234 comments on The energy efficiency of cars
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234 comments on The energy efficiency of cars
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As a new Prius owner living in Vermont I was reminded the other minus 20deg F day of an overlooked ( by me ) fact about batteries: the AH storage capacity goes down drastically as a function of temperature. At -20C we can use only ~50% of the battery's design capacity of Ampere-Hours of storage ..... oops.... there goes the useful range per charge, which OBTW seems to be one of the most difficult design criteria to satisfy.
Put the model in the pix in furs and maybe some muckluks, for a more-to-the-point illustration of a practical vehicle.
http://www.bdbatteries.com/peukert.php
Electric battery warmers work down to at least -40, draw about 20 watts, available at Canadian Tire stores
doesn't help much when you're on the road at -35F. duh.
or are you going to run it off the battery itself?
on a Prius there's no problem starting on a cold morning ..... it's just that the hybrid-system-battery is just another chemical reaction and decreases capacity with decreasing temp.
In a HEV like the Prius, the battery pack can be kept inside and warmed up as the vehicle warms up, so any concerns about temperature w/r/t NiMH capacity aren't an issue. In the case of a PHEV or EV, the manufacturer would almost certainly use a Lithium based chemistry since those are the cheapest per kWh stored right now given a PHEV/EV app, and have very good low temperature performance.
That depends on chemistry. In your case, the Prius uses NiMH batteries, so a link on the relationship between temperature and capacity for different kinds of lead acid chemistries probably isn't the best place to look, at least in terms of current tech. Anyone can put together their own lead acid EV, but that's probably not what we're going to see in the future outside of the lead acid/capacitor combo, maybe...