Prius: the world's most environmentally disastrous car

[theclaud]

@Linford and @User - please stop fondling each other's posts

Oooooooooooh!

 

[Linford]

The Prius' trick is regenerative braking, capturing the energy back to the battery rather than just dissipating it as heat from the disks

Yes i know about this, but it doesn't help when the average speed is 12mph and the battery is flat because you have crawled 15miles in rush hour traffic and the petrol engine is having to spin up all the time. I guess the fancy braking is handy to slow the extra mass of such a heavy car.

 

[Archie_tect]

@Linford and @User
I know it's the Cafe and generally a much lighter place than the debating forum, but we can occasionally have a slightly more serious thread in here too.

You started it...

 

[threebikesmcginty]

...and everyone else, please do your best to stay on topic and take the thread a bit more seriously.

That's me done then.

 

[Linford]

Self awareness, if only it were more common.

So do you accept that regenerative braking doesn't really work in rush hour crawling traffic..that you have to be moving at a reasonable speed to put the energy back into the batteries...that this speed is actually generated by burning petrol, so it can realistically only make a very minor difference to the state of the battery pack ?

It is a party trick, and doesn't offset the extra energy needed to haul the massive battery pack around in the first place.

 

[P.H]

It is a party trick, and doesn't offset the extra energy needed to haul the massive battery pack around in the first place.

Every bit of new technology starts out as a party trick.

 

[Wobblers]

Is there a source for this claim ?. My workmate has a lithium battery e-bike, has done thousands of miles on it, but the battery needed replacing last year at 4 years old. The thing abotu a Prius is that the battery is only a supplement to a petrol engine, not the other way around. You can still drive them on petrol even when they are knackered.

The batteries in the Prius are nickel metal hydride (or at least were, they may be using lithium ion/iron phosphate by now, can't be arsed to find out) and it has a sophisticated charge management system to maintain charge in the 30-70% range - all of which optimises the life of a battery which is already far longer lived than conventional Li-ion batteries. Your workmate's e-bike will have had to endure full charge/discharge cycling and stood for long periods fully charged - both of which shorten its life expectancy (of a battery chemistry which already has a rather short lifetime). In other words, you're not comparing like with like.

The idea of regenerative braking is to recover the energy lost in stop/start driving which is typical of much urban driving. It works. The engine is only turned on for periods to maintain battery charge - at the speed at which it is most efficient so uses the least fuel. That works fairly well too, though you're probably better off most times with a diesel in a small car....


<must... resist... commenting on Mars and Venus's atmospheres... >