Featured The story behind the Prius

they all had good intentions, and were busy paving a road...

 

IIRC, on a cross-country flight around 2001-2002, I fell into conversation with a mid level GM executive, and took the opportunity to suggest that they needed more engineers to design and build more technically advanced cars. He responded that I was wrong and that the key to increasing sales was to hire more designers so that their cars looked better. If he reflected the corporate culture, the lack of technical development makes sense.

 

The other tricky misconception echoed by this executive is "more designers" makes the cars look better. Vast volumes of mediocrity will always be eclipsed with just one first rate designer. Are you sure this guy was not in the human resources department? That is how they think.

 

i found the same problem during my working career. marketing was always over rated by the powers that be. engineering was just there to do their bidding.

 

it's still fugly
they should have brought the AWD version here in the US to offset it's fuglyness

 

Works for Subaru. Like the Prius it's a quality car, but(t) ugly.

 

it will sell well at first and then become the "aztek" of hybrids

 

i don't think so. it will probably sell based on gas prices, just like the current model. will the new features lure more buyers, or the design drive some away? that will be hard to determine.

imo, the only driving factors for alt fuel vehicles are gas prices and car prices.

 

Once it was known that that 100% increase in mpg was probably available with hybrid, resetting the target to 100% is significantly different from deciding on hybrid and is much better.

Rather than senior management dictating solutions to people who are probably far better able to understand and develop them, it sets an ambitious but reasonable target, focusses efforts on what matters, leaves room to take advantage of unexpected innovation or opportunities, and results in a more motivated and creative development team.

It appears to me that rather than having decided on hybrid, he thought it was likely the best path but had the wit to leave other opportunities open and get the most out of his team.

 

Who knows if fortune got the story right, it is so much later and lots of revision.

Gore's PNGV was supposed to make american car makers leap frog imports in efficiency, and they chose 80 mpg. Ford fought for an easier goal. PNGV would not bend, and so excluded toyota (goal was american competitiveness not just lower oil use) and only technologies seemed very expensive diesel hybrids that could not meat epa regulations or fcv.

Toyota management, according to the fortune version of the story set a goal like ford's proposal. When engineers proposed econobox or hybrid, they set the mpg goal high enough that it would not be met by econobox. If they had failed it just would have been a foot note of history like pngv. Management looked at engineering input before making the decision. Toyota had the econobox echo or tercel or whatever it was at the time if prius failed.

 

Instead, the PNGV budget was redirected to a decade of fool-cell subsidies . . . and delivered. In 2015, these are the rankings:

	model	MPG
1	I8	409.9
2	I3 BEV	196.4
3	NISSAN LEAF SL	183.9
4	SPARK EV	183.5
5	NISSAN LEAF S	180.4
6	e-Golf	179.2
7	e-Golf	177.8
8	NISSAN LEAF SL	177.6
9	500e	174.9
10	500e	174.9
11	smart fortwo electric drive (convertible)	173.8
12	I3 BEV	159.1
13	FOCUS	157.2
14	SPARK EV	156.3
15	500e	154.5
16	500e	154.5
17	e-Golf	149.7
18	e-Golf	149.5
19	NISSAN LEAF SL	146.4
20	NISSAN LEAF S	144.2
21	NISSAN LEAF SL	143.4
22	FOCUS	141.4
23	C-Max (PHEV)	135
24	smart fortwo electric drive (convertible)	133.2
25	B-class electric drive	121.9
26	918 Spyder	118.8
27	918 Spyder	117.9
28	B-class electric drive	117
29	C-Max (PHEV)	116.4
30	Panamera S E-Hybrid	94.6
31	e6	93.4
32	e6	92.9
33	Panamera S E-Hybrid	91.6
34	e6	90.2
35	e6	89
36	PRIUS c	75
37	PRIUS Plug-in Hybrid	72.5
38	PRIUS	72.4
39	PRIUS	72.4
40	Tucson Fuel Cell	71.9
41	PRIUS	71.8
42	ACCORD HYBRID	71.5
43	PRIUS c	71.4
44	PRIUS c	71.4
45	PRIUS Plug-in Hybrid	70.6
46	ACCORD HYBRID	70.4
47	PRIUS	70.2

Source: Test Car List Data Files | Cars and Light Trucks | US EPA
Use 2015 data.

Sad history, PNGV turns out to be not that hard . . . if you don't crush your EV1s and patent-squish the batteries.


Bob Wilson

 

Where do these mpgs come from? They seem odd.

 

They appear to be cafe numbers other than the i8, and I have no idea what is going on with that number.

PNGV's 80 mpg was epa not cafe.
Compare Side-by-Side


The best we did was insight, 65 mpg. You need a bev with much better than year 2000 battery tech to get to 80.

That insight was too small though its taken until now with the gen IV prius eco to crack that 53 mpg on current epa of the insight.

 

These are the EPA numbers used for CAFE calculations from 2015. It also comes with the raw metrics which is what I prefer to deal with: Test Car List Data Files | Cars and Light Trucks | US EPA

Give me engineering data from the original standard and I'm good. Everything else is 'cooked' . . . almost Ioniq. <GRINS>

Bob Wilson

 

As I said the PNGV were EPA not cafe ratings from that time. Reminder of what they were at the time they were changed off pngv and replaced with freedom car.

The Green Brigade - Car Comparison - Car and Driver

Insight got 65 mpg on the old epa, was much more affordable, but failed space goals. That insight was the champ on that old test until perhaps the gen IV prius eco (perhaps we will get numbers) or the gen II clarity with the changed freedom car rules.

Some of the big problems sited for PNGV failure not only were the too high of goals, and not including the goal to meet epa emissions, lack of requirements to actually sell the cars to get the money, etc. Also sited was leaving out the battery consortium. And no the i3 or leaf couldn't have met the goal these were supposed to have easy refueling and range. Something like the 2013 ford fusion energi is very close, but again batteries were left off, and I have no idea how they would have scored it.

In 2006 DOE looked at the much more successful program that brought out the prius and insight from honda. That is the much more successful plug-in program we have today. We are around 400,000 plug-ins in the US under this program, and other governments also helped with over 1M world wide. That is good results for only 9 years.

 

The reason I use Test Car List Data Files | Cars and Light Trucks | US EPA is it traces back to 1984 and the original tests that are still used today. What I'm aware of are:

• raw metrics from the standard EPA tests and the same CAFE calculations as before
  
• Monroney sticker metrics which uses five tests and a weighting with an 'engineering adjustment'

Even the EPA has "CAFE, labeling and Gas Guzzler" of which CAFE comes from the table cited earlier and Monroney is the window page. If there is something else, I'm not aware of it. Perhaps a source?

Of which the Wiki provides a lot of insight:

The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles was a cooperative research program between the U.S. government and major auto corporations, aimed at bringing extremely fuel-efficient (up to 80 mpg) vehicles to market by 2003. The partnership, formed in 1993, involved 8 federal agencies,[1] the national laboratories, universities, and the United States Council for Automotive Research (USCAR), which comprises DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company and General Motors Corporation. On track to achieving its objectives, the program was cancelled by the Bush Administration in 2001 at the request of the automakers, with some of its aspects shifted to the much more distant FreedomCAR program.​

Now I took a quick look at the Car and Driver, May 2001 article:

It is like reading 'its too hard' by someone criticizing Kennedy's decision to go to the moon or our WW-II efforts or the Cold War. I fully agree the USA automakers decided it was too hard and got the program killed for fool-cells. In effect, abandoning the market to Honda, Toyota, and even Ford who apparently "didn't get the memo." Ford, the only USA company that did not go broke eight years later.

So we'll have to agree to disagree about PNGV versus the 'freedom fool-cell' program. Personally, it set two USA car makers back a full decade and I've long suspected it was done for personal pique since there was (is) no evidence that fool-cells make any more sense today than they did in 2001.

So this afternoon, I'll get ~51 MPG (it is in the 40s) driving our Toyota Prius around town. If someone finds a way to convert 'freedom car' press releases into gasoline, I'll burn it and finally get some good from the program.

Bob Wilson.

 

In the interest of full disclosure, Ford nearly went broke a couple of years prior, but the banks weren't as tight fisted in extending credit back then. They actually mortgaged their trade mark.