How far travelling a Hybrid with no petrol

that should read 30 miles.

Reply to
MrCheerful
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a hybrid needs a different driving style to get the best

Reply to
MrCheerful

Yes that is about it Tim. Maybe manufacturers will take more of an interest as the fossil fuel only vehicle ban becomes more definite unless a battery swap or near instant charge method can approach what we are used to at a filling station. Eg 5 minute pause off the road extends range by 500 miles.

Reply to
Bob Minchin

1.8l nowadays, and I managed nearly 20 minutes without the engine running at all in very slow traffic approaching road works.
Reply to
MrCheerful

The "in a hybrid" is irrelevant. Driving style makes a huge difference no matter what you're driving. Google "hypermiling" for more information.

In addition to driving style.

Reply to
Huge

Hence "FWIW".

Reply to
Huge

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The i8 also has a range extender version.

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Not a huge range, I admit.

Reply to
Huge

Which is a shame. I imagine it is a lot easier to drive an electric car because there is no gearbox (or at least, there is one fixed ratio) so you are controlling the road speed directly without having to take into account the fact that in a petrol/diesel car the torque/acceleration is greater in a lower gear so the amount of throttle you need depends on what gear you are in; this is fine in a manual where you *know* what gear you are in, but I find automatics change down on demand so it's difficult to get just the acceleration you want - too little throttle and it stays in a high gear but with little engine power, fractionally more throttle and it changes down when you wouldn't in a manual and then gives an unexpected surge of acceleration. Whenever I had an automatic car on a site visit at work I found it very difficult to accelerate smoothly out of roundabouts because of the unexpected change down - I never managed to estimate the right amount of throttle to get it to stay in third and then apply increasing engine power. (*)

Electrics would have that discontinuity. I imagine that it is possible to set an acceleration limit in the controlling software, as well as a speed limit.

But everything depends critically on range. So a petrol/diesel-electric with a decent size of battery and electric rather than mechanical drive at all times, would seem to be the way forward.

As a matter of interest, how much energy is put back into a battery by regenerative braking. It would be interesting to see comparative mpg figures for the same car, being driven in the same conditions, first with regen turned off and then with it turned on.

(*) The ultimate was a Ford Focus that I was one given as a hire car, which I presume had a fault. It would get up to about 50 but if I tried to go faster, it changed down. I managed to get 50 in any of 4th, 3rd or 2nd gear with correspondingly higher engine speeds. Painful on a motorway.

Reply to
NY

Oh, so the electric motor still goes through the variable-ratio gearbox rather than being a single ratio from 0 to maximum road speed? Seems to defeat one of the big advantages of an electric motor - that unlike an IC engine it has torque at zero rpm and over the whole operating speed.

Reply to
NY

Depends what you mean by slowly and how long your journey is. I can assure you travelling at 50 rather than 70 makes a very big difference to the travel time on a 600 mile journey. In practice, the difference between doing it in one day or two.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Only really had much experience of an early one. And although it had obvious advantages in heavy traffic, its size was more a family car in the UK than a town only one. And it was horrid when used as a family car for long journeys. But can see why it makes an economical taxi. But then I don't want a taxi for daily use. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

According to the Toyota website it is not intended to be run to the point where it runs out of petrol and permanent damage may occur:

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Bottom FAQ on the page. What if I run out of petrol?

Bit of a risk handing it to a customer so close to empty.

Reply to
Martin Brown

There's all these folk touting electric cars but without examining the charging requirements. There was one such on Twitter I saw yesterday. What was amusing was the response (which unfortunately I didn't keep) of a sensible person. He was talking about next gen cars with 700 mile range. Unfortunately that would take 3.5 days to charge up at home using an ordinary 13A connection. Or faster at a station, but you'd be plugging in a cable that had 1000V or more on it, or at a lower voltage a cable which would have to pass 400A which you'd have trouble lifting.

I could pump 50 litres of diesel into my old C4 in about a couple of minutes. The 50 litres is about 500KWh of energy. At 10 amps I'd need

50kV for an hour. Even at 100A I'd need 50kV for 6 minutes.

There's no magic here, what is being exposed is the reason why the internal combustion engine for personal transport has been where it's at for the last 100 years and electric power nowhere.

Reply to
Tim Streater

My neighbour has a Prius, some days he reverses off the drive on battery alone and the engine starts as he pulls off down the road; other days, it only moves a few feet then the engine starts while he's still on his drive.

Reply to
Andy Burns

From cold it will, intentionally, unless you hit the EV button first.

Reply to
MrCheerful

or use motor as generator for regenerative braking, or feed engine power to motor as generator purely to charge battery with wheels stationary.

planetary.

Reply to
Andy Burns

As an earlier poster commented: "we have not progressed an enormous amount" - and the limitation is battery technology.

However the imperatives to minimise pollution and reduce reliance on fossil fuels will give the incentive to alter the way we use cars.

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... this indicates that a large proportion of journeys are very short - to quote: "95 percent of them travelled less than 40 miles to work, with the average commute distance being 13.6 miles". Earlier in the same piece: "The average single-trip distance? Just 5.95 miles".

An all-electric car is ideally suited to such distances. Further, charging can be either at home or the place of work. The non-continuous nature of renewable sources such as solar, wind, and tide can be accommodated because the car already contains the necessary storage battery.

What this doesn't address is congestion. Mass transit can help with that but the long-term solution will be to remove the need for travel.

Longer journeys are more of a challenge. Trains are good for one person travelling, and the the option would be to have an electric vehicle to hire at the destination station. But the electricity for trains is more likely to come from fossil sources. Here again the solution will be to remove the need for travel. The concept of commuting long distances to work is silly, anyway.

Reply to
Graham J

Irrespective of the battery technology you need to put in phenomenal amounts of electrical energy, which means dangerously high charging voltages or current that needs very thick cables - or a combination of the two. 500 kWhr delivered in 5 mins is 6 MW - how the hell do we solve the problem of delivering electrical energy at that rate

That's why you need either a swappable pre-charged battery or else an on-board generator powered by an IC engine if you want to avoid the very long charging times.

When electric cars can match my present car, which has a range of 700 miles on 60 litres of diesel, and I can replenish that 700 miles range in a few minutes, then pure-electric cars will be a viable alternative. Until then, you have to make sacrifices:

- have two cars (petrol/diesel for long journeys, mainly avoiding congested town/city centres, and electric for shorter journeys into town)

- use public transport for longer journeys and hire a car locally when you go on holiday for touring (this is not feasible if you want to take bikes or lots of luggage)

- charge the car overnight or while you're at work, and live with the fact that you cannot travel more than 100 miles or so (on current technology) before you need to repeat this palaver.

So you need a hybrid or else a car with a fuel cell - either way, to convert very "compact" energy of something like petrol/diesel or compressed gas (LPG, hydrogen) into motion (via electricity).

I hope the government has correctly predicted the rate at which technology will progress in the next 20 years, or there is going to be a very pissed-off population who have to accept a drastic reduction in standard of living (live closer to work or at least to public transport, no long holidays touring around).

Reply to
NY

What sort of figures do you get in practice (as opposed to OEM claims)? Motorway cruising and town driving ?

You might manage a bit more on a long downhill stretch or less uphill.

But basically yes - the battery is there to allow the petrol engine to run for short periods at absolute maximum efficiency acting more like a capacitor or reservoir for the energy that it produces and then feeding it to the electric drive train as needed. I do wonder how well the battery will tolerate this regime long term but they claim it works OK.

I wonder how it damages the vehicle more than running out of petrol in a normal vehicle and running crud from the bottom of the tank through. Anyone have an explanation ?

Reply to
Martin Brown

210 mile extension lead?
Reply to
ARW

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