A Stock Toyota Prius Just Drove Across America Averaging 93 MPG, Setting A Guinness World Record
TheAutopian.com | Thomas Hundal | September 12, 2024
Hypermilers are a different breed. Like racing drivers, they view elevation changes, acceleration and braking zones with millimetric precision, but instead of clipping apexes and shaving off milliseconds, they’re all about boosting cruising range and dropping fuel consumption. Case in point: One hypermiler just set a new coast-to-coast MPG Guinness World Record from behind the wheel of a current Toyota Prius, clocking an average fuel consumption of 93.158 mpg.
So, who gets 93.158 mpg out of a stock fifth-generation Toyota Prius, and how does one possibly maintain that average across an entire continent? That would be Wayne Gerdes, the man who invented the term “hypermiling” back in 2004. (OP: BS. The term existed back in the late 1980's when my own Acura Integra consistently got >~39MPG when hypermiling). His steed of choice was a new Prius with 10,000 miles on the clock, and it was the LE trim which meant it got the low rolling resistance 17-inch wheels, a big deal for efficiency over the larger rollers on the XLE.
Gerdes kicked things off in Los Angeles with a drive to Lakewood, Calif., then from Lakewood to Flagstaff, Ariz. From there, Gerdes went by way of Fort Sumner, N.M., to Amarillo, Texas, where he finally had to stop for fuel. By this point, Gerdes had managed a cumulative 106.334 mpg, but a leg to Russell, Ark. slashed that figure to 98.023 mpg.
Fuel economy further fell on the leg to Knoxville, Tenn. with a cumulative average of 94.010 mpg, but the trip from Knoxville up to Winston-Salem, N.C., reverse course with a cumulative average of 94.993 mpg. Even with the last leg up to New York City Hall followed by a fuel stop in New Jersey, the record was as good as achieved with a total trip average of 93.158 mpg across 3,211.7 miles of America. As for further specifics of methodology, well, here’s what Gerdes said in a statement:..more
https://www.theautopian.com/a-prius-just-drove-across-america-averaging-93-158-mpg-setting-a-guinness-world-record/
Toyota's 1- 6 - 90 Rule (clueless people ridicule them for not going all in on risky fire-prone Li-Ion batteries)
Toyota has done more for reduction of Auto GHG than any other car company in the world. But there's no more respect for anyone or anything left. Enjoy the new world.
= new reply since forum marked as read
If charging to the recommended 80% level, more like 10 hours.
https://www.greenlancer.com/post/charging-a-phev
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-models/plug-in-hybrids/plug-in-hybrids-require-special-home-wiring.htm
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-models/plug-in-hybrids/how-to-charge-plug-in-hybrid-vehicle.htm
And if you do run out of your grid-supplied battery, your internal combustion engine will charge it, and supposedly even then the whole thing is more efficient doing that then a regular ICE or something like that. As I understand it --
The Volt comes with two chargers that you can use on home electric current. The smaller, 120-volt charger is designed to be portable and will plug into a standard electric outlet. It's switchable between an 8-amp recharge and a 12-amp recharge, depending on what your system will bear. If the 12-amp recharge sets off the circuit breaker, just drop the charge to 8 amps. It'll take longer to charge (see the next page of this article for details), but you'll have fewer problems.
At present plug-in hybrid vehicles aren't ideal for long trips. If you can't plug in frequently, you'll be using the internal combustion engine most of the time. Yet for a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt, this is still more cost effective than an ordinary internal combustion engine alone, as we'll see later in this article. ((unfortunately they don't -- what follows as far as cost numbers is assuming ALL the energy for the PHEV comes from the grid ... well the exception is that they give is a Chevy Volt running 100 miles, which is 60 miles more than the battery's capacity, "will run on $2.75 worth of electricity" -- the first 40 miles are on electricity, yes, but the remaining 60 miles are on gasoline which apparently runs the ICE that turns the generator to produce electricity which powers the electric motor that thruns the wheel, I am so confused, but whatever, that $2.75 is lot cheaper than the gasoline cost for an ICE car travelling 100 miles -Progree)) -- Next, however, we'll look at how long it will take to recharge a plug-in hybrid.
A couple of pages back we mentioned that the Chevy Volt will come with two different chargers, a 120-volt portable charger that runs off a typical household electric outlet and a 240-volt charger that will be hardwired into your home's electrical system. The 240-volt charger provides the fastest charge. General Motors estimates that a full recharge with the 240-volt charger will take about three hours. The 120-volt charger will take six hours for a full charge if set at 12 volts and eight hours if set at 8 volts. ((talking about the Chevy Volt I'm pretty sure -Progree)) How will you know when the charging is complete? An indicator on the dashboard will tell you when the battery is at full charge, so you can be sure you have a full 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) worth of power in your car before you head off to work in the morning. The Hymotion plug-in modification for the Prius is similarly designed for an overnight charge
... the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come up with a new measurement called the Petroleum-Equivalent Fuel Economy Calculation or PEF. It allows you to compare the fuel economy of a hybrid or electric vehicle with a car that runs on a gas engine. The calculations that go into the PEF are complicated (you can read about them on the EPA Web site http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/2000/June/Day-12/i14446.htm ), but in practice all you need to do is to compare the PEF with the normal EPA fuel-efficiency figures to see how much electric "fuel" your hybrid needs to go a given number of miles. For instance, the PEF for the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid is 230 miles per gallon (97.8 kilometers per liter), making it the first production car with a three-digit EPA rating [source: Valdes-Dapena]. Of course, it's not actually going to be using gallons of gas except when the 40-mile (64.4-kilometer) battery range is exceeded, but this gives you a rough idea of how its fuel efficiency compares with other cars that do use gasoline.
((in this paragraph they never tell you what cents per KWH or $ per gallon they are using, but maybe I can figure it out I think by working backwards and from info in previous paragraphs. What I really want to know is the KWH needed and the gallons of gas needed, but oh well -Progree)) Perhaps a better way of looking at this is that General Motors estimates that it will cost 80 cents to give the Volt a full 40-mile (64.4-kilometer) charge using house current ((so 80 cents for 40 miles means $2.00 for 100 miles if it all hypothetically came from the grid, i.e. kept charging it whenever the battery needed it -Progree)). Hymotion estimates that its plug-in for the Prius will cost even less, about 50 cents per 40-mile recharge.
Further, GM says the Volt will run 100 miles (160.9 kilometers) on $2.75 worth of electricity, or about 3 cents per mile. Obviously this is going to vary according to how much your local power company charges for electricity ((well tell us how damn many KWH it takes and we'll figure it out for our circumstances , and does any of this include gasoline being burned when driven beyone the battery ranges? --Progree)) and it'll vary according to whether you charge at peak hours or off-peak hours, but it's considerably cheaper than gasoline would cost for an equivalent distance.
Another figure offered by GM estimates that a Volt driven for 15,000 miles (24,140 kilometers) per year without ever exceeding the battery-only range would use $300 worth of electricity annually. By comparison, a car with an internal combustion engine that average 30 miles per gallon (12.8 kilometers per liter) would cost $1,500 annually for the same amount of driving.
I broke the above block into 3 paragraphs.
Sorry if this is too much, and not enough, at the same time
I'm unclear if for a PHEV, all the wheel-turning is electrically powered, with the electricity supplied from the battery, or when the battery runs out, the gasoline ICE engine turns a generator to supply the electricity.
As opposed to when the battery runs out, the ICE turns the wheels like in a conventional ICE car
I suppose I can spend a few minutes more reading the unexplored links in the above material or do more Google searches and it will tell me. Or not.
...but one would simply be relying on self deception.
A study of the carbon intensity of electric cars vs hybrid cars as a function of the grid on which they operate has been published.
Cleaning up while Changing Gears: The Role of Battery Design, Fossil Fuel Power Plants, and Vehicle Policy for Reducing Emissions in the Transition to Electric Vehicles Matthew Bruchon, Zihao Lance Chen, and Jeremy Michalek Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (8), 3787-3799
I covered the paper in this space: A paper addressing the idea that electric cars are "green."
There is no such thing as a "green" car - despite much delusional bull that the car CULTure can be sustainable - but that said:
A graphic from that paper:
The caption:
You see the red regions in the graph. This is low carbon and reliable electricity, not dependent on the weather at a time the weather has been vastly destabilized by the unrestricted brown and black regions promoted by antinukes. And let's be clear again, the "bait and switch" game is what is promoted by people claiming that hydrogen is "green" and batteries are "green." What they're selling is fossil fuels.
I am not innocent, as I am a participant in the car CULTure. This said, I do drive a hybrid car, a CAMRY, my second, as the first was destroyed in an accident when less than a year old. I routinely get, with judicious use of the cruise control, better than 60 mpg without using thermodynamically degraded electricity.
Last edited Sun Sep 15, 2024, 01:52 PM - Edit history (4)
that's better than 100% fossil fuel, as in the case of a hybrid or conventional ICE car. Something that promoters and owners of either might very well contemplate before they accuse others of being "fossil fuel salesmen". Sigh.
And there is some progress, and plans to reduce the grid's carbon intensity, but I'm not aware of any to reduce the carbon intensity of the gasoline that fuels conventional hybrids and ICE cars. I know that you don't think much of plans, given the "by 2030, by 2050" etc. and I can understand that. But nobody has plans for making gasoline net zero carbon that I know of
From: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143289137#post3
Edited to add: I'm aware that the increase in projected electricity consumption due to data centers and crypto-mining, and yes, electric vehicles and electric furnaces and water heaters etc. is likely going to end this small slow progress in reducing carbon emissions from the U.S. electricity sector, although I expect the CO2e/KWH will continue to improve /End Edit
More nuclear energy on the grid, will of course reduce the carbon intensity of the grid. But so far I'm not seeing it reducing the carbon intensity of hybrid and ICE car fuel that the fossil-fuel salespeople sell.
And I certainly don't think that any kind of car is "green". Or any source of power either.
I'm always impressed by your graphic of solar, wind, hydro resource utilization
Materials needed for different forms of power generation. Figure based on data from U.S. Department of Energy Quadrennial Energy Review 2015.
taken from this, that uses some of your other work:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219407847#post4
I'm not an "anti-nuke", by the way. Nor am I a "not-an-anti-nuke anti-nuke" either as you have characterized some others in past posts (or words to that effect). I was an electrical engineer in the nuclear Navy in the 1970's. And I'm impressed by your mortality posts of radiation deaths vs. air pollution deaths.
Edited to add I did look at your first link
I see that even if we managed to get electricity production greenhouse gas emissions down near zero, something that is decades off at best (or a hypothetical minimum case ), the various EV's are only marginally better than the ICEV and HEV (conventional ICE gasoline car and the conventional (i.e. non-plug-in) hybrid. Interesting.
Edited to add I wonder what the Dept of Energy's perspective is. Do they refute this? Have other data? Are bureaucrats in service of politicians? /End Edit
Myself I haven't had a car for 5 years, and manage with a lot of walking (need the exercise anyway), and occasional bus ride.
Another late late edit If I do get a car, it probably will be a conventional ICE, given that I would drive less than 2,000 miles a year, probably more like 1,000 miles. That would be greener (and cheaper) than the other options, since the various electric vehicles (and the conventional hybrid) have higher factory emissions (making the car and the batteries). I don't see in the graphic what they assume as far as annual miles driven, so that i can do some extrapolation to lower mileages of the gasoline production + vehicle use to match my situation.
