Toyota negative on batteries because it has more experience than other others on them

An incoherent jumbled mess that makes a lot of noise and doesn't go anywhere?

Let's see:

Wouk: single electric motor mounted between engine and conventional transmission

Severinsky (Paice patent): a clutch-based torque transfer box with an input for a gas engine, another input for a single electric motor, and an output to the wheels

TRW: a clutch-less planetary gear set with an engine hooked up to one gear, a "speeder" MG1 hooked up to another gear, and a "torquer" MG2 hooked up to the third gear and to the final drive to the wheels

Joslin: at least it has a planetary gear set -- I'm less familiar with this one and will have to read it closely but it was a bonus point requirement so I'll skip it for now

The Prius design and GM's February, 1995 patent are clearly based on the TRW patent.

Toyota famously lost a patent case to Paice LLC (Severinsky) but that was a combination of persistent patent lawyering, something called the Doctrine of Equivalents, and an Eastern Texas jury.

The jury actually found that Toyota was not literally violating Severinsky's patents because they are quite different from how the Prius design works. And yet, somehow Toyota was found liable on 2 of the 40 claims in the patent anyway.

For whatever reason, GM has never been sued by Paice or anyone else that I know of for their bus or SUV/pickup hybrids nor have I heard of any patent swap deals.

 

Good point. I certainly know a lot of factors are involved in Toyota making the commitment to what lead to the Prius. But someone at the top has to decide on the starting baseline of a new vehicle program. They could have started with any of their existing platforms and gotten the funding and subsidies. They started with a clean sheet. That was gutsy. It paid off big time.

What is often attributed (incorrectly) to engineering is actually corporate leadership. For example the GM decent into truly crappy vehicles was entirely driven by the CEO level decisions. They considered the engineering department's only function was finding the next corner to cut. Imagine being a top graduate of MIT and being assigned to lower the cost of a windshield wiper motor shaft sleeve 15%...and it already has a short life. Is the engineer the real source of GM building crap cars? The opposite is also the case as with the Prius. I'm really waiting to see if GM has seen the light or if they are past the point of no return.

 

To you and me no doubt, but in hindsight not that hard to see:

• Multiple power inputs with variable, efficient control
• A central power mixer
• High Voltage e-CVT to run the show

 

GM didn't need a patent swap. They had their 1995 patent and later patents describing exactly how the Toyota and Ford hybrid transmissions were architected. If either Toyota or Ford were to sue GM they would instantly be countersued. No such lawsuits were ever filed against GM even though their hybrid transmissions implemented a superset of the core design features of the Toyota and Ford designs plus additional modes.

The need for a patent swap deal is a myth. The GM executives, for whatever reason, decided to start by hybridizing large vehicles first. Toyota and Ford decided to hybridized small and medium size vehicles first.

Toyota and Ford later teamed up to design a hybrid system for large vehicles and then cancelled the joint project. Perhaps they couldn't find a way to do it without violating GM's patents?

From a historical point of view, Toyota and Ford took the better approach since transit bus sales are limited and SUV and pickup customers are often hybrid haters.

At this point, both the Toyota/Ford and 2016 GM hybrid systems are using 2 planetary gear sets. In "input-split" mode, both systems are very similar. At higher vehicle speeds, GM uses clutches to switch to either a single direct fixed gear or to a different eCVT mode optimized for highway cruising. Toyota skips the need for GM's additional modes by using additional DC-to-DC circuitry to run the electric motors at higher voltages to improve highway speed efficiency.

 

Thanks for the retread down hybrid patent history Jeff, but a couple of questions come to mind:

1. IIRC Toyota had the (Japanese) G1 Prius on the streets in late 1996. Even on a Toyota clock they must have had firm design ideas years earlier. Where is the IP work ?
2. If, as you contend, GM had substantial prior art from 1995 for the eventual HSD, why didn't GM sue Toyota ?

 

Not a myth, a way to keep from a later lawsuit. All three had patents that partially infringed on each other. You do a swap with or without compensation saying these are equivalent (or equivalent + some cash or other property), I won't sue your and you don't sue me. But we get to the same place.

It was not patents or intellectual property that stopped gm from making a malibu or a aveo or cruze hybrid, it was other stuff, and my opinion of that other stuff was in my post.

Again the problem is a new term I call
Lutzing, misleading statements about the competitors technology for attention or to gain some political advantage. This often hurts the company of the person Lutzing but that person gets good press coverage and money in terms of salery, stock options and bonuses despite harming shareholder value. The best way to lutz is to criticize the technology of a current media darling that some for poltical reasons dislike. The prius was a great thing for lutz to attack for his own fame. The idiots that listened to him didn't fare quite as well. Tesla is a much better target for Lutzing than the volt.

For an example of a lutzing try this from 2004, after it was clear he had been wrong about previous anti-prius statements, he dug deeper.
GM: Hybrid compacts don't make economic, environmental sense - Jan. 6, 2004

 

Your asking me why Toyota didn't file patents earlier? I do not know.

I know there is a book that surveys Toyota's development of the P1 Prius but it's been a long time since I've read it. I should go back and read it again.

Toyota and GM had a complex relationship. For example, they operated a joint factory called NUMMI in California starting in 1984 that manufactured both Toyota and GM labelled cars for 20+ years.

My guess is that GM leadership just didn't see an advantage in getting caught up in a big legal battle and thought the Prius wasn't going to be a big immediate success and when it was successful later on GM was mired in the bankruptcy and recovery from that. And now, the patents are expiring.

 

So far as I know, the reason is that GM chose a bigger, more expensive hybrid design that only had a market chance of success in big, expensive cars where the fractional increase in the vehicle's base non-hybrid was competitive. Wasn't it called "2-mode" ? I somewhat recollect that the tech was developed by a consortium that included one of the German car manufacturers and perhaps a third party as well.

NUUMI manufactured Corollas. Some of them had a GM badge stuck on them and were then called "Prizm."

 

GM could have chosen to build hybrid cars based on their 2016 Malibu transmission design a dozen years ago. That design isn't any more complex or expensive than today's Ford/Toyota design except for a couple of additional clutches of a common design used in conventional automatic transmissions.

For whatever reason, the consortium with the Germans chose to leverage the GM SUV design that used 3 planetary gears in order to gain 4 fixed gear modes in addition to the 2 eCVT modes. I don't know the added manufacturing costs of having the 3rd planetary gear or the frictional efficiency loss of having the 3rd planetary gear set.

According to Wikipedia, NUMMI made GM branded vehicles for 25 years starting with the Chevrolet Nova in 1984, the Geo Prizm, the Chevrolet Prizm, and the Pontiac Vibe.

Also, they apparently made something called the Toyota Voltz.

Toyota Voltz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Sorry, I had to correct your spin. Toyotas were produced, and some half of them rebadged into a GM.

 

Not spin, I said they were GM branded which is correct. I never said the cars were GM-designed.

 

Perhaps they lacked the control expertise.

 

As I noted earlier, GM's hybrid bus transmission introduced in 2003 implemented a superset of the control algorithms needed for a Prius transmission. The bus transmission has the same "input-split" mode which is the only mode in the Prius. The bus also has an additional eCVT ("compound-split) mode.

 

I may have over-read you when you said "... that manufactured both Toyota and GM labelled cars for some 20 years."

I would have understood if the sentence had read:
"that manufactured Toyota, and GM labelled cars for some 20 years."

 

Burn hydrogen where?

 

Doesn't the extra gearing duplicate certain HSD modes ?

 

No, not really. The GM highway-speed eCVT ("compound-split") mode is mechanically different from HSD ("input-split").

In input-split MG2 and the output axle to the wheels have a fixed ratio relationship. HSD is always in this mode while GM hybrids switch out of this mode at higher speeds (35+ mph, as an example).

In compound-split, MG2 has a variable ratio to the output axle (it does not have a fixed mechanically geared connection to the wheels). This allows more engine power to flow mechanically to the wheels at higher speeds but limits the torque that can be contributed directly to the wheels by MG2 (hard acceleration) at lower speeds.

 

I meant in terms of throughput efficiency.

 

There is often more than one way to accomplish the same goals. Toyota uses a single mode and compensates for efficiency losses at higher vehicle speeds by adding electrical circuitry to boost motor voltage levels. GM compensates for those losses by using a clutch to switch the mechanical power flow.

You might think that circuitry would be cheaper and more reliable than clutches but these kinds of clutches are common and can be reliable and long lasting since the GM design can shift synchronously under low mechanical stress. The DC-DC circuits require fancy high-power transistors and are the circuits (I think) that have been recalled in the various 3rd gen Toyota hybrids (like the Prius V just recently) for being over-stressed and failing prematurely under some conditions.

 

[QUOTE="jameskatt, post: 2216996, member: 75307"
Hydrogen fuel-cell cars are going to be inherently cleaner than battery cars because in coal-dependent states, your Tesla is being charged at the expense of tons of pollution into the environment, whereas hydrogen can be provided by the oil companies and other companies (e.g. solar) a lot cleaner than coal. So if you want true zero pollution Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars are the way to go.[/QUOTE]

REALLY?

Why would a "coal-dependent" state add more coal to power the increased electrical demand for EVs but not do the same thing for the increased electrical demand to generate hydrogen?

Your argument makes no sense.

Second point. Hydrogen is going to come mostly from reforming natural gas. It is cheaper than generating hydrogen from electrolysis. If you use wind/solar to generate the hydrogen it will be 3x - 4x the cost per mile than just using the electricity directly in an EV.

Mike