Prius Plug-in Hybrid Concept Debuts at Frankfurt Motor Show

I'm going to kick myself in the a** for buying this year if they roll out this plug-in vehicle next year

 

Toyota Prius Plug-in | Green Business | Reuters

62 mph for 12 miles is pretty good if they can keep the costs down.

 

Hey Prius Team - I'm the perfect candidate to test this car for you! With my short commute I'd never use any gas.

 

What happens to the gas in the gas tank after sitting there for a year? I've seen my lawn mower spare gas looking very nasty.

 

and what happens to your electric bill after plugging this car everyday to recharge?

 

It goes up of course. And guess which bill plummets (Hint, gas)

 

The question then becomes, so how much is the net savings after weighing the two?

And also, switching from using oil to dirty coal as the source of the car energy surely isn't too smart, unless we can get more renewable energy as the source of the car electricity.

Also, no one has yet figured out what might happen to the grid when a substantial portion of the population plugs into it at night (usually an off-peak time). More blackouts? Brownouts?

 

Hopefully, Toyota will offer upgrade kit for our 2010s.
Is it only battery & s/w upgrade? Or the electric motor and alot of toher stuff need upgrading too.

 

Absolutely good comments. As for the cost, a friend and I were discussing the cost per gallon equivalent of electric vehicles and at the time (last year) it was around $0.25 per gallon equivalent.

As far as renewable energy, something has to be done to replace our aging and antiquated energy system regardless if cars are going electric or not. Any cheap domestic renewable energy source would be a good thing for the automotive industry.

 

I promise to occaisionally travel further than 12 miles.

As someone else pointed out, most people that have done the caluculations come out with a much lower cost.

FYI, down here in Texas we get to choose from a wide variety of possible electricity providers, including all wind providers. We also have a nuke down here. Dirty coal is not the most prevalent source down this way. I also buy into the argument that a single source power plant is much more suceptible to pollution controls than multiple car sources.

 

I haven't seen the grid capacity addressed but gasoline distribution and combustion verse coal has been studied and there is a net gain so society will probably benefit from plug ins assuming the actual car manufacturing does not get to negative.

Our grid is in bad shape. This certainly will increase the load but it also might increase the attention. Might make a good case for having a plug in hybrid until the grid has proven its capabilities. After all it always makes sense to have a backup.

 

As this thread is about plug-in cars.... WOOOOT! GO PLUG-IN!

The real question is when can I get a conversion kit for my '10 prius??


Somethings really bugs me, so here goes... Since i really don't want to argue, I'll post quotes and links from various 'sites. If you disagree -- go argue with that website, not the messenger.

That is misinformation.

Surprisingly, many people forget several things.

1) [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_scale"]Economies of scale[/ame]

For example: A .01% improvement in the production/process of power generation would result in a 10%+ improvement for the end user -- as opposed to a .01% improvement at the end user is still just a .01% improvement.

2) It's significantly easier and more cost effective to clean-up the gunk from ten sources than from 10.5 million sources.

3) Any sort of power plant is going to be significantly more efficient than an Internal Combustion Engines. (ICEs are only ~15% efficient.)

4) Not all electricity comes from coal plants.
- Hydro
- Natural Gas
- Oil
- Wind
- Geothermal
- Nuke

- Check it out


Unless you live in Appalachian Mnt. region, you don't even use coal! With very few exceptions, see the map for more details.

I'm not disagreeing that coal is horrid, it really is! However, where I find insulting is your presumption that we use coal as a primary power source in the US. (Only one region in the US actually uses coal as it's primary source.) You might as well claim that we still live in the Stone Age...


Even if we use 100% coal power, getting away from using the ICE is an enormous step in improving things. This is based on the logic that 20,000 efficient power plants are better for us than 143,781,202 really, really inefficient cars.

It would still be an huge improvement even if those power plants ran on the blood of virgins.

 

Isn't a plug-in hybrid a "tri-brid"?

 

No, actually, that's my opinion. I wasn't saying switching to electric vehicles is bad, I was suggesting we could do more.

agreed.

I suggest looking at that map again, because if you selected COAL in the drop down, it'll show the vast majority of states use coal as their primary energy source, with the main exceptions of the California area and the upper upper north east.

That's because we do. Coal is the single largest source of electricity for the USA, contributing 50% or more of the total.

Btw, if you've ever been to areas with very high coal usage you wouldn't keep thinking coal is so much better than ICE. In fact, a study done earlier this decade concluded the damage done by coal fired plants in the US amounted to about $62 billion per year, while the aggregate vehicles amounted to about $56 billion. So, the sooner we can clean up coal generation or switch to other sources, the better, before we replace damage via ICE with coal-damage as electric cars come into play and more demands are placed on the grid.

 

While it may be the largest, it's under 50% and falling every year for at least the past 20.

Electric Power Monthly - Table 1.1. Net Generation by Energy Source

Natural gas (much cleaner and much more efficient) and renewables are growing significantly to take market share.

 

exactly my point. we should continue to push non fossil fuels as the main source of electricity before cars start piling up onto the grid.

 

If we wait until the grid is "perfect" we'll never get there. Just like if we wait until EV tech is "perfect", we'll never get there, either.

Even with the current grid mix, EV/PHEV is a huge win over oil. You miss the point completely.