Honda planned its new Insight hybrid to cost less than Toyota’s ubiquitous Prius in hopes of snagging economy-minded hybrid shoppers. Unfortunately for Honda, the Insight wasn’t quite the bargain they’d hoped for. Despite rumors of an $18,500 base MSRP during planning, the Insight ended up just a few grand away from the Prius at $20,470 base (including delivery charge). And now Toyota is returning the favor, telling Automotive News [sub] that it’s planning a Yaris-based “economy hybrid” to undercut the Insight. “We are going to compete by expanding our hybrid-vehicle lineup to smaller hybrids, in the class of the Vitz and Yaris,” says Prisu chief designer Akihiko Otsuka, using both the Japanese domestic and overseas market names for Toyota’s supermini. The implication is that this baby hybrid will hit all of Toyota’s major markets possibly beginning as early as 2011. But Honda isn’t taking the news sitting down reminding AN that a Fit Hybrid is also being planned which could bring Honda’s hybrid entry cost down even further. All of which is good news for hybrids, which seem ready to finally leave behind their eco-accessory reputation and get stuck into some good, old-fashioned value competition.
You know that advertisement for the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid where a douchey fellow suggests that “they should hybrid (sic) this thing”? I would post the video, but it seems that Cadillac has pulled all trace of the spot from the interwebs leaving only the marginally less insipid “cupholders” and “checkmate” ads on its website. And though it’s strange to plumb the Tubes of You for hours and not find this mythically inane third ad, it’s disappearance down the memory hole isn’t surprising at all. The spot suggested a troglodyte’s approach to hybrid technology that is only underscored by the reality of GM’s hybrid strategy: quick-n-dirty BAS, expensive and complex two-mode system, and moon-shot EREV. Hybrid this. Okay, now hybrid that. [ED: Zammy found it!] But Nissan’s announcement today that it will be bringing a hybrid version of its Infiniti M to the US market in 2010 has to put the Japanese firm in contention for worst hybrid strategy around.
Many of our Best and Brightest have flagged the fact that cold weather may ding the Chevrolet’s gas/electric Hail Mary Volt’s performance. And now we have anecdotal, real world evidence for the challenge. Underneath an innocuous headline, “Fusion Hybrid Game-Changer for Ford,” a WardsAuto scribe gives us the 411 on the difference between the vehicle’s heavily advertised EPA number (38.5 mpg combined) and its cold weather efficiency. Byron Pope reveals, “The best we can squeeze out of the Fusion Hybrid is a combined 33 mpg (7.1 L/100 km). In all fairness, our seat time came in the midst of a brutal Michigan winter cold snap. Running the heater at nearly full blast most of the time siphons power from the battery causing the car to rely more often on its gasoline engine.” And that’s because using the heater changes the way the Fusion hybrid’s power-train works . . .
The fellas at Autoexpress are saying it’s the “new MR2,” although there’s no indication yet that the planned hybrid coupe will rock the nameplate’s trademark mid-engine architecture. Toyota’s CR-Z fighter will be RWD though, making it the second rumored RWD Toyota coupe in the last year. The first, a joint Toyota-Subaru may or may not be on hold. “We have set a tough price point (expected to be around £20,000 ($28K)), as it will be easier to sell if it is affordable,” says Toyota VP Masatami Takimoto. “It has to be fun to drive, too, which means the hybrid set-up must be different to the Prius’s, with greater responsiveness.” If the hybrid coupe is “done right,” reckons Autoexpress, it will do 0-60 mph in seven seconds, while getting over 50 mpg. Looks like Honda isn’t the only firm trying to mate green with fun these days.
When I read in Auto, Motor und Sport about a concept car that looks great, claims 110 mpg (city) and a top speed of 210 mph, I was intrigued. But skeptical too, of course. Since the boffins at the UK’s Frazer-Nash Research (and not just some garage geniuses) are behind the “Namir” Rotary-engine hybrid dream car, I thought it would be worth a call. So, I spoke with company Director, Gordon Dickson. Why Wankel? “A rotary engine is extremely compact and is also extremely energy-efficient at its RPM sweet spot. The Namir is a serial hybrid, meaning there is no mechanical connection between the combustion engine and the four electric motors, so it’s easy to keep the 814cc Wankel engine within its sweet spot. We have already employed this technology in our Metrail system.”
“For those who want to use as little gas as possible but still need the capabilities of a full-size pickup truck, the hybrid twins from General Motors will fit the bill nicely. So let the love affair continue.”
In times of crisis folks tend to look for radical change rather than steady improvement. Before you know it, Steve Jobs is being (wrongly) touted as the saviour of the auto industry, recent authors are expounding on the Googlification of the industry, and GM is staking everything on the Volt. And I’m not even going to get into the theological implications. But like the old fable of the rabbit and the hare, the steady improvements will be what saves the industry. A study by Carnegie Mellon at Green Car Congress shows that plug-ins with smaller capacity than the Volt’s 40-mile EV range are a more cost effective strategy than the Volt moonshot. Go figure.
“All of a sudden out of nowhere, the check engine light comes on, along with a couple of other lights, the chimes start going off, and the display under the speedometer alternates between “Service Stabilitrack Soon” and “Service Brakes Immediately”. When this happens, I lose power braking! Luckily, all 3 times I was going very slow in electric-only mode, twice at drive-thrus and once in the grocery lot. The first couple of times this happened I turned off the ignition and restarted, and everything was back to normal, except that the “Check Engine” light stayed on for a day or so and then it went off. Yesterday when this happened for the 3rd time, I had to turn of and restart the truck about 10 times to get it back to normal.”
gltech published a brief blog beginning to outline his brake issues, which he’s now expanded to include battery problems. Other posters on greenhybrid started chiming-in; they’re having the same issues with firmware updates and such. Several are also losing braking on a regular basis.
This little tidbit kind of encompasses everything GM faces now and major challenges going forward. The potential inability to compete in the hybrid game and how it relates to the Volt; the disintegrating dealer network and lack of communication between different arms of GM; and the brain drain as GM sheds staff that probably caused the minor problem of losing brakes in a brand new $50k car.
Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times apparently wasn’t taken in by the “This Car Gets 100/150MPG!” signage on Seattle’s test fleet of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). And it seems that his journalistic incredulity was rewarded with some disappointing numbers from Seattle’s real-world testing of the much-vaunted PHEVs. Sure, a converted plug-in Prius might get 100 mpg in the hands of a fanatic hypermiler, but in daily use by untrained city drivers, the PHEVs return much more moderate results. Westneat reveals that Seattle’s 14 plug-in Priuses actually averaged about 51 mpg after driving a total of 17,636 miles in all kinds of conditions. And the Seattle case is no fluke.
Via Green Car Congress comes a number of perspectives on Plug-In Hybrid (PHEV) adoption fom the 2009 SAE Hybrid Technology Symposium. And there are some interesting lessons to be learned. One consumer study by Dr. Ken Kurani of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies indicates that mainstream consumers favor less PHEV capability than manufacturers are developing. The ITS study asked a sample of plausible early market households (neither pioneers, advocates nor experts) to design their own PHEV, and found that expectations of all-EV range and battery capacity were remarkably low. Says Dr. Kurani, “consumers right now, given the opportunity to manipulate the idea of a plug-in vehicle, are designing not only very different vehicles, they are designing vehicles that are much more possible than the experts are assuming.” How so?
Kicking Tires has apparently been curious about yet another potential pitfall of the Volt’s Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV) design: gasoline aging. If gas sits in the Volt’s fuel system for an extended period while its owner stays within the EV range, will it degrade over time and harm the gas engine performance? That’s what KT asked GM alt-energy poobah Britta Gross, and guess what? Her answer wasn’t wildly convincing! Writes KT’s Kelsey Mays “It’s certainly a concern, Gross said, but it shouldn’t be a problem: The Volt’s system stirs fuel in the tank about once a month to fight fuel-system buildup. At most, ‘it’s a minor impact on performance and emissions,’ she said.” Unconvinced, May took the query to Volt spokesman Dave Darovitz. “I wish I could talk about it,” he said, “but we will have solutions in place to address the aging-gasoline situation. It’s a great problem to have . . . [and] the engineers are addressing that situation.” Darovitz says the issue came up in product planning, and that GM wasn’t disclosing its workaround for “competitive reasons.” Not that consumers need convincing, or anything.
The vocabulary used to classify hybrid drivetrains has been lagging considerably behind new developments, as Wikipedia’s article on the matter proves. The old parallel, serial, mild and plug-in hybrid categories do little to illuminate public understanding of the underlying technology, and much to confuse it. Enter the BYD Dual-Mode, VW “Twindrive” and, now, the AVL “Turbohybrid”. With cooperation from BMW, Bosch and LuK, AVL has developed a mild-ish hybrid drivetrain. The consortium claims it’s cheaper and more fun to drive than a “full hybrid” while offering nearly the same efficiency. Care to deep dive?
Forty miles without a single drop of gasoline. That’s been the pitch for Chevrolet’s Volt since it was just a concept. And it’s a claim that GM has been hammering hard on in promotional materials, advertisements and to the media. But it seems that the claim deserves an asterisk. Green Fuel Forecast‘s Sam Abuelsamid recently spoke with folks from GM’s Voltec battery development team. In the discussion of the Volt’s thermal management system, an inconvenient truth raises its misshapen head. “If you’re not plugged in and the battery is not conditioned and we’ve got to deal with the elements, right now we’re thinking 0-10°C we won’t use the battery. The more we can use it the better but we’ve got that area of refinement we’ll have to do as we get more of the engines, more of the vehicles, more of the batteries and tune it all up,” GM director of hybrid energy storage systems, Denise Gray tells GFF.
Green Car Congress reports that the Senate Committe On Finance is recommending (PDF) increases in the amount and size of the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) tax credit. The proposal has been put forward as part of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, the American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Of 2009. The availability of PHEV tax credits would be doubled under the plan, from 250k to half a million vehicles sold before the credit phases out. The tax break amount is unchanged, with a base credit of $2,500 per qualifying PHEV plus $417 for each kilowatt-hour of battery capacity in excess of four kilowatt-hours. For vehicles under 10k lbs, the maximum credit is $7,500. Credits increase by vehicle weight, but the maximum (for vehicles over 26k lbs) is $15k.
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