Hybrid car "hot rodders" hit 250 mpg

[Dr Mordrid]

by upping the specs of the cars batteries and adding plug-in chargers to their cars;

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/08/15/hybrid.tinkerers.ap/index.html

Cool....

Dr. Mordrid

[Jammrock]

I hope the big guys wil recognize this. They have access to better battery tech which could hopefully give hybrids a bigger boost.

[Dr Mordrid]

If something like this came out in a minivan I'd beg/borrow/steal to get one.

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

Haven't you seen Tucker? The big boys would supress it. It needs some independent guy with his own private army to protect him from corporate thugs.

[Wombat]

Bah.

This guy is NOT getting 80mpg. He's using the extra batteries to run as an electric car, which works over short commutes. Hey, yes, that's cool. But it is NOT 80mpg any more than letting my car coast downhill in neutral implies that my car doesn't need fuel to run.

The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg.

I like how it costs him "only a quarter" to charge up, but they ignore the thousands of dollars in extra batteries, and the extra environmental risk they present.

[KvHagedorn]

That's the thing about alternative fuels.. nothing else has the energy per unit mass that oil does. Batteries poison everything, hydrogen costs more energy to produce than you get out of it, etc.

[UtwigMU]

Hydrogen will be viable only when it will be cheaper than pumping out oil, despite high prices, we're still not at that point.

[Marshmallowman]

probably is cheaper , we just have not realised it yet

[ZokesPro]

At 114.4/L, getting anything better than 40mpg is a damned good idea.

[Tjalfe]

how about ethanol fuel cells once they develop them a bit more?... they are already viable for laptops from what I read.. or somehow rig an internal combustion engine to run ethanol

[agallag]

Unfortunately ethanol also uses more energy to produce than you get out of it. They wouldn't be able to power the ethanol production plant on the ethanol that it produces. Great stuff there...

[Jammrock]

If something like this came out in a minivan I'd beg/borrow/steal to get one.

Dr. Mordrid

Toyota has a hybrid minivan in Japan. Initial rumors had Toyota releasing it in the 2006/7 model year, but current rumor puts back as far as 2008/9.

[Marshmallowman]

Unfortunately ethanol also uses more energy to produce than you get out of it. They wouldn't be able to power the ethanol production plant on the ethanol that it produces. Great stuff there...

Whats so energy consuming about fermenation?

Sugar cane farmers commonly run their farm stuff on ethanol they get from the waste from sugar cane production, and I believe it is quite big in Brasil. I think ethanol will be good fuel once we have good ethanol fuel cells.

[Dr Mordrid]

The raw cost of an oil alternative isn't the only factor. More and more we have to take into account the security problems imposed by importing oil from parts of the world that are either inherently unstable (Venezuela) or hostile (much of the middle east).

IMO the civilized nations of the world need to get as many of their vehicles into hybrid operation as possible, even if this means giving targeted tax credits to those without the resources to purchase one outright. I also think much more has to be done in the way of getting oil shale production online ASAP.

These, IMO, would change the equation enough that they could tell those trying to use oil for political gain to f**k off and go swim in their oil without having a worldwide economic catastrophe waiting in the curtains.

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

We should build battery cars here and not let the Chinese have any. Then they are the ones dependent on the Saudis et al.