z80

Check out the HSV view of the universe


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Holden Special Vehicles boss Tom Walkinshaw claims most hybrids are less-efficient than petrol engines. Andrew Heasley and Richard Blackburn report.


Tom Walkinshaw


Diesel cars, alternative powertrains and alternative bio-fuels are not the broad environmental panaceas they are made out to be, Holden Special Vehicles boss Tom Walkinshaw claims.

The performance car expert, whose company is investigating the idea of developing a diesel model for its range of high-powered Holdens, claims most hybrids are less fuel-efficient than regular petrol-powered vehicles.
Hybrid engines make sense on large commercial vehicles, less so on cars, he says.

"There's a lot of BS at the moment about hybrid cars. If you actually study the fuel consumption of most of the hybrids out there (they) are worse than a petrol-driven car. But it's a nice marketing thing.

''At best they're no better than anything with a conventional powertrain,'' he said.

The comments, made at a press conference to announce the limited edition, VE Commodore-based HSV W427, put Walkinshaw at odds with HSV managing director Scott Grant, who regularly spruiked the advantages of hybrid technology in his former role as head of Lexus in Australia.
“Lexus also offers diesel variants, but its long-term view is that hybrid will prevail over all single-fuel sources,” Grant said at the launch of the GS450h in 2006.

In the past, Grant has also refused to rule out a hybrid HSV, while Holden recently announced it should have a hybrid Commodore on Australian roads by 2010.

But Walkinshaw believes diesels are a more logical solution, although he says governmental tax policy on fuel is critical to the environmental debate.

"At the moment you have the answer to fuel consumption by looking at diesel, but governments then charge extra taxes on it so they make that option really unavailable to the public because they chose to put a levy on the fuel.

"Goverments throughout the world have to sort themselves out: are they really serious about cutting down fuel consumption or are they just interested in raising tax?''

"At the moment there is a lot of stuff done under an environmental heading that's only just a veiled cloak for increasing tax revenues.

"Diesels will get you 30 per cent better fuel consumption so if they're interested in cutting down the consumption of fuel, then why not make that fuel the same tax levy as petrol? They don't.

''It's not a genuine attempt to solve the problem,'' he says.

As for so-called bio-fuels (such as ethanol or bio-diesel) derived from crops, their production method raises another set of problems, he says, including robbing poor countries of land for food production.

"I don't know that cutting dowm rainforests to plant soya beans to generate fuel is too good for the planet.

"How can you use ... food production to fuel motor cars without causing a problem for people ... in poor countries.

"Where are they going to get the food to eat? If you're taking millions of acres of food producing land and say that's now going to be fuel producing land, where's the food going to come from?'

Substituting fuel for food production has serious global consequences, he warns.

"We've got a whole lot of social unrest coming down the track at the moment at a million miles an hour if we're not careful.

"I don't see how you can take a whole lot of food production out the chain without having a massive social effect,'' he says.

Despite his scepticism about hybrid cars, Walkinshaw, who heads a group of automotive companies, confirmed his European engineers were developing diesel-electric hybrid technology for commercial use in trucks and buses.

Development is based on a 2.2-litre diesel engine that acts not as a propulsion unit, but a generator for an electric motor. The technology is about a year away from being able to be commercialised.

"I think there's a big opportunity for efficiency in buses and commercial vehicles for hybrid that could make a huge impact,'' he said.

"There's a lot of pollution that comes out of that type of vehicle - so there's a lot of potential for making quite a significant improvement.''

Local governments in European cities are quite interested in the technology to clean up their cities, he says.

"Before we started, we had a lot of sounding out of governments and cities throughout Europe that were all very receptive to the concept of being able to cut down the pollution in the city,'' he says.

Other measures that his companies were investigating include "stop-go'' and cylinder de-activation engine technology to eke out better fuel economy.

"You have to ... be at the forefront of anything that's being developed,'' he says"


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Since when was diesel environmentally friendly?
Seems to me someone is confusing fuel economy with carbon/particulate emmission levels....

diggler

I caught a prius taxi yesterday and was having a yarn to the driver about the fuel consumption, he reckons he uses around 50% for a typical dayshift as apposed to a normal full sized taxi. $22 to $25 compared to $40 to $50 a day.

roguefan99

Hmm well I'll give Walkinshore his points in some way. He is right about the Biofuels arguement. A lot of food goes into making a small amount of biodiesel at the moment, which is why we need research into an alternative source of biofuel if we wish to go this route (plant chaff, or even green algae). I know people working on biofuel projects and they laugh when they see people complain about food price rises and then applaud biofuels because the biofuels are directly increasing the food prices.

As for hybrids, yea he is off on that, but it will be interesting to see what happens in 10 years when the batteries on these cars need replacing and the chemical waste problem that they will cause.

__________________
Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of pop tarts and pancake mix.

omega99

I drove a prius from dubbo to canberra average 7lt per 100Km. Where these vehicles come into there own is heavy crawling traffic.

The battery tends to run down pretty quick & anything over about 30km the petrol engine cut in!!
What we need it nuclear fission powered electric cars or they need to improve either solar panels or the speed at which you can charge batteries.

ssrattus

For the Prius, Toyota say the batteries last for the life of the car.... can that be re-read as when the batteries are stuffed the life of the Prius is over?

SystemRat

Walkinshaw is correct the Prius is great at low speed around town but take it on the freeway at high speed and its fuel economy goes down the tubes. The electric motor can’t sustain high speed road use leaving a small petrol motor to push the car complete with batteries and electric motor forward.

Here’s Top Gears take on it

YouTube - Top Gear-Toyota Prius Hybrid

And for no reason other than I found it when looking for the above there is this.

YouTube - Toyota Prius destruction with guns

z80

I can make a Prius run without petrol on any major highway.


Just have the odd kilometre of road surface as a buss bar charging the batteries every so often....like the dodgem cars at Luna Park....
Especially in uphill sections.....

It can't be that difficult eh?


Or at major intersections...


Or what about a pit lane every so often just for Prius/electric cars?

circuit

I wonder how much of that is due to the weight of the smaller Prius ?
Is that compared to a car running petrol or gas?

Circuit

Godzilla

I think he was protecting his own interests.

A petrol engine is less efficent in a hybrid setup on its own because of the extra weight being lugged along.
Combined with the battery and electric motor setup in city stop go driving its far more efficent than petrol on its own.

I belive the next fronteer in home hotrodding will be young men building electric drag cars.
The torque produced is astonishing.

The day will come and its not far away.

machine

Why fart around, just cut out the transition/hybrid era and go straight to developing electric cars.

I think mitsubishi is going directly to electric powered cars.

z80

what makes you say that mate?

machine

Hi z80

Saw/read an article on the news about 2 weeks ago.

Just a couple of articles I had a quick read of.

Mitsubishi unveils electric car for 2010 - Green Machines - MSNBC.com

Mitsubishi's Electric Car Achieves 160km Cruising Range -- Tech-On!

Mitsubishi Unveils All-Electric Car With Solar Roof : TreeHugger

Mitsubishi R&D seems to be making progress.

Also see

YouTube - Mitsubishi i MiEV Sport - Tokyo Motor Show 2007 : DigInfo

z80

thanks....looks interesting.

roscored1000

If hybrids are so great for the environment then how come none of them have a solar panel or panels on them, also as far as i know none have a power point to recharge the battery overnight. Why do none on the market so far have a diesel or LPG engine, some are coming I know, but why push a Prius with a petrol engine.
I have heard that the real cost of the hybrid is being heavily subsidised and that just means we are being conned on the true environmental effects and conned about the true efficiency of these vehicles.

nerd1

I think they are building the prius with power point plugin and solar panels for them.

trash

Errr ... as much as I like the idea of a nuclear powered motorcycle, reality is much much much less exciting than fantasy.

Solar, well that's a seperate issue from that of batteries.

Solar panels can't produce more than the amount of energy that falls onto them. This is currently about 10-15% with off the shelf panels. The maximum energy will be about 1kW^-2m. Give that certain cars are anything from 70-300hp, that's a lot of solar panels even for a very small car.

Batteries have a whole lot of issues.
1>The charging speed
2>The charge capacity
3>The charge holding time
4>The discharge speed
5>The weight
6>The cost of construction
7>The lifespan

Then there's
7>Bullshit green issues like lead pollution.
8>saftey issues like caustic chemicals.

Shit... it just makes burning petrol look sooo much simpler

There are a couple of sollutions. In the case of buses, trolley buses are ideal electric vehicles. Most Australian cities used to have them, Wellington NZ still does. I've also ridden on the Simferopol to Yalta trolleybus in the Crimea. The world's longest trolleybus route. They use only Czeckslovakian trolleybuses because now other trolleybus can handle the climbs or the distance.

Australian Trolleybuses

The Sydney Tramway Museum: Links to Other Tramway Web Sites
Sydney trolleybus survivor

One solution to electric cars may be a hot swap in a similar way that is done with LPG bottles.
The electric car drives into a recharge station, the battery bank is rolled out the vehicle and swapped in a minute or so with a new charged battery minus cash from the driver's pocket.

The advantage of this is that it's quick, and the batteries can be maintained and charged by service personell. The batteries may also be charged at home.
One dis/advantage is that all battery banks would probably need to be the same size for all vehicles, or at least multiple banks of smaller cells.

What would be interesting if electric cars could automatically put themselves on and off overhead wires while a vehicle was in motion. Rather than having a mesh of wires like the tram or trolleybus networks, only artirial routes would have an electric lane.

You could imagine something like the F3 freeway out of Sydney. Commuting to and from the central coast, an electric vehicle would be rooted by the mooney mooney bridge. But if overhead wires ran from Hexam to Hornsby, it would extend the range of electric vehicles by hundreds of kilometres.
A car would not even need to be fully charged, just enough to get it onto the freeway and under the wires. The car hooks up and recharges while it's driving. At the urban end of a run, the pentograph retracts and the vehicle runs on battery.

Sure, everybody is getting electricity for free on the wires, but nothing a tollgate couldn't fix or a meter in the car couldn't fix.
The system is completely feasible, the question is how do you idiot proof the pentograph ? It should be fully automatic or at the very most, prompted by the driver.
The worst case is a high speed derail. The vehicle detects a loss of power, retracts the pentrograph (which is a dual wire system). It then either removes the vehicle from the overhead and attempts to reconnect the car either at high speed or lower speed (it can't stop mid freeway) or it will only reconnect at onramps where a special overhead configuration collects the pentrograph arms and puts them on the wire like a hornby train set.

Morris Iemma and his metro idea. I've been screaming this for 20 years and still the NSW Labor party can't build a simple network cheaply and quickly.
They're going to fvck it up like our current slow expensive heavy rail network.

Maybe one day I'll get lucky and a consulting firm or a parlimentry secretary will read some of my hairbrained ideas and offer me a job.

omega99

trash,

what about sending power through the air, wasn't faraday, tesla or one of those inventor types working trying to do that?? Wifi electricity - have to make sure your now far from a tower or like the bloody mobiles your out of power!!!