Toyota Prius Alpha - why it makes sense to build this compact van

Toyota has announced the Toyota Prius Alpha, kind of a compact van version of the Prius, similar to the Verso. This is a good idea. Anyway the Prius wasn't a pretty car, so changing the back can't do much harm. Also, the Prius always suffered from a lack of luggage space. With the bigger back, that should be at least partially solved. And finally, from an aerodynamics standpoint the high "Kammheck" shouldn't worsen the drag coefficient substantially. And families have been happy buyers of the Prius, with more space they will be even more happy. Hopefully the brakes work this time ;-)

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.

Motoring in 2000-2009 - what will we remember in 20-30 years?

The Decade 2000 to 2009 was influenced by a rapidly increasing oil price towards the end of the period (for example the ratio between the highest and the lowest price per barrel was 5-6, peak was reached in 2008), by the inconvenient truth of a changing climate and global warming, by terrorism, tsunamis and hurricanes. Towards the end of the decade the whole world suffered from the consequences of the financial crisis and a global recession. At the same time the digitization of the world has continued and we couldn't imagine a life without mobile connectivity, Internet and flat screens.

So what where the motoring highlights of the years 2000 to 2009?

A Decade of Extremes
Super and Hyper Cars got faster and faster. The climax has been reached with the Bugatti Veyron, a car that really showcases what is feasible today. Whether anybody needs 1001 HP and 400 km/h top speed is another question.

The reinvention of the cheap car
Tata introduced the Nano, a really cheap car. But already before Renault has proven with the Dacia that there is a market for cheaper cars.

Supercar performance on a budget
When Nissan announced the GTR it was an instant success. Fast laps on the Nurburgring also helped to establish the image of a supercar on a budget. And the interior is designed for the PS3 generation. Four seats even make the car suitable for a small family.

The Hybrid Decade
With the Toyota Prius a new technology became both fashionable and consumer-ready, the hybrid car. While the Prius may neither have been pretty nor ecological it was sold very successfully thanks to Holywood and a brilliant marketing and it certainly proved that people can be motivated to save fuel.

Retro retro
The new Mini is a success, but the Fiat 500 was even more loved by the crowd thanks to its affordability and the really cute design. Revitalizing the Abarth brand at the top end of the 500 has also proven to be a clever move.

Electrical cars that actually are attractive
Tesla built a Roadster on top of a Lotus Elise chassis and loaded thousands of laptop batteries. Despite some getting quite hot this cars proved that performance and electricity don’t need to be opposites in the motoring context. Since the Tesla many manufacturers (i.e. Audi, Mercedes) and tuners (i.e. RUF) have followed and presented electrical sportscars.

In a next post I will talk about the ones that didn’t make it and why I think that from a motoring perspective the 2000 to 2009 decade was a disappointment after all.

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.

Tests in Car Magazines are not neutral

A lot of people consult Car Magazines to find out what car to consider to buy, me included. Car Magazines employ well educated people with lots of experience and therefore are able to measure the performance of cars and the car’s characteristics. But why can it be that more often than not French cars win and are celebrated in French magazines, while a German car may be the winner in a German journal? Is there a lack of Neutrality?
Well, I strongly believe that these journalists have a very professional attitude and they try to stay as fair as possible. What may make the difference is, that not all criteria are the same for Germany versus France for example. Why would a French motor journalist care about the top speed of a car really? Let’s take an example: the Toyota Prius. If you apply German criteria you may want to be able to go fast on a highway and also drive very quickly on normal streets. Distances are big between cities, so you really care a bit less about city fuel consumption. People are rather tall and you need lots of space for all the stuff a family wants to take for vacation. The Prius will not score well here. In Japan it’s very different. Lots of city traffic, impossible to drive faster than 100 km/h, smaller people and probably no need to take the car when you do vacation trips. So the test result will be quite different in these two cases. Another good illustration is what TopGear did when comparing the Toyota Prius and the BMW M3 on the race track: the Prius going full speed followed by a relaxed M3 resulted in more fuel consumption with the Hybrid than with the tuned six cylinder engine of the BMW. Actually as a reader you may not even care about neutrality as long as the criteria applied fit to your own needs. And yes, there’s some national pride involved too and probably some sponsoring and advertisement money as well. So it’s good that the readers have their own opinions also and often read a number of different journals anyway.

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.

Weight Watchers - we need to slim down our cars

Weight is one of the most critical factor in car engineering and at the same time quite underrated. Cars have become heavier and heavier over the last 30 years. And it's not that helpful. The weight doesn't only influence handling, but also fuel economy and energy to be spent for production. And of course if there's more stuff in a car there's more you have to get rid off at the end of its life cycle. So, it seems, there are more than enough arguments to make cars light. However, the contrary has happened.
An excellent illustration from a paper from the "LS-DYNA Anwenderforum (Bamberg 2008)" illustrates this. But let's take some examples.
Here's a accidental list of cars and their base weights:

Car Weight (kg)
Porsche Cayenne GTS 2225
Mercedes 350 SL 1750
Lamborghini Murcielago 6.5 V12 1750
Nissan GT-R 1740
BMW M3 1605
Toyota Prius 1400
Porsche Carrera 997 S 1350
VW Golf 1.4 TSI 1340
Fiat Punto 1.4 T 1155
Lotus Elise R 900
Morgan 4/4 1.6 880

You have to look very hard to find a car that is below 1'000 kg. And the weights in the table aren't even what you get when you receive your fully spec'd car. Extras such as navigation systems, electrical sunroofs, etc. will add addiditional weight, so that the Golf mentioned in the table may be well 1450 kg and not the 1'340 kg quoted.
Obviously it could be different, as the Connaught D-Type GT V10 with 850 kg, the Mindset with less than 900kg or other innovative cars are proving it. And you don't even need to suffer as good solutions offering both performance and comfort are possible.

So, maybe we should form an organization such as a "Car Weight Watchers Association" to focus on the weight of cars? And promote light cars and blacklist heavy ones?

What is really friendlier to the environment - the Prius 2009 or the Lotus Elise 1996

Everybody appreciates the Toyota Prius as being one of the most green car of the century. Even myself who prefers light fast sports cars to family sedans, am impressed of what Toyota engineering built with this car. But is a Prius really that ecological? When you look at it from a full life cycle point of view then you must include the production as well as the removal of the car. I recently read that the gasoline equivalent of the energy needed to produce a Toyota Prius is roughly 1'000 gallons or 4'000 liters of gasoline. That's a lot. That means that only after driving 80'000 km (at 5 liter per 100 km) you have consumed the same amount for driving as for building the car. Or if you assume that you save 2 liters of gasoline compared to the car the Prius replaces (i.e. a first generation Lotus Elise with the Rover K engine) then you need to drive the Prius for 200'000 km until you have made up for the production effort. It might have been more "green" to keep the Elise and to not buy the Prius! So in many cases even older cars may be the better option for the environment than the new green cars. But it gets worse if you reach the end of life with a Prius. There's so much stuff in the car that can't be just easily re-used or burnt (for example batteries) that the overall balance of buying and using such a car may actually not be the best thing to do for the environment. But there's this image and self marketing aspect to it too - George Clooney probably didn't think that far ...

Doing the math - what transportation mean is really good for the environment?

The University of California has published a scientific report to compare different transportation means and their specific energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. What is new in this report is that they also included the energy spent to provide the infrastructure, i.e. rails, roads, airports, maintenance services, and so on. And of course the effort of building the vehicle was included as well. The authors also assessed the typical load of the different vehicles and therefore can show the "cost" per person transported. If you now look at the key chart they produced you will have some surprises. The worst polluter is the urban diesel bus that is half empty and travels fairly big distances. Pickups also look pretty bad, especially when they run on gasoline. Best is the city bus that is heavily loaded (many would say overloaded) with people and covers the centers. Large aircrafts are actually much better than you wouold assume, this is because they don't need a lot of infrastructure. And what about the conventional gasoline sedan, the car we all use? Well, it's sort of in the middle field, better than the SUVs of course, but clearly worse than most of the public transport vehicles. Of course the picture would look much different if you would take cars like the Aptera or the Toyota Prius as reference. Modern optimized electrical or hybrid cars would certainly be better in comparison than small aircraft and could probably beat the light rail vehicles. What is interesting is the fact that building these vehicles, and the bigger they get the more relevant this is, produces quite a share of the overall greenhouse gas emissions. But on this topic I will post specifically during the coming days.

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!

3.9 liter gasoline (europlus) for 100 km with a Toyota Prius

Well, not exactly. At the end, when I was able to take the picture, the fuel consumption was 4 liters per 100 km. But still, it's not a Diesel, it's unleaded gasoline and it's a car of 4.5 m lenght with 5 seats and all the comfort we are used today. So, not bad at all. The display is shown the German language, but the bar chart is understandable anyway. With a modern hybrid car you can stay substantially below 5 liters and most of the time below 4 liters even. The 80 kms included city traffic, highway and other streets, nothing artificial. Average speed probably something like 70 km/h. I must admit that I tried really to safe fuel, for example by not using the air condition (it wasn't hot anyway) and by not rushing up the hill. The good thing about the Prius is that it motivates the driver to save energy. But it takes experience also and it's not well enough explained in the manual. For example, braking isn't braking all the times, it depends on how much you step your foot on the pedal. I actually think Toyota should do a campaign with pictures like this (ideally with a number 2 or 3 for the consumption), this could be impressive.

Living with a Toyota Prius, the hybrid car for the future?

Now, a Toyota Prius doesn't sound, look and perform like the car, a true petrolhead would buy, you say? Well, yes, that's probably why my wife is driving it. But having used it myself for some thousands of kilometers, I am able to provide my own judgement. And it has to be said - it's different. There's nothing in this car, that makes you happy if you look for driving fun or sportiness. It's quite slow and the faster you go the less fun it is to drive it. I did longer stints on German highways with it and it was aweful. But if you start to understand the car and take it as what it is supposed to be, then it starts to become interesting. Can I do more than 100 kms with 4 liters of fuel? That's the ambition you develop with this car. With how little gasoline can I go how far? Can I do more than 5 kms without using any gasoline, just with the accumulated electricity? You will find youself stopping the aircondition just to lower the gas consumption a bit more. And now it starts to become fun, somewhat. It's different. But to be fair, Toyta was able to build a car that runs quite well, has space for five people and some luggage and can cover long distances without effort. That's quite a convenient truth in today's world, isn't it?