Very funny, I'll admit I laughed.
But seriously, in a hybrid, the battery is simply used to store braking energy, it is not used as power source like batteries are in an electric car. The energy comes from the gasoline engine, the battery capacity only needs to be big enough to store a reserve.
vehicle retrofit on the Prius that REPLACES the existing Prius NiMH battery and Toyota battery control computer. They aren't selling it yet - for obvious reasons - no demand since all the Priuses are still under battery warranty. But their install keeps the gasoline engine, which means that for a Prius to be a candidate for this company, it really needs to have a shot battery that isn't under warranty, and a gasoline engine that is expected to last at least for the following decade, in order to cover the expected life of the replacement system
I think this is not a particularly valid approach - because Toyota's battery warranty is going to insure that by the time the battery comes off warranty, that the gasoline engine in the Prius will be shot.
A better approach I think is to gut the battery and engine and computer and all that garbage out of the vehicle, and install an even larger battery pack and charger and make it fully an electric vehicle. It would, of course, kill it's usefulness for long distance interstate drives of hundreds of miles, but it would be still very useful as an around-the-town vehicle.
The General Motors EV-1 program demonstrated that there IS a market for fully electric vehicles. Lots of people screamed when GM took back their EV1s. The problem with the GM initative is that the demand wasn't large enough for GM to make the EV1 profitably.
BUT, in a decade or so when there's lots of used Priuses that have shot batteries, not under warranty, and shot gasoline engines, why then the economics will be quite different.
There have been people doing electric cars for years - Flight Systems Inc. for example sold plans to convert a Chevy Chevette to full electric, using a 6 volt lead acid battery bank, back in 1982, that would go 30-40 miles on a single charge. A book "build your own electric vehicle" by Bob Bryant in 1994 did a 1993 Ford Ranger pickup conversion that would go 75Mph and got 60 miles to the charge that also used lead-acid batteries.
The only difference between these two more low-tech approaches and the higher-tech edrivesystems approach, is the edrivesystems approach uses lithion ion batteries, and a computer to manage power and charging, while the older designs used simpler electronics and lead-acid batteries. The higher-tech approach is more expensive and gets you a greater range, but the lower-tech approach could be done by anyone in their garage.
So yes, I do think that when the warranty ends on the traction battery in a hybrid, that there will be lots of choices other than to drop $5000 into a new traction battery, into a vehicle that probably has about 4 years of life left in it's gasoline engine.
Ted
