News on the 09 Prius?

I found this article with BusinessWeek and they interview Toyota's CEO Katsuaki Watanabe and he says the thrid-gen hybrids will be out late 2008 early 2009 with Lithium Ion batteries. They asked if he thought batteries would be done in time and he stated that he has visited the site often and that the batteries will be done on time. Here is a link to the article.

3rd Gen Hyrbids

 

Intresting threads (tangents included)

My 2 cents:

Plug ins will significantly reduce CO2 in the long run and help in the short run. As Utilities are forced to move to real time pricing overnight energy costs will be less and daytime costs will be more. This will cause investment in local peak energy generation, especially solar (because the sun conveniently is out when power is the most expensive). Large areas of the world that have access to wind power are further helped because when the wind plows power becomes real cheap. Plug ins don't have to recharge all night or all at the same time, they can do it when clean energy is abundant.

As the grid changes from 50 - 80% coal depending on where you are, the CO2 footprint of the plug-ins go down. Increased local generation and battery technology will help reduce transmission and storage losses.

Nuclear power has a place because it is probably the best of a bunch of bad choices right now. Coal is 100% the worst and carbon sequestration is a political pipe dream. Conservation is best (but requires political leadership, we got some this week), solar is not yet scalable and wind is intermittent and could really only serve maybe 35% of some regions power. New technologies create less waste and future technologies like breeder reactors significantly recycle that waste. Not perfect, but the coal MUST stop.

Toyota seems more tight lipped than most companies about the future Prius. I just got impatient and bought one. If I were a gambling man, I would say whenever the Volt is available Toyota comes out with something that blows everyone away...

 

That article says the Toyota CEO was interviewed on February 16. That was ten months ago!

One problem with the internet is that sometimes a web page remains on display long after it has become outdated.

 

http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4227944.html


Pretty recent article, October 07.

 

"Conventional nukes won't be able to meet our energy needs once fossil fuels run out or we finally stop burning them to avoid turning the Earth into a Venus-like greenhouse"
I disagree, We can meet the demand for power if we build more nukes.


"As far as nukes being "non-polluting," every nuclear weapons facility in the U.S. is now leaking radioactive pollution into the groundwater underneath it."

Again why are you talking about weapons? I said nuclear power.

"As Pat noted above, the waste products will be deadly for over 100,000 years."

And you dont think that in 100k years we wouldn't be able to find a way to eliminate waste, perhaps recycle it? What we should be doing is finding a constructive way to reuse / recycle the waste now.


The most important point made." Although a properly-functioning nuclear power plant does not release pollution," thank you , lets work on fixing the other issues and then we wont need OPEC.


"

 

A mix of nuclear and solar power are the most obvious and achievable ways to wean ourselves off of coal for electricity. But nuclear and solar alone do nothing to stop our dependency on oil for automobiles. For that, we must, as a society, gradually convert our automobile infrastructure over to super-efficient PHEVs and PEVs. Vehicles like the Prius and TCH are huge steps in the right direction and, thankfully, appear to gaining more and more public acceptance and demand every day, despite the worst efforts of numerous energy companies and automobile manufacturers. It's truly a case of public will and wallets transforming the market in spite of itself. That's great, because it forces all of the automakers to either follow suit or go out of business trying to sell gassers that eventually nobody will want.

 

But nukes aren't really clean and we are not working on ways to recycle the waste just looking for isolated places to hide it until we die. I think Nuclear power is just another way governments and corporations are saying "F*** you" to our descendants.

Could there also be leaks under waste storage facilities or existing power plants? Oh sorry what was I thinking? The directors and share holders would make sure we knew about that. Yeah right.

Fix the problem now then go ahead and build more power stations. What gives us the right to create a major hazard for future generations 100,000 years from now just on faith that a solution will come? Is this the same logic an oil company uses when they dump waste products into third world water supplies? They will work out a solution.

Yes we should, before we build one more power station that uses uranium as fuel. The future is tomorrow so we need to work toward it today, there isn't much time left. Fix the issue before adding to the problem.
Would you drive into a wall on faith that the hospital will have a fix for your injuries by the time you get there?

Lets work on a balanced solution of current power stations and renewable energy. Lets look into solar/coal or current nuclear hybrid power in the short term to reduce emissions, that is use solar to create steam when the sun shines and feed it into existing power stations. Grid connected solar on our homes, this allows utilities to exist. Expand wind energy harvesting, a wind turbine can recoup its cost in 15 or so years, not a bad investment when it can go on producing almost free energy for 10 to 15 years more.

We haven't even looked at improving efficiency of industry and individuals.

I love this although I couldn't vouch for its accuracy.

http://www.chemexplore.net/solar.htm
The spots represent the area of the earth we would need to have 8% efficient solar panels to replace all of our energy consumption from all sources for all our current uses. This includes transport and stationary applications. It is a big task and it will never be done unless we work toward this. There are a lot of roofs on this planet.

 

Agreed, but they usually don't come out and say something will be ready if they don't feel it would be ready in time. So just the fact that he stated they will be ready for their late 2008 early 2009 release is encouraging.