Hollywood_North GT

I wonder if the Blue Oval is secretly working on something, just as Chrysler has apparently been doing for the past year.

With GM and Chrysler both jumping in, can Ford be far behind...?

stangfoeva

I was thinking that earlier when I saw the autoblog article. But I think the better question is SHOULD Ford be following suit and developing an EV

Moosetang

Volt's a PHEV, not an EV. And for the record, Ford's been testing a 120mpg PHEV for awhile now:
http://www.gizmag.com/ford-testing-1...explorer/8719/

Ford HAD an EV program, but they bailed out of Th!nk when it became a money pit and they needed cash elsewhere.

stangfoeva

Well there's our answer, thanks Moosetang

Evil_Capri

Going to move to 'Other Fords', as it seems topic relates specifically to Ford's EV program . . . or lack thereof.

codeman94

mmm...well...It seems I posted the same thing but didnt put a spin on it....do what must be done mods..

Evil_Capri

What do you mean? Links?

N/M I found it codeman94 . . .

To me it seems Hollywood's thread was directed at FMC and thus (hopefully) discussions will take course. Yours seems more directed at the actually Dodge's vehicles. Doesn't matter to me either way . . . I am flexible to leave, combine, etc. either threads.

Vermillion06

Ford's been there, done that 10 years ago:

Ford Ranger EV

05fordgt

I just read in Automotive News this week, and one of the reporters did an article (more like an OpEd), on the Volt. He was interviewing a head engineer and that guy let slip that the Volt's engine DOES NOT recharge the battery. Only plugging it in, will do this. A bad design IMO. When the battery drains, they become paperweights! And for $40,000 (the estimate what the car will cost), it will take YEARS and YEARS of driving to get back the savings over a normal gas motor.

Knight

Yes, this is already known. I think the problem with a plug in hybrid is it will never drain with it constantly charging and it will keep using your gasoline to charge rather then your electric outlet. i dunno, and adding that would also further increase the cost of the car.

and its not a paper weight, it still has a gas engine to take over afterward to get to a outlet.

StillenMustang07

Actually, I dont think Ford needs to do the electric vehicle at this point. I would MUCH prefer they bring the diesel Fiesta (65 MPG) to the United States.

Hollywood_North GT

Hang on - GM's press clearly states that the ICE in the car is used to recharge the battery ONLY and does not drive the wheels.

So what's going on here?

Hollywood_North GT

I guess I would employ a different colloquialism: That was then, this is now.

mustang_sallad

There's a bit of confusion going on here.... The engine does not power the wheels in the volt, all it does is keep the battery charged. However, the engine will not recharge the battery back to 100% SOC. Instead, the car goes into charge sustaining mode, meaning that the engine will maintain the batteries around 40-60%. In other words, the engine is sized to approximately match the AVERAGE power requirement of driving. So the SOC will go down a bit during acceleration, and then climb back up when your travelling slowly or decelerating. They could have sized the engine larger so that it's output would be greater than the average driving requirements, thus allowing the SOC to climb back up, but there wouldn't be any point to that, why would you let the SOC go down in the first place then? The idea here is that you use as little gas as possible, and you drive as much as possible on electricity from the grid. If you get back to your house at the end of the drive, and your engine has already recharged your battery to 100%, then that was a waste of fuel, because you're home now and you could have recharged the battery much more cheaply through the plug.

Besides, when you get in to "charge sustaining" mode (40-60%), the batteries aren't at all dead weight, rather they give the car much better performance. Since the engine is so small, it would never be able to give any decent acceleration. But thanks to the batteries, the engine is able to work constantly at it's ideal power level, storing extra power in the batteries whenever you're not requesting it, and then releasing that power (discharging the batteries faster than the engine's able to output the power) through the electric motor when you accelerate.
This compares to running a large engine that is able to handle your peak demands on its own, but spends most of its time running at low power, (and definitely not at its most efficient operating point). The batteries allow the engine to run constantly at an optimized speed and power, while the electric drivetrain chops off all of those peak demands.

The main point of this vehicle though, is that if, like most people, you drive less than 40 miles a day, you won't even need the engine to start up at all. Gradually, as new models come out with better and better batteries, the all-electric range might be good enough to convince enough people to buy a car with out that gas-powered range extender.


As for Ford... They came out with the Airstream at the same auto show as the original volt concept, but that thing didn't get nearly as much attention, even though it was a series hybrid, albeit with a fuel cell instead of a gas engine. Lets face it, the Airstream wasn't exactly the same kind of real-world proposition as the Volt. A few months later though, Ford showed off the Hy-series Edge with the same powerplant as the Airstream. Still though... I wish they had put out a gas powered or even diesel powered series hybrid with more ambitious real-world production goals (as in sooner than 5 years!). This highlights another sweet aspect of the series hybrid set-up: you can use whatever you want as your range extender.
These guys, for example, make a series hybrid bus that's already in use in England, with a gas turbine for the range extender!
http://www.designlineinternational.c...trichybrid.cfm

Knight

Thanks for clearing that up, I guess i didn't understand the engine didn't power the wheels.

mustang_sallad

i find in general GM's doing a really bad job of explaining how this car works to the general public. Bob Lutz on the Colbert Report made it sound like a pretty crappy car to buy. I like what Chrysler's doing though... one pure EV and two series hybrids.

by the way, here's my series hybrid:

Eights

Overall, I think the best approach is high-mileage gasoline-powered vehicles for now...

High-performance batteries are megabucks--whether you use lots of small ones or fewer large ones.

Hybrids add complexity without greatly improving mileage.

Plug-ins merely transfer your billfold decimation from the oil companies to the electric utility companies.

Diesels? Who wants to pay an extra $.40--$.50 per gallon, and that's without the extra $$$ it will cost for the high-grade low-sulphur diesel that's used in Europe.

E85? Without subsidies, E85 costs more than regular gasoline. And identical performance from E85 that you get from gasoline requires burning a lot more of it per hour since its calorie content is so low. I'm sure you can improve E85 miles-per-gallon by driving slowly, but you can improve gasoline miles-per-gallon by driving slowly, too--and maybe save more gasoline than you could save E85. Now, it might be possible to design engines specifically for E85 (and I ain't talkin' modifying some gasoline internal-combustion engine to burn E85) that are more competitive mileage-wise with internal-combustion gasoline engines--but I'm sure it's possible to build non-internal-combustion gasoline engines that would improve the mileage obtained from gasoline, too.

I don't know enough about natural gas and methane to offer any suggestions--conversions of gasoline engines to run on natural gas are costly, but might not be if the vehicles & engines were designed to run solely on natural gas to begin with. Methane? It comes from organic decay, but there may be cheap natural sources of methane that can be tapped. Or it may be something that can be synthesized from non-methane compounds (with our luck, you can only synthesize a gallon of methane from six gallons of petroleum)

For better or for worse, gasoline seems to still be the most viable automotive fuel even at the current prices. More efficient use of it probably means (a) lower powered engines and (b) smaller vehicles. Vehicles may become so basic and so sterile in the name of fuel economy that mass transit finally catches on in North America. Airlines may become extinct, too, once flying becomes so costly that inter-regional flying (say, from the US Northeast to the US Midwest) is only available a few days a month and then only by charter companies who won't fly unless 85 percent or more of the seats on the flight have been sold. Commercial passenger rail service may flourish, but the rail services will have to be immensely more passenger-friendly and efficient than AmTrak.
I gotta quit--I can't stand to prognosticate that Pontiac's third generation GTO will have a mind-boggling 65 cubic-inch-displacement three-cylinder engine in a vehicle as exciting (and as roomy) as a phone booth with supermarket cart caster wheels...

Greg "" Ates

Moosetang

Alot of the reason the Volt drowned out Airstream was because it looked like a hot rod, instread of the Prius it became. I wonder which concept would have gotten more press if the Concept Volt had looked like the Production Volt.

mustang_sallad

very true, hopefully this will change over the next decade or so.
Parallel/Series hybrids like the Prius and Escape are pretty complex. Getting the engine and motors to mesh together is pretty tough. A pure series hybrid though (like the Volt or HySeries Edge) is relatively simple. It's just an electric vehicle (dead simple) plus a generator (also very simple). No fancy transmissions required.

No matter which way you look at it, driving your car on electricity is more energy efficient, pollutes less, and costs less, even if your electricity is relatively expensive. Power plants, even the dirty ones, are much more efficient at converting energy than the equivalent multitude of IC engines, revving up and down in less than ideal conditions. And that's before you factor in cheap renewable electricity which exists in some places, and will hopefully become more widely available.

Overall though, I agree with a lot of what you say. The cost of batteries, and the fact that it'll take a while for the electric grid to grow and grow renewably means that we will and should rely on improved gas engines for quite a while. That's no reason at all though against automakers doing whatever they can now to develop plug-in vehicles. These will take off, especially for commuting purposes.