

Got me thinking about firsts we don't see in this country. I posted about the new tech in the 21 Aqua here a couple years ago. Since then there's been an update to the Toyota Worldwide site on the model and I also found a half hour youtube about the 2017 Aqua upgrades. Links respectively below.

Toyota to Launch All-New Aqua | Toyota | Global Newsroom | Toyota Motor Corporation Official Global Website

ps: don't forget to do the conversion of km/L to mpg
from the article Aqua is rated at 35.8 km/L ( obviously that's not an EPA rating ) still ! ! ! ! ! ! !

once the drive by wire programming features are more fully / better understood, so is the B mode braking by wire..

 

Well, let me put it this way. I drive a 14mpg car because it was free. I drive it less than 5 miles a day. So less than two gallons, or less than $7.50, per week.

However, I really should just ride my bicycle.

As far as "soon", I mean I'd like to be able to afford a +75 mpg vehicle. Perhaps a cheap Nissan Leaf with a run-down battery would be a good replacement if I don't bike. But I do see benefits of having this large thirsty vehicle since it holds some 7 or 8 people and has enough ground clearance for going over some rough passes, which I've done in the Avalon, but it does drag bottom quite a bit.

If only there were that perfect vehicle that get 100mpg, makes me get my exercise to work and back, hauls the whole family and then some, has the off-road capability of a tank, and is basically free.

 

The prime messes up the math though, lets be honest.

Thanks to EV mode I get nearly 250MPGe, and the HV efficiency screen in the car tells me I get almost 200MPG in HV mode. // 0.9L/100KM and 1.3L/100KM respectively

I don't exactly have a special app and reader tracking the engine on time and distance driven to gas used in detail while stripping out the EV mode stuff. But the regular prius wouldn't strip those out on its readouts either, and just tracking distance per tank is what gets me the 250 rating so idk how we're supposed to compare these things as prime owners to the non-prime ones.

 

it must be a hoot coming up upon you driving through Texas

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Most are doing 90+ in the posted 85's.

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This is why I take the back road. There's no way I'm doing more than 55mph down any highway. Modern day speed limits are nuts!

 

From a simply mathematical viewpoint, theres only around 10% or less EVs on the road today. If you increase that number to 50%, that lowers ICE cars by 40%. You not only have a 5X higher demand for electricity, but also half the demand for gasoline.

Your prices for electricity will increase significantly, while gasoline prices will decrease to covid levels and production will probably stay the same since gasoline companies can now sell gas to electrical production companies which will become profitable once electricity costs more than gas. They might not exist to a large degree now (especially not in europe), but once its profitable, its almost a guarantee electrical production by using gas will become mainstream in a very ironic predictable move.

In other words, it will then be a lot cheaper to fill your car with gas than electricity if its not already driving a prius.

Also turbo on atkinson engine?? Or turbo on the non hybrid version of their ICE?

 

Why is it assumed oil companies' gasoline output is fixed? The above scenario is not a temporary shift to the market like the pandemic. In this purposed case, the oil companies will reduce drilling and gasoline production to keep profits up. They can change what cones out of a refinery. Most of the gasoline we get was made from other compounds in the petroleum, they'll switch that to feedstock for the chemical and plastic industry if gasoline prices drop.

Converting natural gas power plants to oil isn't cheap, as more pollution controls will have to be added. If new needs to be built, why not more solar, wind, and storage instead of oil?

It's called a Miller cycle. Invented back in 1954.

None of these new engines are going to be used for a non-hybrid version. Emission and efficiency regulations mean straight ICE cars had a limited life span before ICE bans existed.

 

Most electricity is used for things other than cars ;-) Since it won't happen overnight, but lots of charging will, the grid can easily grow without increasing prices significantly. My guess is also if ice cars dropped 40% then I would not expect gasoline/diesel sales to dip more than 20%, but that is because gasoline for light vehicles is only 43% (in 2022). Heavy trucks, industrial equipment, generators, heating, etc account for the rest of petroleum.

You mean quixotic if it happens. Gasoline is much more expensive than wind or natural gas. The US has plenty of natural gas and can produce more fuel from bio sources. Only remote places like hawii now produce much of their electricity from oil, or places where oil is cheap and natural gas, wind, and coal are expensive. That is not the US.

A turbo efficient engine uses the miller cycle, and it is actually less costly to do the initial pressure with a turbo than with the pistons. Because this pressurization occurs the effective compression increases so 10:1 in a turbo works like 15:1 in an dynamic force hybrid engine like the one in the current prius. atkinson engines actually came from miller cycle engines but without the turbo. The turbo recovers heat energy so the expansion to compression ratio does not need to be as large. Most turbos are used for power not efficiency which is why numbers look worse.

Happy independence day. I hope in 20 years we are independent of worrying about oil prices. Plug-ins are part of that, but I don't think we need to mandate them for everything.