Comment on Australia: Undergrad develops cheap kit for hybrid electric vehicle conversion
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Conversion to a hybrid seems more complicated, not less.
They’re adding a bunch of weight to the rear wheels - I’m sure that’s going to effect things? How does it trade-off with the ICE smoothly? How much per model customization is needed?
It’s an interesting idea - but there are a lot of details being left out…
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Your goal should not be to buy a hybrid or to “upgrade” to a hybrid. At this point, anyone buying a new vehicle should either be sticking to ICE or going full BEV. Anything else is. generally, a waste of money and tradeoffs.
But the point of this is more to extend the life of existing vehicles. That beater Camry that you have been driving for ten years? For a couple grand you can help the environment and probably make that back in gas over a few years if you mostly drive city.
You definitely lose out. Your trunk space is likely to shrink considerably (since even a 100 km battery is going to have some heft) and your overall gas mileage likely will go down when in ICE mode because of the weight of everything. But, again, if you are mostly commuting to work with a lot of stop and go traffic, it is a good upgrade to consider.
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I drive an '07 ICE pickup. Would adding a battery / motors to it for the remaining 5ish years of its life really be worth the impact to the environment for those batteries just to save a bit of fuel over that time period?
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s for you to decide. But the environmental impact of batteries is drastically reduced if you actually recycle them and so forth.
As for cost effectiveness?
Quick google of a poorly documented site that looks “about right” says the average price of a gallon of gasoline was 7.079 Australian dollars and 4.459 USD, respectively. Normalizing, that is 4.54 and 4.459 USD. And it gets a lot higher in other countries, but those seem the two pertinent to this discussion
So doing a bit of math:
N city miles / X city Miles Per Gallon * 4.5 USD per gallon = Y dollars per retrofitSo get the price of the retrofit, your average city (stop and go) miles per gallon, and figure out if you are likely to travel that distance. Because the effectiveness of a hybrid drops drastically for extended highway (although 100 kilometers is a decent charge size), whereas they use trace amounts of gas during stop and go city driving.