Quote:
Originally Posted by gassless
I was trying to approach the sleeper in a different manner. I was thinking that if a person looks at the market at the older Chev Volts and the Toyota Prius (after they get close to 100k miles) they have no warranty and have a low price because the batteries are too expensive to replace. Can they be made to literally remove the extra weight of the hybrid system and use the basic car and use it as a hypermiller . the bad thing is the automatic transmission. Can this be a practical cheep try at it?
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Used hybrids have been holding their value well. Honda is the exception in that they pushed the NiMH too far in their early Civic hybrids. Also with the first Insight, but that car has an all aluminum frame, low cd, and the first North American hybrid, so it may hold its value for other reasons.
Honda's with IMA could be driven without the batteries. Some of the first ones even have a manual transmission. They will just lose performance and become slower off the line and lose their top fuel efficiency limits. I don't see the point of doing so with the Civic, because you could just get a regular Civic, and get close to what is possible from the efficient hybrid engine. The original Insight be worthwhile to do because it is lightweight and has a very low air drag. It has a 0 to 60 in excess of 13secs with the battery to help though, but someone has stuck a turbo(from a Chevy Sprint IIRC) on its 3 cylinder.
The Toyota and Ford systems are intergrated with the transmissions. If you could remove the motors, you would be left with what is essentially a one speed manual. So any change to pure ICE would mean a new transmission. More Prii have been converted to pure EVs.
The Volt is pretty much like the Toyotas. Just getting a Cruze would likely be cheaper.
Battery prices have dropped since these cars came out, and if you have any skill with a multi-meter, finding the problem cells on a bad pack is no more difficult than hauling the 100lbs pack out of the car. One guy recently fixed a 'dead' pack in a Camry hybrid by just cleaning the bus bars.
The batteries will last the life of the car. Barring a defective part, expect them to last at least to 150k miles. There are plenty of Prii with 300k on the original pack. There also third parties already offering reconditioned packs, or to fix the one in the car for way less than what a dealer will charge to replace the pack. Which itself may be reconditioned.
The engines are efficient. In non-plugins, gasoline is still the sole source of energy. ICE cars have oversized engines to provide power for passing and hill climbing. Most of the time that engine is under light load, where it is less efficient, though. Hybrids, and to a lesser extent turbos, get better fuel economy by down sizing the ICE to a size which will be running efficiently for the majority of its time. Many go a little further by using a Atkinson cycle. It is more efficient than the Otto one, but produces less power.
The motors and battery provide power for the rarer times when it is needed for heavy acceleration and loads. The battery gets recharged when less power is needed to move the car than produced by the engine in its 'sweet' spot. Recapturing energy from braking is just icing on the cake.
In short hybrids hold their value too well for this to likely be worthwhile economically. Those where the money balance is better will most likely just end up with a slower version of the non-hybrid. In the others, just putting a smaller engine into a regular car will net the same results for less money.
Now, if you have the skills for the repair, finding a hybrid with a dead pack may be a deal.
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