Pajamas Media

34 Comments

1. Delia:

This article has me all sorts of sideways. Was Stork a Villian or a HERO or perhaps a little of both?

I’ll probably have to re-read your piece twice to fully absorb all of the material but I’ll probably come to the same befuddled inconclusive conclusion.

Interesting, gray matter tingling stuff worthy of reading.

Thank you.

Feb 8, 2009 - 3:02 am 2. Brian Richard Allen:

Government is ALWAYS the problem and NEVER the solution!

Brian Richard Allen

Feb 8, 2009 - 3:41 am 3. Richard:

What’s killing “hybrids” is that they generally suck, and under perform mileage-wise their fully internal combustion counterparts.
You fly on the first “hybrid” plane for me okay?
As a consumer I see them as a mid-stage development like Windows ME was..or for that matter Windows Vista..soon to be replaced, and consequently not worth the money or time or hassle.
Electrics have always been the pipe dream of TRUE Greenies, and will always be until the battery capacity problem is fixed.
Don’t get me wholly wrong, I’d surely drive a Tesla, and have absolutely ZERO problems with electric, until Hydrogen technology is perfected. Then I can water my garden while warming up the car. Hell yes.
Sexy little car the Tesla…for 200 miles, then it’s fully pushable, but man it does look good.

Feb 8, 2009 - 5:08 am 4. Jeff:

I had to buy a new SUV. I looked at Hybrids, and wound up buying a BMW X5 diesel. It gets 28-30 MPG on the highway, and it’s emissions are cleaner than any gasoline model. I pay .30-.40 more for a gallon of gas, but I received a 1500 dollar tax credit, and I get much better mileage than I would have with a V8. The V-6 BMW would have been more economical, but I wanted V8 power.

Mercedes and BMW have other models that are coming in diesel. Its the way out. Plus you can make diesel fuel from lots of different sources, even coal.

Feb 8, 2009 - 6:05 am 5. Scott:

I totally get the article. Where would the American hybrid car be now with 30+ years of extra development?

Definitely better looking and driving than the funky little boxes on the market now.

Feb 8, 2009 - 6:22 am 6. wes esry:

I had a small contract assembly and manufacturing company in the late 1970s through the early 1990s.I assembled at least 25 different iterations of hybrid control systems from different auto component suppliers.All contracts were canceled ,we were told,because of the EPAs absolute insistence that only a pure Electric powered system would be approved.A lawyers solution.If a hybrid was approved a pure electric system would become a secondary goal.A Volkswagon Rabbit diesel was adapted to use a hybrid system.This was in 1981.Results varied in fuel mileage from a low of 90 miles/gallon to a high of 115 miles/gallon.
I wish I knew what happened to this test vehicle.Sure would enjoy driving more now if I had been able to buy and keep it.
Even the $5/gallon high that diesel reached would not have been as oppressive.

Wes Esry

Feb 8, 2009 - 9:20 am 7. Self-hating Boomer:

This doesn’t smell right. There’s either more or less to the story than this.

As far as being “philosophically opposed” to hybrids goes, we do have a real problem now with government agencies being philosophically infatuated with hybrid technology, to the point where the technology (rather than the performance; i.e. exceeding x mpg) is spelled out statutorily. This is the wrong approach. The statutes should not be specifying technology (i.e. in the boondoggle bill, where the feds are budgeting for hybrids, or state laws that allow hybrids to use HOV lanes). The laws should call out performance criteria (i.e. vehicle shall travel more than 45 miles on one gallon of fuel). But regulators and legislators aren’t so thoughtful.

One one point, Stork was completely right; it’s easy to abuse statistics to make hybrids look better than they really are, specifically when testing is done in electric-only mode. This leads to much present-day dishonesty about the “mpg” of plug-in hybrids. They’ll top up the batteries, run them down, and then run a while longer in IC mode, and then divide miles traveled by fuel consumed. That’s fraud.

Feb 8, 2009 - 9:28 am 8. Jim Baker:

When hybrids are better, people will buy them. Maybe there was a conspiracy to prevent them, I don’t know. I sure don’t know from this article. But I do know that there is now less than 1% of the 1970 average emmissions on today’s cars. Since there are about 3 times as many cars now, we have achieved better than a 97% reduction in emissions. But now the EPA says that isn’t good enough. Now we will spend more money to get 1% more reduction, than we spent to get the first 97%. This is ridiculus. There is never any cost/benefit analysis when government cooks up these standards. Our air is already pretty clean, people! Plus, I can tell you that the world is not running out of oil and gas any time soon.

Feb 8, 2009 - 10:18 am 9. Mark in Texas:

That is the problem with government bureaucrats picking winners and losers. They often do so for completely arbitrary reasons. Eric Stork hated hybrids and still does. End of story until Eric Stork is no longer making the decisions, and for a well entrenched member of the permanent federal bureaucracy that can be for a very long time.

Look at a similar phenomenon in conversions to dual fueled compressed natural gas or gasoline vehicles. Outside of the US these conversions cost less than $1000. In the US, thanks to the requirement for very expensive testing, a legally certified conversion will cost ~$20,000 plus the cost of the vehicle. If you do a conversion without the certification, you are subject to EPA fines of $5000 per day for tampering with the emission controls even if your conversion runs cleaner than the the original vehicle.

Feb 8, 2009 - 10:38 am 10. Larsen E Whipsnade:

Self-hating Boomer said:
“They’ll top up the batteries, run them down, and then run a while longer in IC mode, and then divide miles traveled by fuel consumed. That’s fraud.”

Where’s the fraud? That’s how people drive them! I think you’re using a typically deceitful left-wing ambush to try to bamboozle the readers here.

Feb 8, 2009 - 10:46 am 11. cedarford:

Larsen E Whipsnade:
Self-hating Boomer said:
“They’ll top up the batteries, run them down, and then run a while longer in IC mode, and then divide miles traveled by fuel consumed. That’s fraud.”

Where’s the fraud? That’s how people drive them! I think you’re using a typically deceitful left-wing ambush to try to bamboozle the readers here.

The fraud is obvious. You are calculating MPG for this vehicle using a supplemental stored form of energy plus hydrocarbons against another powered purely by hydrocarbons. Then dividing miles by how much hydrocarbons each use, omitting the cost and CO2 generation of the electricity used in the supplement.

As fair as saying my F-150 can beat any hybrid provided I get the advantage of stored energy, in this case starting off on top of Pikes Peak with a huge “potential energy” against by hybrid competitor doing 10 miles on a level track.

Do make comparisons fair for consumers, you need straight MPG compared against “equivalent MPG”. You will still see hybrids with an advantage, especially in city driving with regenerative braking and less high gas guzzling moments of revving up for short accelerations.

But you would still have better consumer reference in better assessing cost and pollution factors in their choice looking at MPG comparison.

Normal car cost per mile is price plus fuel plus insurance, fee&tax costs. Hybid cost per mile is price less taxpayer rebate plus cost of fossil fuel and electricity, then same as a standard car.

EPA pollution stats derived from only fossil fuel use for standard cars and the hybrid are false if the omit the average amount of hydrocarbons used nation-wide for generating a KW-hour of electricity applied to initial vs. final battery charge in any test.

*****************
What Stork was up to seems obvious. He belonged to a camp at EPA that saw only all-electrics as what he wanted in the future, and hybrids would have been developed at a detriment to the all-electric dream he had. Perhaps his dream also had nothing but cheap, CO2-free electricity in the future that would run his “pollution-free” electrics.
He did great harm to America and it’s auto industry, given our present 20-20 hindsight.

Feb 8, 2009 - 11:47 am 12. DavidN:

I’ve been following this debate for some time now. The various proponents of different propulsion technologies for our automobiles have a wonderful propensity for conspiracies and paranoia, and when they discuss things like this everything soon dissolves into a shouting match with lots of name-calling and little intelligent debate. Like everything else in the private sector, this should be decided by the market. The problem is that the technology involved is so expensive right now that spending money on it, without some sort of government guarantee, would mean probably the death of the hydrogen fuel cell technology (mostly being developed at GM, Bailout Central for the auto industry). Proponents of the electric car, of course, want this to happen, and are adamant that *their* technology, alone, is the one America should pursue. Several of the people connected with the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” movie are behind the “Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car is a Fraud” movement. Each will assert, if you read far enough into the literature, that the other is a cat’s paw of the oil industry, designed to keep fossil fuels in use for longer than if their chosen technology was chosen.

Hybrids are a sort of bridge technology. They still use fossil fuels, but not as much as an electric would, if they ever developed an electric car that was viable. One advantage of a hybrid is that you don’t have to plug it in. There are now people trying to develop, or developing, plug-in hybrids. This would make the previous comments, and Mr. Stork’s complaints, about “fraud” irrelevant. The conditions that he cites–charging up the battery before the mileage test is started–would be the actual real world situation, much of the time. Of course the people planning plug-in hybrids have to get past government regulators, still. Hopefully they’ll be more open-minded that Mr. Stork.

Feb 8, 2009 - 1:03 pm 13. David S:

From what I read here, is looks like Detroit is the place conspiring against the hybrid-electric car. If you actually would cite your sources we could all see for ourselves.

Blaming the EPA for foot-dragging in Detroit is really pointless. GM has a history of shelving alternative powertrain vehicles – it just looks like more of the same here.

I’m more interested in contemporary efforts to prevent improved mileage standards, rather than forty year old conspiracy theories. This is just a distraction from the pressing issues of today.

Peace.

DS

Feb 8, 2009 - 1:38 pm 14. Marc Malone:

I’m not at all informed on this issue, so I have a question. Doesn’t the running of the ICE recharge the battery? A vehicle running recharges the car battery with energy to spare. If you start with a near empty battery and run using the ICE, can you not later run the car using the hybrid’s battery? That sounds like a fair test of mileage. It also sounds like you automatically get more bang for your gasoline buck by simply capturing the lost potential energy.

Feb 8, 2009 - 2:06 pm 15. cedarford:

Marc Malone – Unfortunately, the difference between a small (relatively speaking) lead-acid car battery intended on turning an engine over 40-60 times on a cold day and a much larger higher storage propulsive battery is apples and oranges.
If you ever jumpered a dead battery and listened, you would note that revs go down on the running engine, gas increases to provide the torque to keep the charge going.
Yes, you can get some “free energy” from an idling motor, but not much.
Technically, it wouldn’t be potential energy but gas-powered kinetic energy otherwise dissipated as waste heat.
Your proposed MPG test would work as long as the battery end-state matched it’s beginning state. ie car started with a stone dead battery using an external battery, charged up by fossil powered generation, than ran intermittantly and at the end car driven until batter is again stone dead…you have a good test.
The key is that the vehicle, aside from fuel gallons per mile actually tested – is at the same beginning and end energy state with respect to external inputs. Otherwise, data for MPG is no good.

Feb 8, 2009 - 3:09 pm 16. John Moore:

Has everyone forgotten that the price of oil and gasoline collapsed after the late 70s, and nobody in his right mind would want a hybrid for over 20 years?

Feb 8, 2009 - 4:51 pm 17. e:

14. Marc Malone:

You are correct. In addition the engine can be smaller as both the electric motor and engine can be used for acceleration (smaller engine = less fuel usage). There is a lot of power lost in inefficiencies, but regenerative braking and other energy scavenging methods make up for that.

‘Plug in’ Hybrids are pretty cool too. They act similar to electric cars for short trips and like regular Hybrids for longer trips (just fill it with gas).

Feb 8, 2009 - 6:20 pm 18. jerryofva:

Cedarford:

Oh no, I agree with you. Your point is more then theorectical. I own a 2005 Jetta TDI and I can crush a Prius’s MPG when ever there is seriously rolling terrain. Modern direct injection diesel engines do not use fuel when in gear unless the accelerator is depressed. On a road like the Pennsylvania Turnpike I can get 70-80 MPG by coasting on downhills while running in top gear. The Prius’s MPG dives down to under 30 MPG on the uphill leg if the driver chooses to maintain his speed. With a depleted battery draining engine power on the downhill and increasing fuel consumption. Even on the flats my TDI outperforms the Prius at highway speeds. I get 50-55mpg at 65 mph.

Feb 8, 2009 - 7:35 pm 19. Rudy:

When fuel reached $5/gal I looked into converting a small car to totally electric power. I went so far as to actually order the complete kit to do the conversion. I later changed my mind and was given a full refund by the nice people who offered the kit. The reason I bailed on it was simple. Batteries! To equal the energy of one gallon of gas in a small car traveling at 50 mph and getting 30mpg would require 12, 80 pound lead-acid batteries!!!!! That’s almost 1,000 lbs of battery power to equal one gallon of fuel. Of course you will hear about recharging cost, emissions etc but the bottom line is imagine any small car with 12 lead-acid batteries placed into it and one with one gallon of gas in it. This makes you realize that on a pure energy level there is not much that can hold a candle to petro fuels. As far as CO2 goes if you believe in that nonsense then we will all have to stop breathing to live!

Feb 9, 2009 - 8:06 am 20. Self-hating Boomer:

10. Larsen E Whipsnade:

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to explain something so obvious, but…

When you do that, you’re attributing energy that entered the vehicle as electricity to gasoline. That “mpg” number is meaningless, and way high.

I’m rather taken aback that that isn’t obvious.

Feb 9, 2009 - 9:48 am 21. Self-hating Boomer:

14, actually no. Hybrids aren’t perpetual motion machines. They get better economy for one major reason and one minor reason. The major reason is that it allows the IC engine to run at the rpm and torque load of optimum efficiency (instead of the rpm and torque that the road demands), and it is shut off when not doing that. The minor reason is that they also employ regenerative braking, which means that when you brake, most of the energy is recycled back into the batteries.

IC engines rarely break 30% efficiency (for inescapable thermodynamic reasons), and when running at low rpm and torque can be closer to 10. The hybrid makes sure that it spends most of its time closer to 30.

In another decade, we may have turbine-powered series hybrids which can break 50% efficiency. We can then have hybrids in the 80 mpg range for a prius-sized sedan, and over 100 in a “smart car” sized vehicle. It’s not clear if fuel cells will ever be able to beat that, but it’s possible.

Feb 9, 2009 - 10:00 am 22. jerryofva:

Boomer:

I am not sure if a smart car sized vehicle is large enough to have a hybrid powerplant. The batteries alone would add significant weight to the vehicle and negate most of the advantage of the batteries. It might not even have enough room for the duel mode propulsion. Besides turbines suck gas at a phenominal rate. Think Jet engine.

Feb 9, 2009 - 10:47 am 23. Self-hating Boomer:

Jerry – they’re already working (IIRC Honda) on a hybrid motorcycle. When we finally have turbine-powered series hybrids, they’ll be quite compact, because the IC generator will be about the size of a turbocharger.

I’ve also seen some work done on placing the electric drives inside of the wheels, which will save space and some weight.

Never underestimate the gain that can be had from a maturing technology. Much of the really good advancement in technology isn’t revolutionary, but evolutionary. Someday we’ll laugh at the Priuses, just like we laugh at the Model T now.

Feb 9, 2009 - 11:00 am 24. jerryofva:

Never underestimate the laws of physics For a vehicle to have any substantial gain from a hybrid powerplant the propopulsion system has to be a relatively small fraction of total weight. The smaller the vehicle the higher the percentage devoted to propulsion. Hybrid vehicles weigh several hundred pounds more then IC powered equivalents.

So far the most fuel efficient vehicles are diesels. The VW Polo, a Honda Fit sized car gets, 50 city/70 highway. The diesel Smart gets even better mileage. Plug-ins are supposedly better but putting batteries through daily full charge cycles will shorten battery life. PHEV will go through multiple batteries in a lifetime and the production and disposal/recyling of dead batteries will consume a lot energy.

Feb 9, 2009 - 12:27 pm 25. Self-hating Boomer:

Let’s be clear about one thing: I don’t think today’s hybrids are ready for prime time. They’re unbelievably primitive. If we’re lucky, they’re be practical for the masses in a decade. Possibly much longer.

But the laws of physics say that regenerative braking makes weight irrelevant. Real regenerative braking systems aren’t 100 percent efficient, and never will be, but they go a long ways toward making the weight issue unimportant. Even in hilly terrain.

Feb 9, 2009 - 12:53 pm 26. Self-hating Boomer:

Perfect example of some of the snake oil that’s being peddled on the internet:

http://gas2.org/2009/02/08/toyota-reports-that-the-plug-in-prius-gets-65-mpg-are-wrong/

Fortunately, Toyota had the integrity to nip that in the bud. I strongly suspect that the 65 mpg claim was based on the run-the-batteries-down-first trick.

Feb 9, 2009 - 3:23 pm 27. Larsen E Whipsnade:

20. Self-hating Boomer:
“I’m rather taken aback that that isn’t obvious.”

Good grief. I’m not sure if the following generation is becoming chronically ignorant, or they’re genetically stupid due to parental addictions gone wild. Doesn’t anybody study physics anymore?

Feb 9, 2009 - 3:30 pm 28. Self-hating Boomer:

I guess I do have to spell it out: if it’s running on electric power, it’s not getting ANY mpg, because the “g” in “mpg” is gallons of gasoline. It’s cheating to use electric power from the grid to calculate mpg of gasoline.

Using your method, you can run a test on battery only, don’t even bother to start the IC engine, measure zero gallons consumed, divide the finite distance travelled by zero, and get infinite mpg.

Doesn’t anybody study english and mathematics anymore?

Feb 9, 2009 - 4:13 pm 29. G Alston:

If electrics and/or hybrids are for all and the refrain is to keep money not going to places that don’t like us, somebody will have to figure out how to make the motor permanent magnets using unobtanium.

Why? Because what those of us who aren’t Bill gates can afford is cobalt or neodynium. Cobalt is in Bolivia (lefty government that doesn’t like us) and Zaire (who doesn’t like anybody) and 95% of the world’s neodynium is in China.

Dang. Money going to places…. awww, forget it.

“Second verse, same as the first.”

— Henry VIII by Herman’s Hermits

Feb 10, 2009 - 1:07 pm 30. myth buster:

But you can do a calculation on miles per gallon-equivalent, that is, miles traveled on the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.

Feb 10, 2009 - 8:18 pm 31. Larsen E Whipsnade:

28. Self-hating Boomer:
“Doesn’t anybody study english and mathematics anymore?”

It’s difficult to believe that grown, adult, greenies in America actually think like this. A hybrid doesn’t use ANY grid electricity. It generates and stores its own electricity from gasoline it burns. On a hybrid, it all comes down to miles-per-gallon regardless if it’s running on battery or IC power, so there’s no problem running the battery to zero and finishing your journey with the IC engine. It’s still MPG. There’s no grid power in the equation. God help us if that’s how greenies think through engineering problems!

Feb 11, 2009 - 9:56 am 32. G Alston:

#31 whipsnade — “It’s difficult to believe that grown, adult, greenies in America actually think like this.”

You misread.

S-h.Boomer was referring to factoring electricity from the grid for plug-in technology.

S/he makes a valid point: there ought to be a reasonable metric applied for meaningful comparisons between different technologies vis a vis energy efficiency. MPG only makes sense if all vehicles use G exclusively.

Certainly if you have a plugin/gas that gets 50 miles on a charge and you have a 35 mile round trip commute including a stop at the grocery on the way home, you aren’t using gas on those days. MPG is meaningless. On the other hand if you travel 200 miles to visit the folks on the farm the last 150 miles each way is gas. But wouldn’t the meaningful metric in this case be a function of travel distance? Of course it would. A distance of 80 miles to the farm vs 200 results in 30 miles each direction of gas vs 150.

Seems to me that the metric for plugin/gas ought to be some sort of sliding scale using electricty cost vs avg trip distance and gas price and so on. Obviously there’s some point at which the KwH charging cost is equivalent to gas; the underlying “understood” premise with plugins appears to be that recharging is ALWAYS cheaper than gas. This may not always be so. Things change. Wean the country from gas and different regulations etc pop up into place that make the cost of electrical just as awful as gas used to be. The government makes money not just on users of gasoline but also those who deliver and sell it. You think they’re just going to give that up? Of course not.

Have fun developing a metric that’s just as simple as MPG is.

And yeah, just in case you missed it, I’m saying that when the smoke clears the avg cost for the avg guy per mile today will be MORE in 2009 dollars 30 years in the future regardless of the technology being used then.

Maybe that’s the proper metric then: cost per mile.

Feb 11, 2009 - 1:48 pm 33. Larsen E Whipsnade:

G Alston:
“Boomer was referring to factoring electricity from the grid for plug-in technology.”

Actually, Boomer said it was “fraud” to average the cost of gas burned over the entire trip if part of the trip was on battery power.

That’s the bit I’m objecting to. It’s NOT fraud. It’s no more fraudulent than your idea of “cost per mile”. The cost of driving a hybrid (excepting maintenance, etc) is the cost of the GAS, no matter how much coasting or battery cruising you do.

Boomer is so self-righteous that he doesn’t see how transparent and bogus his ideas are. But he does write well. And that’s the really scary part of much of green advocacy.

Feb 11, 2009 - 10:36 pm 34. Robert F:

Re:23 “Someday we’ll laugh at the Priuses, just like we laugh at the Model T now.”

What is so funny about the Model T? It incorporated advances in metallurgy and manufacturing that even today are respectable.
Instead, think of something really hilarious: Today’s top of the line Mercedes(or pick your own example), employs the same basic architecture and technology: Front engine, rear drive, piston engine. 100 years later and all we have to show for technological advancement is a Model T with fuel injection, air bags, etc. Meanwhile, thermal efficiency has only marginally improved.

The Model T will be continued to be admired, a timeless classic; Mozart as motorcar. The ones who will be laughed at are us.

Feb 16, 2009 - 4:20 pm

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