Do Sportscars and Hybrid contradict each other?

Among the car manufacturers to push for hybrid technology there are also a number of sportscar companies, i.e. Porsche, Ferrari and others. But, does the combination of a sportscar with hybrid engine technology really make sense? There are quite a number of reasons against it:
(1) Hybrid technology makes a car heavier, easily 50, but most commonly 100-150 kg extra weight. Weight is bad for handling and performance
(2) Hybrid technology only really makes a car save fuel if it allows to shift earlier or to run without the gasoline engine. However, the fun of driving a sportscar often comes with revving the engine and listening to the noise the car makes
(3) Driveability often suffers due to the effect when you use the electrical engine to slow down the car. This has also been a huge issue with KERS in formula 1.
Of course there are also a number of good reasons why adding hybrid technology to a sportscar can make sense, as for example the successful 997 GT3 Hybrid has shown or the future 918 spider will maybe illustrate, but I stay with my opinion that we should rather save weight and come up with simple efficient sportcars that are fun to drive!

Looking back over 28 months of Toyota Prius driving

The Toyota Prius has gone. We sold our family vehicle and so it's time to look back and think about the strengths and weaknesses of this car.

Let's start with the strengths:
The Toyota is an affordable high tech vehicle. The technology works really well. We didn't face any breaking or acceleration issues similar to the ones recently discussed in the press. It's pretty economical too with minimum fuel consumption of around 4 liters per 100 km if you really try hard. It beats most Diesels in terms of emissions, not specifically for CO2 but for the other stuff like NOx. The car can seat four to five people with acceptable comfort and it comes well equipped with lots of gadgets like keyless go or a pretty impressive JBL loudspeaker system.
The car never let us down, reliability is certainly very good. Servicing isn't expensive either. Insurance premiums and road taxes are acceptable too, some states even have lower taxes for hybrid vehicles. So from an operation's cost point of view the car is good.

There are some weaknesses too:
Fuel economy is only good if you help the car. Short distances are bad, especially in the winter time and high speed driving on highways is bad as well. The hybrid unit will not help in these situations. You need to understand that when you break hard you still burn energy and that optimal recuperation only happens when you break softly or let the engine break on its own. We observed fuel consumption of 8 liters and more per 100 km in suboptimal conditions. The seats are not really good and the offer only limited lateral support. Usability could certainly improved and some things are not thought through. Let me give you one example: In Switzerland we tend to drive with the lights on also during daylight. Now, when switching on the lights, the display dims down, because it assumes it's dark. Therefore you can't read the display very well any more during the day. You can influence the brightness, but not enough. There's not enough space in the boot, certainly not for a complete family. I don't understand why the pure electrical mode has to be limited to speeds below 49 km/h. Most European cities have a speed limit of 50 km/h and this always turns the gasoline engine on. The beeping of the reverse gear is annoying. And there are a few additional little things I could mention here, but to be fair, none of these is a major problem.
The recent issues around Toyota and the fact that (at least in Switzerland) the market has been over-flooded with second hand Prius had a bad impact on the reselling value. We lost much more on this car than we did on the previously owned VW Touran for example.
But what is really the biggest minus in my eyes is the way how the car drives. If you consider yourself as a engaged and sporty driver you will not become happy with this car! The noise is annoying when you rev the car, the handling isn't really fostering fast driving and the performance is sub standard.

So here's the verdict:
If you look for an economical family car with good behavior and a green image and you don't have any aspiration to drive fast and sporty, then the Toyota Prius may be the right car for you. There's clearly an eco premium to be paid, but it's compensated by the fun of driving in fully electrical mode. Reliability is good and emissions are very low. There are many cab drivers in Switzerland who drive Prius now and for them it probably really makes sense.

Peugeot SR1 - best of show at Geneva Car Show 2010

Peugeot surprises the visitors of the Geneva Car Show 2010 with the Peugeot SR1 concept car. But it's not just a very nice looking car, it's also probably the best display and booth over all. The car is interesting with its carbon fiber body, the hybrid drive concept with a total of 313 hp, able to accelerate the car in less than 5 secs from 0 to 100 km/h. Like many of its competitors it's able to drive with electricity only, in this case 12+ km. Three people can find place in the car. As I said in a previous post, if this is
the new Peugeot design concept then I may well end up with owning a Peugeot in the future.
By the way, what you see in the back, is water coming down, it really looked marvelous.
This is a concept car, the roof has to be taken off by two people and there's no space to store it. But why would you care? And you certainly wouldn't want to spoil the shape with packing the roof into the back of this car, wouldn't you?

Are hybrid sportscars the future?

There was barely any car manufacturer present in Geneva without at least one hybrid car to show. Lexus/Toyota showed probably 10 or more variants of the ever same topic. Interestingly even the sportscar manufacturers had to jump on the hybrid train. Porsche for example showed the marvellous Porsche 918 Spyder concept car. With its V8 and twin electrical motors it's supposed to lap the Nurburgring Nordschleife in less than 7:30 minutes. That would be impressive. Porsche even brought a second hybrid sportscar, the 997 GT3 Hybrid, only thought as race car. Ferrari also was forced to come up with something green. So they brought this very green 599 derivate, the Ferrari HY KERS. The most amazing thing about this car certainly was the color. But I am sure the technology is impressive too. So the question remains - are hybrid sportscars the future? They offer even more power, better economics and lower greenhouse gas emissions. But they are also heavier which spoils the sportscar sensation. So I doubt whether big engines with additional big electrical motors are the future. But, we will see.

The 2010 Geneva Car Shows - white hybrid cars, but almost no passion, racing and tradition

Coming back from this year's Geneva Car Show (2010) there are a couple of trends I thought are interesting to mention:
1) Clearly fuel efficiency comes before performance on the marketing agendas of the car manufacturers
2) Any color is good as long as it's white. Many many cars are shown in white, few though are painted in other colors, to be fair, for example the bright green Ferrari or the colorful Fords.
3) There's less money than in the past, therefore there's also less glamour in the show. The booths are more basic, less money has been spent on displays, girls, etc.
4) There's a certain lack of emotion. No real passion!
5) History and tradition aren't really important anymore. You may find some classic cars, but you have to look hard. Ehhmm, I don't count Morgan and the Land-Rover as classic cars in this context.
6) Racing isn't highlighted. There are few race and rallye cars (i.e. at the Renault, Audi, Volkswagen and Citroen booths), but it's really marginal and certainly not in the center.
7) Clearly the the "hybrid" age has hit all the manufacturers, or almost all of them, including Ferrari (599 HyKERS), Porsche (918 Spyder, GT3 Hybrid) and many others. Also lots of electrical cars to be seen, but very few hydrogen cars.
8) There's still a lot of interest. Tons of people try to get an impression of how the cars today and tomorrow look like.

Hydrogen is not the answer to peak oil, Jeremy Clarkson, think again

In a recent blog post, TopGear Jeremy Clarkson makes the point that hybrid cars are the wrong direction to go and lean burn would have saved the world better than catalyst converters. He claims that Hydrogen cars should be the future. Now, I really like Jeremy Clarkson, but I think he is not really right in his entertaining article. Firstly lean burn wouldn't have brought the improvements in terms of clean emission than the catalyst did. A catalyst cleans about 90-99% of what the car produces while lean burn may lead to a 1.5-2.5 times improvement. Only the combination actually helps. Secondly Hydrogen suffers from many different problems that are difficult to solve and make the introduction very expensive. I strongly believe that improvements in battery technology will make the electrical car more viable than hydrogen powered cars. And if we don't think we need 400 HP and 2 tons to drive from London City Airport to Piccadilly Circus then efficiency should be okay. Hydrogen may make sense for certain types of usages, maybe even for powering the range extender, but I don't believe it's the future of motoring. As we have seen over the last 10-20 years there are many ways of improving already existing technologies. Cars today need probably 50-60% fuel of what they did for the same performance ten years ago. Electrical cars have substantially increased in efficiency over the last three to five years. Combining this with new technologies such as hybrid (ideally not with batteries but rather super caps) and hydrogen we still have a lot to gain before we are running out of affordable oil.
One comment to the blog was quite interesting as a thought - we may find other and better ways to fuel more and more cars, but there's a clear limit in terms of how many streets we can build and have. And that limit is given by the size of the earth ...
And as I am just on it, if you haven't watched the movie "who killed the electric car", then you should.

Why is there no "KERS" in supercars? Where is the hybrid supercar?

Despite the fact that often supercar manufacturers copy wrong or right decisions from Formula 1 cars, i.e. 10 cylinder engines, none of the recently presented super cars featured a KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). This is somewhat surprising! By adding some 40-50 kg you can add some extra power (80 HP in F1) and torque to your car and at the same time reduce the fuel consumption if done rightly. Adding a KERS could mean to power the car with a smallish turbo enhanced six cylinder engine instead of putting a 10 or 12 cylinder block into the car. But not even Lexus thought about this when building the LF-A. Neither has Audi (R8), Ferrari (458) or Mercedes (SLS). Maybe it's because of the marketing guys. You don't want to have your customers think about a Toyota Prius when picking a supercar. But calling it KERS this might be a different story and it would help the buyers to justify buying such a car.

Lexus LF-A - have we really waited for this?

Lexus has announced the new Lexus LF-A just recently and it has been covered extensively all over the world. This is a 375'000 Euro supercar with a high revving V10, 560 HP, 1'450 kg weight and impressive performance and road handling (we assume).
It took them 11 years to develop it and the first cars only get shipped in a year or so.
While the car looks impressive (although the design almost looks like a retro modern car) and there's certainly a lot of technology and engineering going into this car, I really wonder whether we have waited for this.
Some of my readers may remember my post on the Connaught D-Type GT V10. Yes, you see Tim Bishop, the Chief Engineer at the steering wheel on the picture here. Well, the team around Tim developed something that I would reckon is more creative at probably a small fraction of the project cost of the Lexus LF-A. There are similarities though. Both cars have a V10 in the front, though the engine in the Connaught is much more in the center of the car, basically between the driver and the co-driver. Both try to to build a lightweight car. The Connaught is 850 kg while the Lexus weighs 1'450 kg. While the performance of the Connaught may be a bit less impressive due to the smaller engine and "only" 300 HP, they achieved to actually seat four people and still have a boot. And what is most intriguing for me, the Connaught has a built-in hybrid module (kind of a KERS) while Lexus, the mother of the hybrid technology, doesn't. Last, but not least, the sticker price for the Connaught is 100'000 GBP, while the price tag for the Lexus LF-A is supposed to be more than 3 times of this.
So, this brings me back to the point, that most of today's supercars and this includes the Lexus LF-A lack creativity and are just evolutions of concepts from the 80ies and 90ies.

The electric car is the winner ...

... at least when you believe search engine trends. "Electric car" is the by far most searched term, compared to "hybrid car" or "hydrogen car".
Despite of all the known problems (weight, reach, ecological issues with batteries, etc.) a lot of people love the idea of the electrical car. Driving a semi-electrical car from time to time (Toyota Prius) I can understand some of this enthusiasm. It's quite a special experience to accelerate without any major noise and to glide in almost perfect silence. Parking an electrical car is fun, as nobody will get annoyed if you have to try twice. Torque of modern electrical motors is great and it's there from the first instance on. And as it feels so green it makes you feel good.
But, no, it's not really exciting enough. I love the noise that a well engineered fuel operated motor produces and I like the smell and the vibrations and this pure feel of machinery. It's bloody difficult to simulate this, I guess.

BMW's Diesel Hybrid prototype - the future of sportscars?

BMW just reveiled a prototype that will be showcased at the coming international auto exhibition (IAA) in Frankfurt. It combines a 3 cylinder diesel engine with two electrical motors and a battery of 85 kg. The car is supposed to be very efficient with less than 4 liters per 100 km and at the same time quick too with less than 5 seconds for the sprint from 0 to 100 km/h. Sounds good, doesn't it? In addition is is supposed to have a very low drag coefficient with 0.22 and it isn't as heavy as you could expect looking at all the technology on board, the weight is actually less than 1'400 kg. So this all looks like BMW has invented the sportscar of the future. Well, I don't think so. This thing will sound awful with its 3 pot diesel engine and the look is more suited for a non-production prototype than for something you can really use. It's an interesting engineering object though, but I will still prefer the really light weight and no thrills alternative that hopefully somebody else (Lotus, where is the successor of the Elise?) will build.

Is the eVaro the electrical sports car we have waited for?

The Canadian company Future Vehicle Technologies is coming with the eVaro, a plug-in hybrid sports car. It is said to be extremely efficient (with 275 MPGE for city driving) while still being very fast (+200 km/h, 0-100 in less than 7 seconds). And FVT is claiming it is production ready.
The performance is clearly remarkable and good enough. However I reckon they could rethink the design piece. It looks too much 80ies/90ies in my eyes and not at all futuristic. This is how prototypes looked in 1985.
So my recommendation would be: Take the technology, if it is as good as promised, and plant it into a really state-of-the-art three wheeler body and this will be a serious contender in the hybrid sports car market. With the given design though it will only appeal to techno-savvy people which are often not early adapters of new innovative products.

New Hybrid engine concept from ETH Zurich - simpler and clever

Hybrid cars are more complex and more expensive to build. Two engines and batteries and a lot of computer power are a lot to handle to save a bit of gasoline. That is at least what ETH professor Lino Guzzella thought. So he came up with something simpler. He took a small engine (approx. 750 ccm instead of 1'300 ccm) and combined it with a turbo to achieve the performance level needed. This comes with the disadvantage of delays in power delivery. To compensate for this Guzzella adds an air pressure tank where he can store air with a pressure of up to 17 bar. The pressure is built up during brake phases. And it's pushed into the turbo unit instantly in acceleration phases. The new concept is said to deliver a similar power output than a bigger engine at the gasoline consumption of a Toyota Prius. Not bad. And it comes at a fraction of the cost (approx. 20 % of a hybrid system) and I would reckon the weight is also a fraction.
A question for me remains: Is this clever engine downsizing or true hybrid technology? Be it what it is, it's a good example of intelligent engineering.

Does the end of KERS mean that Hybrid technology doesn't work in motorsports?

With BMW having said good bye to KERS there's only Ferrari left using a hybrid module in Formula 1 in 2009. While McLaren-Mercedes may use its system once or twice again this year, the KERS technology seems to have lost the fight and its competitive edge. For next year the teams even announced that they most probably will drive without KERS at all.
How can this be, given that KERS contributes 80 horsepowers and substantial additional overtake potential? And what's the impact on the hybrid technology usage for other cars?
First it must be said that a formula 1 car is a highly optimized and tuned vehicle where every gramm of weight and where it's being put can make a huge difference. Secondly it's all about aerodynamics and putting an additional device with cooling needs may limit the engineer's freedom substantially. And thirdly the limits when driving such cars are astronomically high and any inflencing of braking behavior can mean to add a couple of tenths of a second per lap and decide on 3rd versus 15th place on the starting grid. Taking all these things together most teams acknowledged that having one technology less to worry about allows them to focus on the rest better. This doesn't mean the technolgy doesn't work. Actually it works quite well and teams like McLaren and Ferrari, but also Renault showed the benefits of additional power on a straight a couple of times. In other race series such as touring cas or GTs the established level of quality certainly would make cars using KERS highly competitive. But for formula 1 the compromises to take into were too big to create winners. Too bad, as this is quite a bit of negative PR for hybrid systems as such. But if you are looking at how perfectly these systems work in the Mercedes S400 Hybrid, the Lexus, Honda Insight or Prius, there's nothing to worry about and in the future we will see hybrid systems in almost any model range of any manufacturer.

Range Extender - or how to get home safely

With the promotion and continuous development of electrical cars a new technical concept became fashionable - the Range Extender. It has been born out of necessity. If it's not economical to build large batteries and the more power you want to store in batteries the heavier the battery becomes then maybe here's a case to install some auxiliary power in a car - the Range Extender was born. Basically it's a gasoline or diesel powered small engine that loads the battery. With this approach the range that with only battery operated cars is pretty narrow can be extended, hence the name. Interestingly people were remembering engine types for this purpose that are not used broadly otherwise, i.e. Wankel engines or Stirling motors. The objectives for a range extender engine are quite different to what you would usually have for the engine in a car. It needs to be as small and light as possible and should be operated only at the optimal point to deliver high output at low fuel consumption.
The concept makes a lot of sense, but it also makes the car more complex and expensive to build. And it means you have to fill up your car with two sources of energy, electricity and gasoline/diesel. But given the usual driving patterns where people use their car for maybe 10-20 km per day and only rarely do long range trips, adding a Range Extender to an electrical car actually may be a good compromise after all. Also you could see the Full Hybrid car as a car that maximizes the Range Extender approach.

The V10 Hybrid Connaught D-Type GT

Car manufacturers have been trying to convince us that modern sports cars need to have a curb weight of almost two tons, need to be wide and long, thirsty and very very expensive. What looks like a law of nature isn't though!
In Wales (UK) a small company is building a sports car that weighs roughly 850 kg, and is with its V10 2 liter engine very economical thanks to a hybrid modul and the overall construction of the car. And it even carries 4 people with a serious amount of luggage. Where else could you find something like this?
What Tim Bishop and his boys at Connaught Motor Company are able to achieve is really impressive! Have a look at a video on youtube that introduces the car and highlights some of its features. It's very lightweight, as said, roughly 850 kg. That's 500 kg less than a Lotus Evora! It still has been constructed with crash tests in mind and the CAD/CAE tools used are the same as the ones used by the large manufacturers. The masterpiece is the front-mid-mounted V10 with a 22.5 degree angle between the two banks of cylinders. The engine is so small that it can be fitted where normally the transmission would be, resulting into a 50:50 kg distribution for the car. Thanks to a hybrid module energy is consumed in small bits giving a CO2 efficiency second to none in the same category. Yes, it's sort of a green car (not just the paint!). Everything has been constructed with ecology in mind, craddle to grave as Tim calls it. What is also highly impressive is the fact that this cars summons 40-50 years of car engineering and takes the best ideas from these years. You find things in this car that were pioneered in Reliants or Tatras, there's more tradition in this car than in any Aston Martin I would guess.
So here's a potential super car with a price tag of roughly 120'000-130'000 Euros, developed with a budget that was a fraction of what the biggies like Porsche, Jaguar or Maserati spend to come up with cars that are far less innovative than this one. Let's hope Tim Bishop and his great team will be able to lead this project to success and influence the motor car industry with it.
P.S. If you believe you heard the name before, yes, Connuaught built racing (and street) cars in the fifties with quite some success. So, there's even more tradition to this ....

Does the car industry give us the cars we want?

Toyota has introduced a Toyota Prius to arrive this summer, but it's still the same thing with very a limited electricity-only range (2-3 km). The batteries are still of the old kind and despite the car being very low in terms of CO2 emissions, it's not what many Prius owner has hoped for as a next generation Hybrid. The so called Plug-In Hybrid will come later, much later, probably 2011, first field tests are starting this years but only for fleet owners.
Interesting enough there's a company TODAY in the Netherlands to retro fit a Toyota Prius with better batteries and some electronics to convert it to a plug-in hybrid, a car you can charge up at home and then drive some 40-60 kms with electricity only. The company's name is TTd. The means applied to engineer this car seem to be fairly simple and straight forward, so why doesn't sell us Toyota the same thing. Reasons may be the price (I estimate some 20k Euros on top of a standard Prius) and more importantly the reliability. Modern hybrid cars are complex, lots of "decisions" need to be taken by the car, i.e. when to warm up the engine, when to load and unload the batteries, keeping the batteries in the optimal loading condition, break management, etc. But at the end, a key question should be, what customers want also. And I am pretty sure that pioneering users would love the plug-in principle as the best thing about the Prius is to run it quietly with the electrical motor only. So, Toyota, please speed up!

Aptera - the future of motoring?

Two hearts beat in my chest, the one of a petrolhead and the one of an engineer. As an engineer I admire what the guys at Aptera are doing. They build a three wheel vehicle with advanced aerodynamics and electrical power. It's more aerodynamic and more fuel efficient than almost anything else and it looks very futuristic. I would buy one if I could, but they only want to supply cars to people living in California - at least for the time being. When you look at this car you can see why the more traditional car manufactuers will struggle competing with something like this. Almost nothing what you have in a traditional car manufacturing plant can be re-used if you want to produce something like an Aptera. Of course there are some trade offs, not everybody may accept. You will not pull a trailer with this thing, the reach is still below 200 kms when fully loaded and without the range extender of the planned hybrid option. It's probably getting quite hot in this thing and it is not as compact and easy to park as let's say a Toyota IQ. But on the other side, it is more exclusive than a Lamborghini or Ferrari and it makes you feel like a hero when you watch "an inconvenient truth". So, as said, if I can get my hands on one of these, I will drive it.