Another opinion about GreenHybrid

This is Jason Siegel, Tideland, and I appreciate your support. You will I'm sure find this interesting.

 

good luck bob..

you will do just fine at your new spot

 

Except maybe for the person walking away with money in their pocket.

Tom

 

Well, certainly not in my case! The way things turned out, I/we would be much better for me had I not sold the site and continued to manage it through this day. So…oops!!

 

Bob, I have a question for you. What's wrong with discussing, investigating, even encouraging the development of technologies beyond HEVs? Sure, it's good technology. But is it the be-all and end-all of transportation? I certainly hope not. Are hybrid cars ideal for all possible cases? No, and neither is anything else. If we are being objective, and if we learn from man's history of technological success and failure, we can only come out ahead of the energy problem if we keep an open mind. To do otherwise is to say "Here's the solution, make it fit." That's the stuff of failure.

Blind single-mindedness is for the marketing guys, not the engineers.

 

Bob,

You completely dodged Tim's question:

Please answer his question, lest you reveal you are unable to engineer an adequate response.

 

I wouldn't want to speak for Bob, but my perspective on the matter is that it's not only acceptable but encouraged to explore several alternatives to a problem. In the case of the gas/oil/transportation crisis, hybrids are just one answer. Issues arise, however, when communities lose focus and/or no longer have the expertise to advocate any position at all.

What's happened to GreenHybrid is that the site is run by employees with little knowledge of or interest in the grassroots movement. Their only strategy to increase the quantity of information, therefore, is to increase the scope of the website and dilute the content.

A better way forward is to expand in both depth and breadth.

 

Yes, it's the end result - not the means that matters....hybrids is one of many good solutions.

 

It's a bit obscure, but I think his point is that in a hybrid you can use pulse-and-glide techniques safely. You use much more fuel to sustain a speed than you do in getting there, so one major hypermiling technique is simply to let the car coast with the engine off. To do that in a non-hybrid car requires putting the car in neutral with the engine off, losing power steering (in most cars with hydraulic PS) and brake assist (without electronic brake-force distribution), no easy way to get 'engine braking' if a little is needed, and no guarantee that the engine will fire back up when needed.

The full hybrid allows a no-power 'glide', where no power is needed to move the car, and no power is taken from the glide to recharge (minimizing losses), simply by finding the appropriate point in the accelerator pedal's travel. This dead spot seems to be something Toyota designed in - all the arrows on the Prius energy display switch off. Because everything is on, with the car in Drive, you have full (electric) power steering and braking (regen braking), and slight movements of the accelerator are enough to pick up a little speed or scrub a little as necessary. The car is designed to start and stop the engine at speed.

I'm more of the 'just drive it' persuasion, but I admit to gliding when slowing down for a distant junction, if it's safe to do so (the nearest car behind is some distance back).

All that said, hybrids are most likely a stop-gap before full electric vehicles. Easily-processed liquid fuel will run out, we're just extending its range with hybrids. Moving the GreenHybrid site away from hybrids is just ridiculous. Yes, in the last few years some small diesels that beat Prius fuel economy numbers have come out, but the latest Prius iteration will blow most of them out of the water. There could well be a few years of tit-for-tat between them but I think hybrids have more potential for improvement yet, and we haven't yet seen what could be achieved by a Yaris-sized hybrid with Yaris-range performance (i.e. slower than a Prius!)

 

Hybrids are antiquated and backward-looking technology. The Prius was a great step forward in its day. Or would have been a couple of decades earlier. EVs are the future, if we are to have a future that includes non-human-powered transportation.

Confucius? Or the Three Stooges? I though it was Moe who said that.

 

Not wishing to push this thread too far off-topic, there are some people (e.g. me) who cannot easily plug-in at home.

This is my street. The houses are terraced, there are no garages for us. There are no driveways. The marked boxes on the street are residents' parking bays. The bays are first-come first-served, and being able to park outside my house is pretty rare. There's a van parked outside my house (last one at the west end of the south side of the street). (Scroll the map a bit to the left, turn left at the T junction, and I think I see my old green Ford Focus four cars down - probably a weekday morning and I was running late).

Last night I was lucky to even get a parking space, I thought I was going to have to do a third lap.

Run a cable? Even round the corner? I'm in the top floor flat of a converted house. I'd have to run it out of the window, and that's if the electrics could even stand it.

To have any form of plug-in vehicle I'd need to either:

a) move - but that doesn't help the next occupant
b) have recharging points fitted all down the street
c) have fast-recharge stations available

That isn't to say that people who have driveways and garages couldn't get started on EVs - they should be encouraged to - but they aren't yet a practical proposition for everyone.

 

hybrids are not an answer at all. they still use gas. but until we have a more viable option, this is a great temporary solution. i have an EV and i am lucky that it works for me. but many are not and for them, hybrids are the answer. but as all answers, there are many mitigating scenarios, so the question does beg, what is better? a pickup hybrid used for work that gets 2 mpg better than the regular truck or a small car getting twice the mileage at 30 mpg?

sure its great to reduce oil consumption, but what that have to do with hybrids? i think a hybrid designates more than just the amount of gas consumed. its also about moving towards a true green solution along with technology, etc.

so if it aint a hybrid, let them go to one of the 500 existing car sites

 

Mike,

The vast majority of hypermiling critics have not tried it (and you don't seem like one of the bashers)...after three years no accidents or close calls from doing it. The motive of hypermiling-bashers is rarely safety, but reasons such as it would slow down and expose speeders, or various agenda...for instance - the AAA is practically part of the auto lobby, oposing most every safety or green initiative the past 50 years. If safety was a real concern, then motorcycles should be banned as it's riskier than hypermiling....I favor motorcycling and hypermiling, BTW.

World energy consumption will probably triple by 2050, so we need to do what we can now with whatever we have to consume less. That could be walking, biking, mass transit, various hybrids, EVs, etc. Less than 5% of the vehicle in the US are hybrids...while I support hybrids and own one, it's not enough.

For three years Bob has dissed the Honda IMA hybrid, and people trying to get the most out of a conventional fuel efficient car - this is a disservice to things green, hybrid, and Prius....some of these people are probably the most likely to buy a Prius, so why in the world is he attacking them without mercy?

When a hypermiler-basher reads about getting 60, 70, 80mpg, it's about what they could do, not what I'm doing.

I see no good and lot's of harm with Bob's insistence on dividing green drivers.

 

blah blah blah,... all the more reason WE ALL NEED TO GET BUSY!!

 

The issue you describe is not a small one. That's why Better Place will put a quarter million charge spots in Israel before they even have one customer. The same thing will be done in Hawaii, The Bay Area, Denmark, Australia, Ontario - all the places they have made deals with so far.

The plan is to have a smart meter infrastructure in place before their EVs are made available to customers.

This may not work in your situation but for many it will be acceptable.