ABG: VW admits diesel hybrids simply "dont make good business sense"

Of course it doesnt make financial sense now, but wait a few years and it will. Environmentally and socially (disregarding disbelievers) it makes sense.

Pretty sure Peugot is building a diesel hybrid, but I doubt it will ever make it to the US shores...

 

I can't see it being a big seller anywhere other than France. Peugeot are not known for their electrical reliability! So imagine them making a hybrid? ha ha ha ha you just wouldn't ever buy one!

Did you ever see the Peugeot 1007 [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_1007]Peugeot 1007 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] with electric sliding doors? Interesting idea for tight city parking places, but it was a Peugeot so now imagine loads of bad publicity of people getting stuck in and/or out of their car.

 

I think you gain little by going Diesel Electric hybrid. The cost outweighs the benefit since there is not much synergy between Diesel and Electric.

 

The problem with Peugeot's design is that their Hybrid4 system is an add-on (very basically it adds electric motors to the rear wheels while the ICE runs the front wheels) so that it does not remove any components the way the HSD does (no belt, no turbo, no shifting gear).
This means that you will not pay less in maintenance than with a regular diesel car and this is an important drawback in my book.
Plus, depolluting a diesel is becoming increasingly complex and I've seen supposedly clean diesels reject huge black clouds of particles (probably because of lack of maintenance).
France has almost 3/4 of its cars running on diesel (because diesel is less taxed than gas and costs 20 cts less per litre, around 75 cts less per gallon) and believe me, this is not the way to go, unless you can plug in and run on electricity around town and on diesel only on the highways.

 

Also, the efficiency of the gasoline "Atkinson" cycle is better than a conventional gasoline engine, so the diesel advantage is smaller than it would be when compared to a gasoline engine used on a non-hybrid car.

 

This study showed that Atkinson cycle gas engine is more efficient than Diesel engine.

E-CVT is also 4% more efficient than a mechanical CVT used in Honda IMA.

 

How does this work? First, GM says hybrids don't make good business sense ... along with saying the Prius is a P.R. stunt. A few years later they go bankrupt ... even as their dinosar P.R. people are trying to push hummers and suburbans on everyone as cool and sexy and necessary. Now GM is still trying to play catchup with their hybrid program - and trying to get the Volt to market.

So, is this part of the VW playbook too? Good luck with the, "doesn't make good sense" logic.



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Diesel-electrics seem to work for large engines like those found on railway locomotives. But of course, they're not made by Peugeot. Or Lucas. (Do you know why Britons drink warm beer? They have Lucas refrigerators!)

 

Thanks for the link to the paper! I've saved that one.:rockon:

No surprise on the eCVT - CVT efficiency differences. Conventional CVTs have some efficiency issues.

 

Try not to paint with such a broad brush.

VW isn't killing hybrid or diesel plans. They experimented with an light expensive underpowered audi before. Spending the money on lightweight materials does not target the underpowered prefered buyers, and diesel with its NOx does not target the greenest buyers. Removing the added cost of diesel could provide a higher powered gas engine and plug in capability. The up really doesn't have much of a target market, but then again bmw made the activehybrid 6 so stranger things have happened.

 

They are a completely different animal. In a diesel electric locomotive, the electric only serves as a transmission and and extra braking capacity. There is no way to store energy so they aren't hybrids, they are much simpler.
Diesel Electric Locomotive | Engineering Expert Witness Blog
There are a few oddball diesel electric locomotives that can also use outside electrical power from overhead lines and feed power back into the grid. Those would technically by hybrids.

The reason diesel hybrids don't make sense for cars is that you can get near diesel efficiency with an Atkinson cycle engine (like most hybrids already have) for much less money and emissions system complication and a bit less weight.

 

"Hybrid" doesn't imply energy storage. It only implies the merger of two. Diesel-electric locomotives are hybrids in every sense of the word. More specifically, they are serial hybrids, much like the Volt.

The newest diesel-electric locomotives feature battery storage for regenerative braking, making them very similar to what we use in cars.

Tom

 

Hi All,

I wonder if it takes a 2 or 3 cylinder Diesel (with 70 hp or so) in the Prius sized hybrid for this to work?

Now when a Car company says "makes finacial sense", they are really saying " can we sell enough to get economy of scale" .

Since, there are few if any 2 cylinder turbo diesels ,and a turbo that small has poorer efficiency, where are they going to get enough comonality to keep the parts costs down?

In the Prius, they used the Echo engine parts for Gen II, and the Matrix/Corolla engine parts for the Gen III. In both cases they needed much larger displacement for the 70 or so HP, due to the low reving Atkinson/Miller air-flow situation.

 

Then regular cars with automatic transmissions are hybrid, ICE-hydraulic because of their hydraulic torque converter.

Well, some progress. Which production locomotives use batteries for propulsion?

 

The torque converter is not a prime mover. As such, it only counts as a transmission component and in no way can be considered a hybrid drive system.

Tom

 

Until you have a means of storing energy to be reused by the electric motor, a generator-motor combo are also no more than transmission components.