Toyota Has More Freedom
The car is great, looks like any other car, maybe the battery needs improvement but they have one that works, they could get the car out now, with the battery they have, and replace it later. I know it would be expensive but so is gasoline We need it now. Mike
You say "but they have one that works". No, No, that's exactly the problem. They used to have one that works but sold it to Chevron for something like $160 million. I'm sure with the sale of those patents they also signed an agreement to never use "Nickel metal anything" batteries in a vehicle. They probably also pledged to never market the EV1 again; especially that pesky 40-mile PHEV they showed at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show (why, that bad bad car would have reduced gasoline consumption 70% by now). Maybe they even got more than $160 million, heck is there any doubt how much profit it has made for the oil companies to have Cobasys sit on those patents and do practically nothing with them. Sometimes things ARE exactly as they seem.
Toyota on the other hand is growing into the plug-in hybrid in a rational evolutionary approach; as I'm sure GM would have done were they free to. The first Toyota plug-in prototypes are powered with NiMH (see
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/07/26/toyota_plug_in_hybrid_hits_the_road/ or Google search for yourself). But I certainly hope GM's gamble pays off. It would dig them out of the hole they made for themselves.
I have a friend who owns two 2000 Toyota Rav4 EVs. He and his wife have used them as their daily commuters for the past 4 years, and one has well over 100,000 miles on it with the original batteries. How long will it be before we KNOW that Lithium is that durable in deep discharge daily use?
So what is the real weight disadvantage for NiMH? Standard NiMH has 78Watt-hrs/kg, so a pack big enough to run the Volt is about 450lbs. I spoke with Andrew Ferrah recently but he wouldn't tell me the weight that the Volt pack is coming in at. With the thermal management and cooling systems they need I wouldn't doubt that it adds over 350lbs and is possibly heavier than NiMH would be. The EV1 had 1000lbs of batteries, but these gave it over a 130 mile range, so 400lbs is probably overestimating a bit. Don't know what the rolling resistance, weight and drag differences are.