There are several good animations of how the HSD works, some produced by PC members, but they are all schematic. Toyota now has a 3-D one at the Prius demo link on the new HSD mini-site. It shows a Prius starting up, accelerating, cruising, braking, and backing up. It requires a plug-in to view, which is available for both Win and Mac platforms and several browsers. The demo shows how the Prius uses power. It's a good explanation, but lots of things dear to the driving habits of many PC members, such as dead-banding and pulse-and-glide, are not addressed.
Just a heads-up - the link referenced above seems to be crashing my Firefox browser. Works fine through IE though.
The link didn't work in Firefox for me (just sat there), but also didn't crash the browser. worked fine in IE. I liked it, overall, but would have loved to have an illustration on the side showing what the planetary gear was doing at the same time.
Sorry the link crashes Firefox. It works fine in Safari after I downloaded and installed the plug-in. Before I installed the plug-in it just gave me a somewhat disorganized HTML page with a link to download the plug-in.
I tried with Minefield 3.0a1nightly (last nights build of Firefox beta), page works, but plug-in won't auto install. I downloaded the plug-in installer, installed fine into minefield's plug-in folder. Only problem is I can't see the left 1/3 of the plug-in, which is where all the good stuff happens.
Gee, I never realized that the 1NZ was a V-4 engine. . . Sorry, couldn't resist. Otherwise a nice animation. I've viewed that one directly from Toyota.com. I'm still looking for one that combines the Toyota view of the car in motion with the nice details members here have created showing how the PSD actually operates. For some reason (maybe why I'm not an engineer...), I still have trouble visualizing the transition from PSD to the drive wheels.
That's the long-standing problem with Toyota, they always try to shove this frequently dysfunctional scripting garbage down your throat any time you get anywhere near their web site. If enough people would unlame and send mail to [email protected] pointing out "sorry, I don't enable any of that due to very valid security concerns", maybe they might begin to get the idea. But that first requires that people actually care. . _H*
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ekpolk @ Oct 10 2006, 06:56 PM) [snapback]330886[/snapback]</div> What specifically is your request? I'd certainly try to provide it (update to my animations)... if you can describe what you'd like to see. Since MG2 (the big motor, depicted as the outer ring) is directly linked to the wheels, they move whenever it moves. So including that would not actually add anything.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(john1701a @ Oct 10 2006, 07:50 PM) [snapback]330917[/snapback]</div> John: Thanks for the help. I'm with you on this -- conceptually anyway. Where the gears clash in my head (bad pun -- sorry...) is how the rotation of the outer ring becomes the rotation of the drive shafts and wheels. Somehow, when I type the question, it sounds easy, but I still don't get that. Keep in mind that I do very well with tests dealing with abstract concepts, but perform miserably on anything related to spatial relationships, like those classic nightmarish unfolded box questions. . .
