Dealer says lithium battery available in November

The head of Toyota USA and the Prius Chief Engineer stated that the Gen III Prius will use the same battery as the Gen II. The battery has been repackaged, and they are getting a little more power out of it, but it is still NiMH.

Tom

 

Looks like the first one to dealers in middle May or early June.

 

I think that's it. We did hear about that program.

Tom

 

The plug-in Lithium Prius are for fleet sales only. It is part of Toyota's research into PHEV's. If I remember correctly they are building 500 worldwide.

 

Yup. About 150 should come to the US. They will NOT be on the retail market until... well, nobody knows.

 

sure they will Danny, by 2015 we will all have onboard fission power plants (remember "back to the future", 'mr. fusion'?) only j/k

I do wish they moved along a little faster though

Mitch

 

That doesn't surprise me much. There is very little advantage to Li-ion over NimH in a standard hybrid. Panasonic EVs NimH cells are pretty impressive. They put out a lot more Amps per Amp hour than most Li-ion would survive. We know output can be over 100A on full acceleration, from a 6.5Ah battery. Thats a routine 15C+ discharge! Many Li-ion are happiest around 3C, some can do 10C for short bursts. Li-ion will cut weight per Wh in half, but as the Prius battery modules only weigh ~60lbs, that wouldn't buy much of anything. Makes it hard to justify the 2x cost increase. You could also double the battery capacity for the same weight, but now you've 4x'd the cost, and the effect on mileage will probably still be negligible. The DOE ran a first gen Prius to 160k miles and found that even though its older style batteries were down to almost 50% capacity, there was no noticible impact on mileage. Similarly early gen2 hackers figured out how to put a second stock pack in a Prius, doubling the battery capacity and also got almost no improvement in mileage. The mileage performance of a standard HEV is just not that strong a function of battery size provided the battery capacity is much greater than the amount of energy stored/released in a standard deceleration/acceleration event, which in the prius case it is.

I know most folks on here know this, as its been discussed a lot, but I think it bears repeating from time to time as there is a common public perception that Li-ion is vastly superior in all things and some kind of magic answer to all our problems. Li-ion becomes much more important for PHEVs, as battery size and weight becomes more of an issue. Larger NimH are also not available due to the Cobasys patent coverage, and building a PHEV pack out of smaller NimH cells get prohibitively expensive and complicated.

Rob

 

Rechargable Zinc-Air if I'm not mistaken...

 

That's what I'm talkin' about.