Looking at the latest roundup of specs revealed on the 2016 Prius Liftback (Press Information | TOYOTA Global Newsroom), I got to thinking about battery placement, size, and capacity for the next gen PiP. Looking at page 15, the Liftback auxiliary battery moves from the lower trunk area to the front engine compartment. The Liftback hybrid battery also moves from the forward trunk area to under the rear seats. This potentially creates quite a bit more room for the next gen plug-in battery, perhaps now able to occupy the entire floor of the trunk (maintaining no spare tire) and extending forward under the rear seats. Seems easy to imagine at least double the volume now available. We know that the PiP Li-Ion cells are only part of the battery unit with control hardware, fans, etc, taking up some of the rest - so doubling capacity should mean significantly less than simply doubling volume and weight. It also seems likely that we will get more battery capacity per battery cell volume and weight as Toyota has noted that the Liftback will have "newly developed high-performance lithium-ion". Thoughts? Edit: Updated link corrected above as Toyota increased the size of the pdf and changed link location
i think double is a reasonable expectation. what is the current official number, 11? 22 is certainly doable, maybe 25 with battery advancement. that would equate to 30-40 miles for many of us, under optimal conditions. couple that with higher mpgs and you've got a winner. i wonder how charge time will be? hopefully 2 1/2 hours on L2. also, winter capacity maybe improved.
Hoping they upgrade the on board charger from 3.3 kW to 6.6+ kW. With L2 that should give 20+ miles with just one hour of charge.
The problem is that multilink rear suspension occupies more space. If they use the same cells as in normal li-ion Prius, then for 8 kWh battery pack you would need around 300L of volume, that is huge amount of luggage space. But I doubt they will use same cells, because that would mean 8 kW pack would be capable of delivering ~200 kW power, electric motor can not take more than 53 kW. If they package it in place of e-AWD, current battery under the seat and smaller tank size, then they must fit it in something like 100 L of space and it's not box shaped. If they wan't it to do more than 20 miles range then they will have to use more space, maybe H shape: under front seats - middle tunnel - rear seats together with luggage area.
Not likely. GM didn't with the new Volt. It is purely a cost and price issue. The very few customers in which the faster charger would be worth it(ex. those paying per time parked at a charger) isn't enough to justify increasing the cost for all of them.
You are right. I did a quick Google search prior to that post and there were at least a couple sites that (incorrectly) listed it as 3.3 kW and I went with that. Even an upgrade to that charging rate would be a nice 50% boost in charging speed. 13.75 Amps at 240 V and 3.3 kW; 27.5 Amps at 240 V and 6.6 kW, I believe.
