From the July 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the monthly publication of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (which in its 2004
International Technology Forecast, chose the DaimlerChrysler Sprinter PHEV
as Category Winner in Electric Power-- see
http://www.calcars.org/kudos.html for links)

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/jul05/departments/0705ncar.html
is only for subscribers.

Find the 1.2MB PDF at http://www.calcars.org/takethiscarandplugit.pdf

Take This Car And PLUG IT
Eager hybrid owners can't wait to connect their cars to the power grid
By WILLIE D. JONES

A funny thing has happened on what U.S. policy makers thought was going
to be the high road to a hydrogen economy. Initiatives aimed at putting
hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars on the road by 2020‹visualized by
President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address as the
centerpiece of his plans to wean the country from fossil fuels‹are taking
longer than promised. At the time of the speech, hybrid-electric cars,
which offer higher fuel efficiency than regular cars because of electric
motors that help drive the wheels, were seen in the United States as
but a minor detour or way station en route to a world of hydrogen fuel cells.

But they suddenly are looking like the main way to go, or even maybe the
ultimate destination. Models produced by companies such as Toyota Motor
Corp., in Toyota City, Japan, and Honda Motor Co., in Tokyo, are flying
out of dealer showrooms. Among those who have been able to purchase
hybrids (usually after a two- to six-month wait) are some early
adopters‹like a group of physics professors at Harvard University,
in Cambridge, Mass.‹who have made tinkering with hybrids their primary
extracurricular activity.

Now, a derivative of hybrids that will improve fuel economy even more by
maximizing the use of the electric motor is poised to make what is already
an undeniably attractive concept downright irresistible. Some of the most
eager owners of the Prius, the world's most popular hybrid, have been
hacking the cars, swapping their 1.3-kilowatthour battery packs for bigger
ones with capacities as large as 9 kWh.

The modifications also include the addition of plugs so the new, bigger
battery packs can be recharged from wall outlets. The resulting machines,
referred to as plug-in hybrids, can be propelled exclusively by their
electric motors for, in some cases, more than 30 kilometers without their
gasoline engines ever turning on. The factory-built Prius can run on
electricity only, but for just a kilometer or two.

This group of hackers and other technologists say that in a few years, we
could have a car that, after its batteries are topped up overnight via a
wall socket, could handle a daily commute using only electrons for
fuel‹unlike the hybrids on the market now, which still derive all their
power from gasoline [see box, "Stretching the Hybrid's Electric
Capabilities," and illustration, "Charging"].

Dramatizing the potential of the plug-in during the Tour de Sol race from
13 to 16 May in Schenectady and Albany, N.Y., a modified Prius equipped
with a fully charged 9-kWh lithium-ion battery pack achieved 2.31 liters
per 100 km (102 miles per gallon) on a 240-km course. It is representative
of the modified hybrids that clean-car promoters and hobbyists have been
building, partly for fun, partly to show how wide adoption of plug-ins
could lead to dramatically lower gasoline consumption and oil imports.

Because of that promise, a strange-bedfellow alliance of environmentalists
and security hawks has emerged. They are united by a conviction that the
hybrid‹not the futuristic fuel cell-driven hydrogen vehicle favored by the
Bush administration in its FreedomCar program and other initiatives‹is the
way to cut both noxious emissions and oil dependence right now.

In a manifesto issued last fall in the form of a letter to the U.S.
public and then again last March as an open letter to President Bush, a
group representing foreign policy intellectuals and advocates of clean
energy called for the "technological transformation of the transportation
sector through what might be called 'fuel choice.'" The group supports
increased reliance on alternative fuels that are domestically produced,
such as gasohol and biomass, and on cars such as plug-in hybrids that can
draw energy from the grid.

"The United States should implement technologies that exist today and are
ready for widespread use," the group said in its core statement, "Set
America Free." In effect, the report pits a group that includes
influential Republicans against a Republican president on the question of
whether the country should continue to spend several hundred
million dollars a year to promote far-off hydrogen vehicles when it could
do more today to accelerate adoption of hybrid-electric and
alternative-fuel vehicles.


BOLD IN ITS VISION, the "Set America Free" report asserted that a plug-in
hybrid with a 100-km-range battery could cut fuel consumption by 85
percent and that conventional cars could be converted to run on
alternative fuels with the addition of control chips and fuel-line
modifications costing less than US $100. Combining advanced plug-in and
flexible-fuel features could ultimately yield a vehicle capable of going
100 km on a mere 0.47 liter of gasoline (500 mi/gal), the report claimed.

The environmentalists and security-minded luminaries behind the report,
such as Frank Gaffney, a senior defense official in Ronald Reagan's
administration, and R. James Woolsey, the hawkish director of the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency during President Bill Clinton's first
administration, urged Bush to commit $1 billion over the next five years
to the establishment of a domestic alternative fuels industry. In
addition, they said, the federal government should implement tax credits
and other incentives "to encourage rapid production and consumer purchase
of advanced vehicles like hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and flexible-fuel
vehicles" and to produce "more efficient vehicles across all models."

Researchers have shown that battery packs offering an effective electric
range of 32 km will yield up to a 50 PERCENT REDUCTION IN PETROLEUM CONSUMPTION

Eyeing the draft comprehensive energy bill, which once again is wending
its way through the U.S. Congress after being stalled for two years,
signers of the report are hoping that its points about hybrids and
alternative fuels will make it into the final version. "There's very
little doubt in my mind that these sorts of steps will be taken at some
point," says Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for
Security Policy in Washington, D.C. "The question is [do we take them]
after we have realized the very unpleasant national security crisis that
we're forecasting, or do we do it in advance of that."

Gaffney referred to what the report called a "perfect storm" of
circumstances requiring that "we effect over the next four years a
dramatic reduction in the quantities of oil imported from unstable and
hostile regions of the world." Other report signers include a Reagan
national security adviser and a Clinton chief of staff.

THE "SET AMERICA FREE" REPORT is based on two well-founded assumptions.
One is that the hydrogen economy cannot be realized for at least a couple
of decades, a supposition that emerges clearly from recent reports by
organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington,
D.C., and the American Physical Society, based in College Park, Md. Until
basic scientific breakthroughs occur, the reports concluded, the hydrogen
vision will do nothing to liberate the United States from energy
dependence or improve prospects for bringing down greenhouse gas emissions.

The other assumption is that U.S. consumers will be willing, even eager,
to pay a premium of a few thousand dollars to get cars that are more fuel
efficient and environmentally friendly. Sales of conventional
hybrid-electric cars jumped 81 percent in the United States last year and
are expected to double this year. These grid-independent (non-plug-in)
hybrids cut carbon emissions up to 25 percent and smog precursors by 15
percent. Their gains in fuel efficiency are even more impressive: the
Prius gets 4.7 L/100 km (50 mi/gal) on highways, compared with the
top-selling Toyota Camry's 7.1 L/100 km (33 mi/gal), and does better yet
in stop-and-go traffic, when the battery powers the car more of the time.

But make that car a plug-in, with a battery big enough to keep the
vehicle in its electric mode for all daily errands and commuting, and the
potential fuel savings become truly prodigious. Researchers have shown
that battery packs offering an effective all-electric range of 32 km will
yield up to a 50 percent reduction in gasoline consumption. And the hope
is that in a few years, when advanced batteries like lithium-ion become
cheap enough, there will be plug-ins with an effective electric range
approaching 100 km.

At that point, says Mark S. Duvall, manager of technology development for
transportation at the utility-sponsored Electric Power Research Institute
(EPRI), in Palo Alto, Calif., the car will run on electricity most of the
time. Such a vehicle will use only 10 to 15 percent as much liquid fuel as
a conventional vehicle.

Duvall points out that there's really not that much difference between
the systems in the conventional hybrid cars made by Toyota and Honda, or
in Ford's hybrid SUV, and those that would be needed to build a plug-in
hybrid. Yet the companies have not made plug-ins available and evidently
don't plan to do so anytime soon.

To take Toyota, the leader of the pack: "The corporation is committed to
hybrid technology, but so far [only for hybrids that] are grid
independent," according to David Hermance, executive engineer at the Toyota
Technical Center USA Inc., in Torrance, Calif. Why? Hermance says the
answer is simple: the cost of the larger battery packs is so high Toyota
could never make a profit selling them at a price consumers would be
willing to pay. And that's just one hurdle, says the Toyota engineer.

HERMANCE POINTS OUT not only that one Prius-hacking tinkerer paid $15 000
for his lithium-ion battery pack, but that the added batteries make the
car heavier‹by 68 kilograms in the case of lithium-ion and nearly twice
that for lead-acid. Thus, the car's fuel economy is actually worsened when
the gasoline engine is running. And there's also the matter of having to
replace the battery pack more often during the lifetime of the vehicle
because cycling a battery from fully charged to 20 percent charged wears
out even advanced batteries.

"So you have a higher up-front cost, a heavier vehicle that gets less
fuel economy with less performance, and the prospect of replacing the
battery during [the car's] life," he says.

But the individuals and groups like the nonprofit CalCars‹the California
Cars Initiative, based in Palo Alto‹that have installed bigger battery
packs and modified the electronics in the Prius have done so to show that
turning the car into a plug-in hybrid is realistic.

Ron Gremban, the lead technologist on CalCars' Prius+ project, concedes
that the group's modified Prius does not perform as well as it might and
costs more than it would if produced by Toyota. But "a company with the
resources of a Toyota, Honda, or General Motors could build a more
elegant, full-function version for far less money," he believes.

How much less is the subject of debate. Toyota's Hermance insists that,
barring a spectacular breakthrough in battery chemistry, the cost of
nickel-metal hydride batteries will remain around $1100/kWh for the
foreseeable future. He concedes that the Prius's nickel-metal hydride
battery packs have become significantly cheaper since Toyota began
producing the car for the Japanese market in late 1997‹power densities
have gone up, allowing the car to get the same acceleration with a smaller
battery pack. But energy density hasn't really improved, so energy storage
remains as expensive as ever.

On this point, CalCars' Gremban simply disagrees. He claims that achieving
higher power densities is much more expensive than maximizing energy
storage, and he observes that with larger battery packs storing much more
energy, the higher power densities are not needed. Accordingly,
production-volume nickel-metal hydride batteries might cost car companies
only on the order of $500/kWh‹much closer to the $300/kWh price target,
cited by EPRI's Duvall, that will make it practical for a car company to
offer a vehicle with a 100-km all-electric range.

In any case, plug-in development is already in gear. Duvall reports that
his organization and DaimlerChrysler AG, of Stuttgart, Germany, are
currently testing four Sprinter vans built at a Daimler facility in
Mannheim, Germany. If all goes according to plan, those four vehicles will
be the first plug-ins to be tested on U.S. roads.

"The project has really developed nicely," says Duvall‹so much so that
EPRI is negotiating the final details of an alliance of utility and fleet
customers to fund and test another 30 prototype vehicles that will hit
U.S. roads beginning next year. Asked when we'll see a Daimler plug-in in
dealer showrooms, Duvall said, "If [Daimler] makes a production decision
to make this vehicle, it would enter the market sometime in 2008 or 2009."

SIDEBAR:
Stretching the Hybrid's Electric Capabilities

Conventional U.S.-market Prius The motor and battery pack in the Toyota
Prius deliver bursts of power to the wheels, so that the gasoline engine
operates in its most efficient revolution-per-minute range. The 30-kilowatt
motor can accelerate the car from a dead stop to about 65 kilometers per
hour. At that point the engine kicks in (if it hasn't done so already) to
keep the motor from running faster than 6000 r/min and to prevent the 1.3
kilowatthour nickel-metal hydride battery pack from going below a state of
40 percent charged. Even if a driver putters along at 40 km/h or slower,
the car's computerized control system will activate the engine before this
threshold is reached. When running, the engine shunts 30 percent of its
torque back to the vehicle's 15-kW generator, which keeps the battery pack
topped up. Regenerative braking captures additional energy that otherwise
would be lost as heat.

Hacked U.S. Prius with Plug-in Capability Instead of having the motor
mainly deliver peak power to complement the gasoline engine, the aim is to
get as much distance as possible from the electric drive train without the
engine's kicking in. To keep the motor going for more than 30 km rather
than just the 1 or 2 km of the conventional Prius, the hacked versions
[like the Tour de Sol model, above] boast battery packs with storage
capacities on the order of 9 kWh. The battery pack can be charged directly
from an ordinary wall socket, with inverters rectifying the ac current. The
vehicle's control system is modified to prevent the transfer of propulsion
from motor to engine at the usual speed. But with this tinkering come
compromises: in its all-electric mode, when the motor and battery pack are
doing the heavy lifting, the control system will not let the vehicle reach
highway speeds.

European/Asian Prius With air pollution a strong factor in Asia and
Europe, the Prius version sold in those markets allows the driver to shut
off the engine and run just on electricity, though the car is not a
plug-in. The electric-only capability is desirable when creeping along in
the central districts of cities where internal combustion engines have
been banned or strictly limited at certain times. (Milan, Italy,
recently ordered cars, motorcycles, and trucks off the roads on alternate
days, and other cities, including London, have also taken steps to curtail
automotive traffic in their business districts.)

Press a button, and the Prius runs just on its battery at speeds less than
55 km/h for 1 or 2 km. The electric-only setting is not locked in, however.
At any speed greater than 55 km/h or with aggressive acceleration, the
vehicle's control system will override the driver's selection and start the
engine.

The button exists in U.S. models but is not connected to the car's control
system.

IMAGES (FROM TOP TO BOTTOM): VALENCE TECHNOLOGY; JI GUOQIANG/IMAGINECHINA;
TOYOTA



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Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/calcars-news
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/priusplus
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