On Monday Toyota officially announced the launch of the plug-in version of its 3rd generation Prius, calling it the Prius Plug-in Hybrid. Leasing will start immediately.
Deliveries of approximately 600 units will take place throughout the first half of 2010 in Europe, the US, and Asia. These will be offered by lease to selected fleet programs, and not consumers.
The car is equipped with a 5.3 kwh lithium-ion battery pack and has an all-electric range of 14.5 miles. Top speed in EV-mode will be 62 MPH.
The car will use its 1.8 L gasoline engine whenever power demands are high right from the start of operation, which is different that the Volt which will use electricity only for all driving needs in its first 40 miles of operation.
Toyota reports the car averages 134 MPG on the extremely conservative Japanese JC08 test cycle, not taking charging into effect.
Toyota plans to use the learnings from the fleet testing to develop a retail production version of the vehicle, and will begin selling and mass producing them in 2011.
According to Toyota’s Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada, Toyota aims to sell “tens of thousands” of plug-in cars globally each year.
Pricing is unknown but Mr. Uchiyamada said it will be “affordable.”
A less expensive smaller pure electric car will also go on sale in 2012.
Toyota’s lithium ion batteries will be made through a joint venture with Panasonic.
Toyota states the car can be recharged from a standard electric outlet.
I bet you thought you had seen and heard it all when we posted the Chevy Volt song here last week. Well it turns out you hadn’t.
Apparently GM had set that catchy little ditty called “Chevy Volt and Me” to an actual choreographed routine.
Not only does America’s most important upcoming car have its own song, but its own dance as well.
GM played the song along with this dance routine each hour of the LA Auto Show and will be bringing it around to all the nation’s upcoming auto shows as well.
Special thanks to a fan who captured this video for all of us to see. And thanks a lot for sticking this song back in our heads again!
This fan who also runs the site called Sunpluggers writes “My husband and I visit your site regularly. We took some video of the Chevy Volt dancers at the LA Car Show; they were very entertaining.” That’s one way of putting it.
Ladies its OK to try this at home, but guys, not so much.
In the field of electric cars, besides the Chevy Volt, another topic has long been of interest to me, as well as many others.
It is the work of a small secretive Cedar Park Texas company called EEStor, Inc.
The company was founded by a man named Dick Weir who has longstanding experience and expertise in computer disc manufacturing. He partnered with a man named Carl Nelson who has extensive knoweldge and experience with ceramic materials science going back to the 1950s.
Together they invented an entity known as the EESU. This is a device composed of a scalable array of thousands of specialized supercapacitors. Those super-capacitors, or components as EEStor calls them, would be manufactured using a specialized material called alumina-coated barium titanate. This newly fabricated/discovered material has been shown to have a high electrical permittivity (ability to hold electrons) across a wide range of temperature. The number of components dictates the storage potential of the resulting battery. The EV prototype uses 32,000 components and can store 52 kwh.
In theory, these batteries could be built to virtually any size, and could even be used for grid-leveling and in fast-charging stations.
EEStor has partnered with a Canadian company called Zenn Motors who has provided millions of dollars in financial support to EEStor in exchnge for 10% partnership and rights to use the technology in electric vehicles.
Since forming in 2006, Zenn has been a manufacturer of low speed neighborhood electric vehicles. They just announced they will cease those operations in April 2010 to turn their entire focus on selling EEStor-powered drivetrains, called ZENNergy powertrains to other OEMs.
The only problem is no known EESU has ever been publicly seen or demonstrated.
Furthermore the dates for its revelation have been slipping since late 2007 when it was first publicly promised. The most recent and intense promise published is that the first devices would be delivered to Zenn this month.
“EEStor has publicly indicated an objective of delivering functional technology to ZMC by the end of the calendar year,” said Zenn spokesperson Catherine Scrimgeour told GM-Volt in October. “ZMC is confident in their ability to meet that objective.”
The world waits.
Why is this so important?
The vehicular EESU would hold 52 kwh of energy, in a package that weighs under 300 pounds, could be recharged in 5 minutes, and would not degrade over time. The CEO of Zenn even publicly declared recently that 1 million charge-recharge cycles have been achieved in the lab. More importantly, the EESU could be sold at around $100 per kwh, making it several times cheaper than lithium ion batteries. Thus the EESU would be many times better than lithium-ion batteries in every conceivable way
Too good to be true? A lot of supercapcitor scientists think so.
“The bottom line on EEStor’s ceramic capacitor energy storage claims is that they are extrapolating linear performance on a parameter (permittivity) that is not linear. I.e. the electric field collapses at high voltage/high electric field strength,” says Ted Bohn, ultracap expert at the Argonne National Lab. “Or in simpler terms, the capacitance of the device is not the same at 6 volts as it is at 6400 volts.”
If EEStor has achieved the breakthrough they claim it could prove extremely disruptive to the lithium ion battery industry rendering them immediately obsolete. It would replace batteries for cell phones, electronics, military applications, and electric cars including the Volt.
I often mention EEStor to GM executives when I get the chance. I recently asked Volt vehicle line chief Tony Posawatz what he knows about EEStor.
“I have heard a little bit,” he said. “Certainly the press releases are interesting, it causes you to take note and follow it.”
“The guys involved in it certainly aren’t a fly by night operation,” he noted. “Still some of the claims, knowing what I know, are way out there.”
Asked if GM could quickly swap in EESUs if they became available in exchange for the lithium ion cells in future Volts, Posawatz agreed it was possible though added “it would take couple of years.”
Will the world see an EESU by then end of this year? Only 17 days to find out.
The whole point of driving an electric car is to drive without the use of gasoline. For the car to get that energy, it has to be plugged into an outlet daily for a significant period of time.
The time to charge a car fully depends on several things: the size of its battery, the current and voltage available to it, and the capability of its charger.
The Volt, for example, has 8 kwh of usable energy in its battery, and the maximum charge power allowed is 3.3 kw.
It’s important to know the following formula: POWER (WATTS) = VOLTS x AMPERES.
Thus for the Chevy Volt at 220 Volts: 3300 watts =220 volts x 15 amps. The time to obtain 8kwh of charge is then 8000 wh/3300 watts = 2.42 hours. The 110 volt 12 amp charger at household current of 110 volts would take: 110 volts x 12 amps = 1320 watts, and thus 8000 wh/1320 w = 6 hours. The available 8 amp option for a non dedicated circuit would take 8000 wh/880 w =9 hours.
The MINI E has a a 35 kwh battery of which 28 kwh are usable. At 110 volts and 12 amps: 28000/1320 = 21 hours 12 minutes, and for the Nissan LEAF with 24 kwh and 19.2 kwh usable, 14 hours and 33 minutes.
So though the Volt is manageable if only using standard 110 volt household current, a pure EV may not be.
And that’s part of the problem for their adoption, explains a CNN article in which I was quoted.
As BMW found out with its MINI-E field trial there are significant barriers to installing 240 Volt garage chargers. They can’t be legally installed by do-it-yourselfers, but have to be hard-wired into the house by licensed electricians and receive approval by local municipalities. Those rules vary widely state by state and town by town, and right now in some cases can take a frustrating number of weeks or even months.
All of us early adopters are likely to be forgiving and patient with this process, as I was accurately descibed as being in the CNN piece. The general population might not be so acquiescent.
This is why automakers like GM and Nissan are going out of their way to make sure initial rollout areas are prepared to manage this process swiftly and painlessly for consumers.
Part of this plug-in readiness planning is the introduction of some public chargers as well. These will be essential for apartment-dwellers but for many people they will act more as a placebo for range anxiety. Drivers will be made to feel comfortable having them there, but likely won’t use them. 80% of prospective buyers expect only to charge at home.
In August it was announced that GM would be receiving a $30 million DOE grant. The grant was announced as in support of an early demonstration fleet of 125 Chevy Volts to utilities and “500 to consumers.”
This got some of us excited about the possibility of getting our hands on Volts prior to November 2010. This excitement was further fueled by recent reports that GM’s board is offering $100 million to speed the Volt launch.
Last week in California, GM announced it would be using some of that grant money to issue a Volt demonstration fleet to three California utilities, and EPRI in 2011 which would be after the consumer launch.
But what about those consumer 500 Volts?
I recently was able to learn some specifics from Tony Posawatz who is the Volt’s vehicle line engineer.
The DOE grant said 125 cars for utilities and 500 cars for consumers prior to launch, can you explain?
Actually someone made an error in the capturing of the language.
The way this works is after we start regular production. Because we have the capability with OnStar to collect a lot of data, we had agreed on, and the way the language was written, from 500 to 5000 cars depending on what we determine is feasible of data that we’ll share with the DOE that we collected from real customers.
So this would be after November 2010, not pre-November 2010. This is part of DOE saying ‘hey we’re stimulating jobs, we also want to learn about this technology so we can understand how to help further the technology going forward.’ So the data will have things like what percent of the time does the customer really drive on battery electric?, what percent of the time is the engine generator on?, what are the driving distances? That kind of stuff.
Will people be able to opt in on that after 2010?
Once we launch, it’s very much like the deal Nissan has as well. They have the same kind of commitment to collect some data. For the DOE, the data is more important that the cars.
It will be all the cars then?
We have to work through the specifics. Collecting a lot of data doesn’t mean its better, we want to collect it smartly. So we left them with a range, and someone didn’t interpret that accurately in the language they chose to summarize it.
The good news is for every Volt customer we will have the ability, and we’ll have to have a little discussion about the data we will collect as they sign up to be a Volt customer. And how that data gets displayed and shared. Certainly we want to maintain privacy, but we also want to make certain that they can share. Just like what you’ve created in the ability of people to share and discuss. We want to be able to have Volt customers share amongst themselves and to have some real data as well.
It is GM’s intention to make the Chevy Volt a very wired and connected high-tech car.
We have already known that charging will be programmable at least from the dash. Drivers will be able to set the car to charge, for example, after midnight to take advantage of lower utility rates. Another powerful set of real-time connected features will stem from OnStar system which is expected to be able to download to the car, among many other things, electricity rates from utility companies.
Nissan has previously announced their plan to make an iPod app that drivers could use to turn on or off their car’s charging and get text messages from their car.
GM it turns out has similar plans too.
Brent Dewar was the VP of Chevrolet when he showed a few flashy slides at the LA Auto Show last week while presenting the the Volt and US Cruze, and the Volt’s paint color winner. Yesterday Brent was removed from his position by the axe-weilidng Ed Whitacre just 5 months after taking it from Ed Peper. Dewar will “retire” as of April 1 2010 and is being replaced by Jim Campbell.
Anyway, I digress. Dewar had quickly flashed a slide across the screen revealing GM’s intention to develop mobile phone applications for controlling and interacting with the Volt. I captured the image and it is posted above.
GM sources have indicated that there will be applications at least for the iPod and the Blackberry. These will soon be unveiled along with their potential functions.
Besides controlling when to charge the car, I could see these applications receiving signals from the car as well, indicating when charging is completed and if the driver forgot to plug it in at some time interval after arriving home. Having forgotten to plug in my MINI E several times, I can assure you this function will be useful.
What functions would you like to see in a Volt mobile phone application? We might just have a chance to influence it.
