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Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]

13 points by CharlesW

by matt-attack

1 subcomments

Toyota has done the world no justice by tricking most buyers into thinking they’re somehow leveraging the power of electricity when they buy a hybrid car. As if they’re somehow driving a sort of EV.
As the speaker in the video clearly articulates, a hybrid is a gas burning car. Full stop. (Ignoring plugins).
In fact, the technology very easily could’ve just been transparent to the User, and hardly even marketed. I mean, there’s countless dodads in a car that contribute to its overall improvement in fuel economy, and car companies have been adding these features over the last forty years. None of them have declared the car to be of an entirely new class the way this particular marginal improvement did.
Don’t fool yourself, you’re still driving a gas car, it’s still burning fossil fuels l, just marginally less of them.
If all of this effort had been to migrate to EVs I feel like we’d be in a better position.

by _whiteCaps_

0 subcomment

TIL how the Toyota hybrid system works. That's really cool!
Now I kind of want to use one in a sailboat - hook up MG2 to the propeller and a little diesel to the engine input.

by mrguyorama

0 subcomment

Here is an interactive toy you can play around with to get a feel for how this all works out. I love Alec's content but this kind of thing really needed animations for some of the denser among us.
https://archive.org/details/Toyota_Prius_Power_Split_Device
I don't know where it came from. I found it a long long time ago and it was critical to understanding exactly what the video explains. One interesting note is that the max speed of this system is constrained by how fast one of the electric motors can spin backwards, rather than ICE engineering or power.
Personally, I didn't realize just how rarely the electric motors are providing meaningful motive power during normal driving.
I'm not convinced that a naked Atkinson cycle engine would be that "Terrible" for normal driving, at least for people who aren't American who insist that their 4000 pound SUV needs to be able to pull a 7 second 0-60mph. 90s economy cars had far worse power and torque curves than Prius engines and it was just something you dealt with. I imagine you lose some of the efficiency value if you can't manipulate it's RPM as strictly though.