Wade Preston Shearer wrote: > On 3 Aug 2009, at 15:47, Merrill Oveson wrote: > >> What company can "rig up a Hummer to get 100 MPG"? > > Raser: > > http://www.rasertech.com/media/videos/the-electric-h3
Yeah, in city driving, it's the big vehicles like trucks and SUVs that can most benefit from hybrid technology (regenerative breaking, etc). GM expects to have hybrid technology on all it's truck-based vehicles within a couple of years, at least that's where they were heading before the meltdown. Ironically, one of the pictures shows the hummer perched prominently on a cliff at the grand canyon. To get the vehicle there the electrical system and hybrid drive train are, of course, dead weight. The vehicle would have averaged the standard 18 MPG on the trip from Provo to the Grand Canyon. This of course illustrates the main problem with anything hybrid in cars. In a truck the difference between carrying the extra weight and not is probably negligible, so worst case you don't pay anything extra for gas than you would without. But with a smaller hybrid car, it's a bigger deal. In fact in many cases, a car with just good mileage could probably best a hybrid. A few months back I was listening to Car talk and they had a woman call in with a Prius problem. She said she'd bought a Prius because she drives long distances and wanted a car with good mileage. People sure are gullible. Amazingly the hosts didn't even bat an eye over that one (normally they will catch things like that and give the callers a hard time). Granted the Prius gets pretty good mileage even hauling the dead weight of the hybrid system but at quite a cost. But she could have saved $15000 and bought a car that got 40-45 MPG and come out ahead in many ways. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
