Cars with hybrid power plants promise unprecedented hitherto efficiency and excellent environmental performance. If you focus on brochures, it is impossible to not believe: the efficiency of a hybrid car is more than 30%, while a traditional car with a gasoline engine has about 16%, with a diesel one - up to 21% (when driving on a conditional city cycle). Almost twice as effective!
You can believe it. But with the caveat: engine power is spent not only on movement. In addition to auxiliary units like a power steering or generator, a lot of energy goes to heating or air conditioning. On a typical winter or hot summer day, they consume about the same amount as needed for uniform movement at a speed of 50 km / h. You can’t save any batteries … Let me remind you that the average operating cost of the Prius, which has undergone lengthy tests in the ZR, was 7.5 l / 100 km - this is 30% higher than in the Japanese urban cycle. The cold winter and Moscow traffic jams are to blame.
Toyota Prius II promises even lower fuel consumption and CO2 emissions - an average of 5 l / 100 km and 104 g / km. We have no doubt that in the test cycle she will confirm these indicators - another question is what will happen in real life. By the way, do you know how much her nickel hydride battery costs? For its price, you can buy a good second-hand subcompact for four to five years. Although, according to research by Toyota, the battery life is about 240 thousand km. True, here inappropriately you recall how much the batteries serve in a mobile phone or laptop …
Hybrids are well sold in the United States, but so far rather sluggish in Europe - despite the fact that residents of the Old World exorbitantly pay fuel against the Yankees. They simply prefer diesel cars, the advantages of which, I believe, are known to readers. And the leader in the sale of hybrids in the production program has a serious flaw - there are few modern diesel engines. And it will not increase soon - after all, the Europeans make the latest fuel equipment. And one more thing: a diesel engine is the most economical when driving uniformly, a hybrid power plant is in the urban cycle. Those who travel a lot do not roll their kilometers in city traffic jams … So, the success of hybrids is bloated? Not at all. Hybrid power plants are quite worthy of themselves, for example, in city buses, whose driving mode is simply ideal for a pair of “internal combustion engine - electric motor”. That's just the budget of not every city will be pulled by such expensive “toys”.