[Closed] Today I drove the future.

bargain at £45k

Oh...you had to spoil it by mentioning the price!
Just been googling how much I can sell my childrens kidneys for.

More than I would ever pay for a car (new), but the technology is definately a step forwards from pure diesel/petrol engine.

Drove the new V40 too and was underwhelemed.

Is that the 0-60 in 6 seconds one?
That's impressive.

You feel disconnected when driving one which seems the way with car design now.

Yes 0-60 in 5.8 seconds in power mode apparently.
I drive a lot and drive many different cars. This was without doubt the best driving car I have driven (have not driven many sports cars). The hybrid characteristics are invisible and rhe braking is just the same as a normal car.
Best bit was the suspension, firm, but supple. Almost like it was adaptive.

Sold on the concept. Just the not small issue of price.

Just mentioned this to the wife and all she asked was "What colour was it?" 🙄

Not sure about the outside, but the passenger seat was brown by the time I brought it back. Hybrid cars should not be this much fun. A real Jeckyl and Hyde car.

the big lexus 4x4schoolrunmumhybrid is like that, amazing things hybrids

I saw a V60 and thought great, perfect car, then I saw the price - its the same money as a Porsche Cayman S. apprecaite it's a very different comparison but it puts it into perspective. Note alternatively you can have the "base" Cayman plus £8k for a van/estate car.

the same money as a Porsche Cayman S.

But then you'd have a Porsche Cayman... 🙁

Environmental impact of all those batteries isn't great....

I just took the V60 off my short-list as a replacement for my 320D.

The V60 is a lovely place to be and, ergonomically, as good as any car I've driven. The big let down is the boot space. Just not big enough.

Environmental impact of all those batteries isn't great....

[img] [/img]

It would be nice if they included the CO2 from the power station needed to provide the electricity to charge the thing when they publish 48 grammes of CO2 per km. Their claims are at best grossly misleading and IMO porky pies.

I think in future car batteries will be part of a smart grid. Storing up wind and solar energy when parked and then selling it back to the grid at the advert break for corronation street, then charging up again overnight.
All controlled from a smartphone so you can tell the car your travel plans to ensure it always has enough charge for your itinery.

My brother just bought an ex demo Chevvy volt as his latest toy

CHB: http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059980248 BMW already trailing it.

at the advert break for corronation street

The future is bleak. 😉

Until we have a smart grid these things are an eco-nightmare. More CO2 to make them than a conventional car, more CO2 to run them than a conventional car in almost every country in Europe except France in the Summer, more CO2 to recycle them than a conventional car. Still more carcinogens than any petrol/petrol hybrid car. Taking the energy consumed over a typical eight-year lifespan they aren't good and beaten cars you'd never think of being even slightly ecological.

If it's a hybrid it doesn't use the grid to charge does it?

It uses the grid to charge it to achieve the published 48 gm CO2/km. They also claim 50km as a "zero emissions" vehicle when charged form the mains.

Now if we assume that car is charged in France or Germany in Winter when marginal electricity is being produced in brown coal power stations and then transmitted over long distances the Volvo will be producing more CO2 per km than almost anything on the road.

Until alternative energy dominates the market and marginal electricity is produced by pump storage hydro the least environmentally unfriendly/least health unfriendly cars are those with efficient petrol engines such as Renault's 1.2l 115 TCE which produce around 100gm of CO2 per km from petrol.

Now if we assume that car is charged in France or Germany in Winter

That's one hell of an extension cord.

In the UK you can assume that the car will be charged with electricity generated from gas or coal. That means the same or more CO2 per kw at the point of production as the car engine. Add in electricity transmission losses, charge/discharge losses and electric motor efficiency, and you'd be better off starting the engine.

the same or more CO2 per kw at the point of production as the car engine

based on what? the fact that it's also produced from burning fossil fuels?

Renault's 1.2l 115 TCE which produce around 100gm of CO2 per km from petrol.

Your comparison is not valid. You have forgotten to factor in the C02 and energy required to actually get the fuel into the car. All that mining, drilling, extraction, refinement and transportation.

Don't forget to add the CO2 needed to post the adjusted CO2 values on the Internet

All that mining, drilling, extraction, refinement and transportation.

Fuel for the power station also requires all of those though for gas stations the transport is clearly lower than for car fuels. Coal mining and transport is energy intensive.

We've already done the debate about the efficiency of power stations compared with the internal combustion engines in cars on STW. The conclusion was that power stations are in a range from 30-50% efficient and that internal combustion engines are in the same range. The most efficient being gas fired power stations at 50% and turbo diesels also at 50%.

You must include the losses incurred by the national grid on efficiency. Also 50% is far to high for a power stations %. When will you all learn, Clive Sinclair had it right years ago. 🙂

There are lots of studies online about the CO2 equivalent of electric cars. The last one I saw suggested a pure electric car in the UK would produce effectively something like 60-70g/km I think. Not bad, but not out of the question for a n internal combustion car in the future.

One problem is that the official govt tests are completely useless for any car you plug in. That Volvo is probably pretty efficient in normal use because of the energy recovery, but the extra plug in capacity is really useful in certain situations. Iirc you can choose to save your full battery charge for later, which means that you could drive normally and efficiently until you get to a rush hour city, where you could do the whole city section on electric only power thus greatly improving efficiency and also local air quality.

Anyway.. I also like driving hybrids. Feels odd at first but after a while you go back to a normal car and marvel at all those stupid gear changes going on...

Oh yeah and a 1.2 petrol clio will be absolutely nowhere near the govt figures either. I struggled to get 45mpg from my hired one, and I was trying, and I am good at economy driving.

I'm talking about the latest 1.2l turbo TCE Renault engine Molgrips, Google it. A claimed 25% improvement in economy compared with the old engine in the Megane. You don't get the economy the manufacturer claims, I usually do, it's down to driving style and the same applies to electrics and hybrids. British journalists flattened the Fluence batteries in half the distance the French journalists did.

The electric cars that have an equivalence of 60-70g/km are tiny things like the Twingo that manage 100gm/km with not particularly efficient engines. I have nothing against electric cars which don't have an internal combustion engine to lug around, I'm not keen on big, heavy hybrids that claim to be more ecological than they really are.

Today I drove the future.

Remarkably, given its pace, the Clio also proved to be the most frugal model on our test. It recorded 41.8mpg, which left all of its rivals in the shade. This is down to the torquey nature of the engine, as we didn’t need to work it as hard to keep pace with the other cars.

Read more: http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/40195/renault-clio-12-tce-dynamique#ixzz2TlPwE8Ax

and how much CO2 are 6.5 billion human beings pumping out?

Not much compared with what all their toys are pumping out.

You don't get the economy the manufacturer claims, I usually do, it's down to driving style and the same applies to electrics and hybrids.

Haha.. I can't believe what an insufferable smar-arse you always are Edukator. For your information, I can achieve the govt test figures in my Prius, and beat them by miles in my Passat.

The reason I didn't get good mpg from my hired Clio (which was not the verison you are talking about in any case, I mis-understood) was that I was driving around Dublin on their motorway ring-road. The car was so slow it had to be driven quite hard to get up to 60mph to merge onto the motorway.

So you are capable of getting good economy but drove the hire Clio "hard" (were you paying for the fuel yourself?) and then complained the car was responsible rather than your "hard" driving. 45mpg in Dublin and on the M50 from the old Clio seems reasonable to me - Renault claim 6.6l/km for the combined cycle.

As for my Internet persona, it works for me on this forum.

So you are capable of getting good economy but drove the hire Clio "hard"

I didn't have much choice. Merging on motorways requires a certain speed be attained. I don't know what spec the car was but it was labelled Eco 2 or some such and had a 3cyl engine. Now I don't mind slow cars, but it was ridiculous.

45mpg doens't seem reasonable to me from a small very slow car, when both my cars are much bigger and faster, and get much better economy.

Fwiw I don't think these hybrid things are the future, they're just a half arsed stopgap that just shove the dirtyness further down the line from the end user, the future is hydrogen or full circle back to the horse and cart when things are fubar..

As for my Internet persona, it works for me on this forum.

And once it stops working, you can always get it deleted from the history of the internet, huh?

Fwiw I don't think these hybrid things are the future, they're just a half arsed stopgap that just shove the dirtyness further down the line from the end use

I'm in relatively uniformed agreement with that. Road Trip tells me I get 44 mpg from my old estate (v little time on motorways, mostly country roads and towns). The new Lexus RX450h gets 32mpg, but low emissions make it cheap as a company car, apparently.

Slow is relative, it seems adequate to me, same top speed as the Prius and only 2s slower to 100kmh:

The three cyclinder Clios are the latest Clio IV TCEs which go rather well.

Vitesse max 182 km/h
0 à 100 km/h 12,2 sec.
Conso autoroute 3,9 litres / 100 km
Conso mixte 4,5 litres / 100 km
Conso ville 5,5 litres / 100 km
Poids 1009 kg
Moteur 3 cylindres
Cylindrée 898 cm3
Carburant Essence
Puissance 90 ch à 5250 tr/mn
Couple 135 Nm dès 2500 tr/mn
Puissance fiscale -
Boîte de vitesses Mécanique 5 rapports
Transmission Traction
Dimensions (L/l/H) 4,06 / 1,95 / 1,45 m
Réservoir 45 litres
Capacité coffre 300 dm3
Emissions CO2 104 g/km

Slow is relative, it seems adequate to me, same top speed as the Prius and only 2s slower to 100kmh:

2s is quite a bit. Seemed more like the 1l cars I grew up with, 0-60mph around the 15s mark. It may have been an older model than the current one, certainly didn't feel anything close to 90bhp.

However slow is not relative when you are merging with traffic. I'm not talking about driving thrills, I'm talking about not having to pull into motorway traffic at 50mph.

Fwiw I don't think these hybrid things are the future, they're just a half arsed stopgap that just shove the dirtyness further down the line from the end user,

Well depends on the hybrid, there's two types of use here. There are plug-in hybrids with large batteries where you're intended to charge them up and drive using electricity for some of the way; and there are non-plug-in ones where the battery is pretty tiny and is just used to store energy that would otherwise be wasted and use it to move the car when the petrol engine would be least efficient.

The latter is simply a way to improve petrol (or diesel) efficiency, not a shift to a different power source.

And that Lexus 450h is a huge powerful SUV with 300bhp, so it's hardly a like for like comparison. It's much more efficient than similar powerful SUVs, but it's still just as stupid of a car.

It's the CO2 claims for the plug in hybrids that I consider misleading/lies. 2.1L/100km and 49gmCO2/km for the plug in Prius with no mention of the CO2 emitted in generating the electricity to charge the batteries.

The numbers for the old Prius give a good idea of what the car really uses and emits: 3.9l/100km and 89gm/km. Good figures which mean the car still makes sense even when you consider built-in energy for high mileage town users.

[img] [/img]

It's the CO2 claims for the plug in hybrids that I consider misleading/lies.

Agreed. It's not at all clear what those figures represent either. The plug-in battery charge is limited, so when they do the standard govt test pattern are they using up that charge? So when that charge is gone it must surely revert to 89g/km or whatever. I don't think the test takes this into account. The EPA in the US have developed a test that does, apparently.

The numbers for the old Prius

I should just point out that the plug-in model is just a version of the new model which is also on sale without plug-in capability, for a lot less cash.

If I had the money and were shopping for a car (which I don't and I',m not) I'd be tempted by a plug-in model because I could drive to town and back, say, or to school on electric only power. Which would probably be less CO2 than using petrol. Then again, the Vauxhall Ampera would be better still for that reason but I'm not sure I'd want to buy anything from GM. And I'd have to do some proper research on battery technology. I've not found anything that actually explains how batteries are made, it's all just handwaving and supposition as far as I can tell.

RE binners pic, Fiat and Lancia tried that in the seventys, after twelve months the floors rotted away and you could touch the road and scoot along with your feet...

Biggest problem is the price of these things. I looked at Ampera... bargain at €45,000 compared to a 5-door Astra at probably about half the price for a pretty decent spec.

€20,000 difference in list price equates to more 200 tanks of 98 octane! That's a tank per month for so many years that I'd have considered the car worthless, run in to the ground, and/or sold on by then. 17 years worth of fuel at today's prices - so call that 10 years assuming the price will go up quite a bit.
edit: and those calculations assume the hybrid of any variety use 0 petrol/diesel, and the recharge costs are nil too.

Now if you use a tank per week, then things are a bit different.

For that reason, I think I can wait a bit longer.

Yeah the Ampera definitely does not make sense on economic grounds alone. Which is a shame.

I've driven the future,
It's called a, bicycle.....

Yeah for them to tempt me seriously, the Hybrid premium has got to be of the same order as speccing an auto box instead of manual (eg around the €2000 mark more than the petrol manual equivalent).

Even then, plug in is useless for me. I'm not gonna dangle a 50m cable out of a 4th floor window. And I've never seen a single public charge point anywhere either. So it'd have to be petrol/diesel hybrid where the sole input energy source is from the pump.

Well, I reckon the best (non-plugin) hybrid on the market is the normal Prius, but there's no direct 'normal' equivalent to compare with. However the Auris hybrid is only £1.5k more than a petrol auto and £1.5k over the manual diesel, both in the same spec.

The hybrid version has the same MPG as the diesel manual, but 50% more power.. nice 🙂

Would be nice to see some more interesting use of hybrid tech.

I've got a pretty quick hot hatch. Overtaking is a breeze in it, put your foot down in 3rd or 4th and what was in front is now behind.

But the extra power is absolutely no use when cruising along the motorway at 70 or when driving in towns and stop start traffic.

What would be good is a car with say a 1.4 petrol (good ecomnomy and around 100-120bhp (plenty for urban driving and cruising) with a hybrid system that could deliver 70-80 bhp. The battery weight could be kept down by only needing enough power to provide the extra power for a small amount of time.

KERS for the road if you like

KERS for the road if you like

That's basically what the Prius is, but with more benefits. Mine is a 75hp petrol engine, with an extra 30hp of electric power. When cruising, the battery does nothing. The battery in the standard version is pretty small really and is used for extra boost when you floor it, but also when crawling in traffic and sometimes when trundling at 30mph - both of which are less than efficient ways to use a petrol engine. If you have a long straight unbroken 30mph run, like a suburban road, it runs on battery for half a mile or so, then the engine comes on. But instead of using the throttle to limit the speed, it slows the car by taking the extra energy into the battery. So in another half a mile or so that fills back up and the engine goes off.

It's extremely clever and superbly thought out!

Those Lexus mentioned earlier use hybrid power for performance, really. Except they already have lots of performance from the petrol engine, they just get even more from the battery.

What I'd like to see is more ways of recovering wasted energy. Inductive dampers on the springs could generate electricity for the battery, and you could put a turbine on the exhaust attached to a generator, for example.

The A3 E-tron is looking interesting has some good performance figures but being Audi price could well be silly.

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/audi/a3/62836/audi-a3-e-tron-unveiled

I know hybrid isn't the answer but it's a steppingstone until another technology is good enough as an everyday car rather than for popping out to see Grandma.

I think hybrid is quite possibly essential for extracting as much as possible from any internal combustion car. Even hyrdrogen powered cars would still benefit from a battery to capture energy lost in braking.

Yeah I'm aware the Prius pretty much does all this. What I meant was a similar concept but more optimised to performance - think Golf Gti rather then Ferrari.

No reason why they couldn't modify the Prius model a little to use a smaller / lighter hatchback body, with a bit more base petrol power and a punchier electric motor. It doesn't have to be as economical as the standard Prius but a lot more economical than current hot hatches

I get 28mpg in my petrol hatchback - getting 45 mpg with similar performance using hybrid tech would be a big selling point

EDIT - Looks like the Audi E-tron is pretty much this idea

What I meant was a similar concept but more optimised to performance

BMW did something like that, not sure if it was in production. You're quite right of course, but I guess Toyota really want to be seen as being eco rahter than sporty.

I think the Peugot 3008 job has a goodly amount of power, as does the Volvo that started this thread. That Audi posted above does too, of course. And even the Auris hybrid has 136bhp which is fairly warm for a smaller car that does 70-odd mpg I think.

I'd like a Honda CR-Z though. 150bhp or so, not at all fast (9s 0-6?) but aimed at being fun to drive (which it is apparently) and still 50mpg.

Mind you, plenty of fast diesels around that could get 45mpg.

[url= http://www.tflcar.com/2013/03/2013-volkswagen-jetta-hybrid-a-drivers-hybrid/ ]Also this from VW.[/url]

Mind you, plenty of fast diesels around that could get 45mpg.

I'd been sending mine to be looked at if it dropped that low.

EDIT - a UK review

http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/volkswagen/jetta/first-drives/volkswagen-jetta-hybrid

I've driven the future, It's called a, bicycle.....

Yes indeed!

I've driven the future, It's called a, bicycle.....

Mind you, plenty of fast diesels around that could get 45mpg.

my 10yr old audi gets 45mpg and goes plenty quick enough...

Shifting energy sources and carrying on as normal doesn't seem like a very big leap forward to me.

No, it's a very small one though.

Restructuring society could end up being significantly easier than finding the ultimate power source, but no-one will make much money from it sadly.

Big problem with capitalism that.