Jumpstart a car

[az]

No, the "hybrid" electric motor is used as the starter motor usually.

[SteveC]

I've never not used simply the + and - battery terminals and I'd started many a car - even had to do my Crossfire and my girlfriend's 206 the other week after they'd not been driven in a few months....

[gt40]

yes, I'm guilty of using the + to + and - to - as well.
I'm just stating the reasoning why manuals state the 'proper' way of doing it.
Basically erroring on the side of caution (and liability).

[DGhost]

I was pretty much told what Greebe was by a mechanic recently. From what I understood, mostly it had to do with not having proper contact with the negative terminal on the battery. They also mentioned it's usually easier to do it that way just for the fact that finding a good ground is hard as shit on most modern cars.

of course, this was also in regards to a battery they installed and they like to use quality parts...

[ND66]

That starter is going to last a long time, it's never activated.

Chances are it will rust it self shut sooner than that, if you never give it a “spin”… .

.

[Brian Ellis]

We got our Civic Hybrid in November.
It's got about 4,000 miles on it now.
I'm going to write up a full report sometime, but the gist so far is:
39.5mpg city, 42mpg highway (fully loaded @ 75mph)
Almost all of our driving is city.

Would be interested in knowing more. Translated into more usual units, you obtain about 6.0 l/100 km for urban and 5.6 l/100 km for highway. With driver + 2 passengers, on a 2 hour test drive, knocking hell out of it (e.g., accelerating uphill on the slip road onto the highway to see how well it would merge into the traffic), I did marginally better. However, I did respect the 100 km/h (63 mph) speed limit on the highway, so that would explain my 5.3-5.4 l/100 km figure. My best figure was on an ordinary road, averaging 75-80 km/h, where I got it down to under 5.2 l/100 km (about 46 mpg). However, I would expect lower consumption with normal driving, as I was deliberately heavy-footed for the test drive. Will tell you more when I actually get the beast. Whatever, it will halve our present consumption in a C-RV and reduce my carbon footprint by >1 tonne/year, even if it is not really economically viable.

[VJ]

If they're nice, they give you a nice ground post.

Ok, so Hyundai (the car that we jumpstarted) wasn't nice on their Elantra. But I have learned that VW has been very nice on the Polo.

Still, it lead to an interesting thread.

Oh, BTW, three of the planes at our flying club (Piper PA28, Cessna 172) actually have a socket where you can plug in a cable to charge the battery of even to jumpstart it from a portable source.
And in case you were wondering: not all current planes with propellors can be started by swinging the propellor: it depends on how the alternator works. If the alternator works with electromagnets, it needs a minimal current from the battery at startup (once it is running, it powers itself); if the alternator works with permanent magnets, you can start the plane without power.


Jörg

[Fat Tone]

Brian - looks like you are using the same conversion as Google calculator, but is that a proper Imperial gallon or a puny U.S. gallon (~80% of an imperial)? google.co.uk and google.com give the same answer.

[gt40]

I've checked, he's done a proper US gallon conversion. 3.78L vs 4.54L for imperial (aprox)

[cjolley]

So...you never hear it starting its enigne like a "normal" car? It just starts to drive?

No, the "hybrid" electric motor is used as the starter motor usually.

Yup, but the demand on the electric motor is so low to just start the car that it makes no noise.
The effect is to have it sound like the gas engine just comes to life on it's own without any of the sounds a starter normaly makes.

... Whatever, it will halve our present consumption in a C-RV and reduce my carbon footprint by >1 tonne/year, even if it is not really economically viable.

It seems like all our trips are up hill and against the wind both ways

Our in town driving is very urban, so it makes the most of the hybrid setup.

I don't think the economically viable thing really works that way even though it is talked about frequently in relation to hybrid cars.
After all, in absolute terms the smallest, cheapest car that will carry what you need to carry is the only one that qualifies as "economically viable" defined that way.
The fact is that the vast majority of cars that are purchased have costs that are assumed by the buyer for reasons other than nessesity.

[Brian Ellis]

The reason a conventional starter is noisy is that the motor is a cheap and nasty thing with a pinion that slides up and down a thread as it gets up to speed and engages in a cog on the flywheel. This makes a clanking noise and the the power of the motor is only just sufficient to turn the engine with little safety margin. The motor design is such that its lifetime counts only in a few hours of actual running.

In the Civic hybrid, you have a whacking great 30 HP motor/generator permanently engaged directly to the crankshaft, so it is designed for a long lifetime and there are no gears to engage. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, the electric motor also takes over the role of flywheel, as well!

It is a different concept to the Prius; it doesn't run on electric motor alone with the petrol engine stationary and the engine starts as soon as you lift your foot off the brake pedal. This is why the urban consumption is poorer than the Prius. In town traffic, the engine turns for as long as the brake pedal isn't pressed but the electric motor provides most, but not all of the acceleration power, but when you crawl, the power from the engine is too great just to move the car, so it also charges the battery, and more so when you slow down. The repartition of electric and IC power in the Prius is partly mechanical with its epicyclic drive; in the Civic, it is all in the electronics, which is more complex, as a result.

And, yes, my conversions were approximately to US values. Using my HP RPN calculator:
mpg Enter
1.6 x
3.8 /
1/x = l/km, mentally shift decimal point 2 notches to the right to get l/100 km. Near enough! Much quicker tha Google conversions. I LOVE RPN for calculating (and am lost with a conventional calculator!! )

As for "economically viable", what I meant was that the cost of the Civic Hybrid - the cost of an ordinary ± equivalent Civic > the savings of buying less fuel over the expected lifetime and my annual kilometrage, at today's fuel prices, taking into account tax and insurance breaks. A back of envelope calculation estimates that crude oil would have to rise to ~$125/bbl, assuming the petroleum industry remains as greedy as ever, before approaching break-even.

[schmosef]

My next car

[cjolley]

...
As for "economically viable", what I meant was that the cost of the Civic Hybrid - the cost of an ordinary ± equivalent Civic > the savings of buying less fuel over the expected lifetime and my annual kilometrage, at today's fuel prices, taking into account tax and insurance breaks. A back of envelope calculation estimates that crude oil would have to rise to ~$125/bbl, assuming the petroleum industry remains as greedy as ever, before approaching break-even.

Oh I know. We did those calculations too.
The $2100 tax credit (not deduction) here helps
I just think it would help people sitting on the fence about a hybrid to point out that they aren't using straight economic calculation to pick that $900 radio or those $1200 leather seats either.

[Dr Mordrid]

BTW guys; got a closeer-up view of the Volt's tech than I got at the auto show. VERY impressive!

Nice knowing insiders

IMO they are so close to putting it in a vehicle it's rediculous. Battery tech just since the auto show has advanced to the point where if they start now by the time the vehicle is ready so will be the batteries, if not before.

IMO it could fit in some existing cars/trucks, it's just a matter of costing the retrofit & willpower.

[az]

If I were a carmaker, I'd have made a hybrid with motors in the wheels a year ago. It's not as if the technology isn't there yet.