nickel-metal-hydride battery
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Toyota continues to stay the course with nickel-metal hydride battery cells for many of its hybrid vehicles, even though most other hybrid vehicles from other brands have moved on to using lithium-ion cells exclusively. According to Prius chief engineer Shoichi Kaneko, in an interview this past week at the LA Auto Show, most of Toyota’s current hybrid lineup are capable of easily trading off between the two battery types for one chief reason: flexibility. In being compatible with either one, the company can more smoothly react at a factory or vehicle level to supply shortages or price...
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Nickel-Metal-Hydride Batteries For Electric Cars? Energy Density Can Rise 10-Fold: Researchers
The division is pretty clear: nickel-metal-hydride batteries are for use only in hybrids--at least those from Toyota, which has used more of the batteries than any other maker by far. Lithium-ion cells, on the other hands, are the only ones with sufficient energy density to be used in the much...
John Voelcker -
Toyota Camry Hybrid Battery: Electrician Spent $10, Not $4,000, To Fix
A Toyota Camry Hybrid owner repairs the car's battery pack.
Stephen Edelstein -
Ford Cuts Rare-Earth Metal Use In Hybrid Batteries, But ...
With plug-in cars now on the market, rare-earth metals are a hot commodity. They're needed in one type of electric motor and various electronic components, and volume projections for hybrid and electric cars mean that increasingly larger quantities will be required. China has largely cornered the...
John Voelcker -
Replacing A 2001 Toyota Prius Battery Pack: What It Cost
It's one of the most frequent questions asked about hybrids: What happens if I have to replace the high-voltage battery pack? While Toyota warrants its Prius batteries for 8 years/100,000 miles (or 10 years/150,000 miles in some states), cars more than a decade old won't be covered--and may still...
John Voelcker -
Will Old Electric-Car Battery Packs Cause Horrible Pollution?
It's an assertion that comes up a lot in comments on our stories. It goes, essentially, like this: No one recognizes the horrible pollution problems that will arrive when hybrid and electric cars are junked, and their nickel-metal-hydride and lithium-ion battery packs go into landfills. It's a...
John Voelcker -
A common misconception of electric cars and hybrid vehicles is that at the end of a short battery life, the remainder is dumped in landfill and contributes ever more pollution to the Earth. Of course, we know this to be incorrect. Not only are the more common lead acid batteries the world's most recycled product, but dumping old ones makes little economic sense either. Not only that, but battery life in hybrid cars is already well-proven under the toughest of conditions - as yellow cabs in New York and San Francisco. Electric car batteries use expensive metals like nickel and cobalt in their...
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Ford Hybrids Prove Durability By Racking Up Most Taxi Miles
Ford has issued data showing remarkable reliability among the battery packs and electric motors in its hybrid vehicles, not the least of them the ones used in grueling taxi service in cities like New York and San Francisco.
John Voelcker -
2012 Toyota Prius V Station Wagon/Minivan: Arrives This Fall
There's nothing like a story translated from overseas media, concerning a related but not-quite-the-same model of a new hybrid car, to get people all in an uproar. So here's the real deal on the 2012 Toyota Prius V station wagon/minivan: It will still arrive in U.S. dealerships this fall. That's...
John Voelcker -
The Ultimate Guide: Toyota Prius Battery Life, Cost, and Warranty
Like many articles, this one started with a reader question. Casey Krakowiecki wrote: I'm interested in buying a new Toyota Prius hybrid. I hope you can answer a couple of questions that will help me. (1) Are the rechargable batteries guaranteed for 8 years? If they fail at 7 years and 11 months...
John Voelcker -
Lexus LF-Gh Hybrid Concept (New GS) Unveiled For NY Auto Show
Last week they teased it; this week, they took the covers off it. In this case, "it" is the Lexus LF-Gh Hybrid Concept car that will be the centerpiece of the Lexus display at next week's New York Auto Show. The LF-Gh concept car is a styling exercise that "sets out to redefine the premium grand...
John Voelcker -
Who Knew? A Car Battery Is the World's Most Recycled Product
A concern raised over upcoming electric-drive cars--the all-electric 2011 Nissan Leaf, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, and the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid--is what happens to their lithium-ion battery packs once the car's life ends. Images of those battery packs tossed over cliffs or littering...
John Voelcker -
Our reader Jonathan P asks: I have a 1997 Saturn that, remarkably, is still running. It probably has the book value of a large watermelon, so if anything major goes wrong with it, that's the end of that. If that Saturn were a hybrid, I'm guessing the battery pack would have died about four years ago, give or take. But replacing a battery pack would be a huge expense, no? And the older the car gets, the less incentive there is to incur this huge expense. So it seems to me that hybrids have a significant built-in obsolescence factor--while at the same time their higher up-front cost means you...
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The Car Battery's Carbon Footprint
Electric cars may run clean. But how green is the battery? Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum's "This Week in Technology." With governments around the world investing heavily in electric and hybrid cars, the demand for the batteries that power these vehicles is on the rise. The United...
IEEE Spectrum -
Tomorrow's Power Today? New Battery Is Most Powerful Ever
The electric motor is a great invention, but it's entirely limited by the power that the battery can feed to it, and that power is limited by the amount of energy the battery can store. Battery technology is in constant development behind the scenes, though, and the latest to emerge in research at...
Antony Ingram -
World's First Diesel Hybrid SUV: 2011 Peugeot 3008 HYbrid4
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote that Peugeot would display its 3008 HYbrid4 Concept at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show. Right on schedule, the French automaker is now showing the production version of the compact crossover ahead of its debut at next month's Paris Motor Show. Why would we cover a...
John Voelcker -
Toyota Backs Off On Aggressive 2011 Hybrid Production Plans
There's no question that Toyota dominates global production of hybrid-electric vehicles, but even the king of the hill has to take smaller steps sometimes. According to the Japanese business newspaper Nikkan Kogyo, Toyota [NYSE:TM] plans to build almost three-quarters of a million hybrid vehicles...
John Voelcker -
UPDATE: Tesla To Send Toyota 2 Cars Converted To Electric Power
[UPDATE: Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes says the original report via Bloomberg that Tesla would develop two separate electric models for Toyota was erroneous, and may have been further confused later by the fact that Tesla had developed two prototype RAV4 vehicles.] ++++++ UPDATE: Citing Japanese...
John Voelcker -
One of the many unknowns about Toyota's partnership with Tesla was whether it would result in a jointly produced car. That won't be known for many months yet, but Toyota has already taken a first step: It's building Tesla's battery into a test car so it can compare the Silicon Valley startup's technology to its own lithium-ion pack. Toyota president Akio Toyoda told journalists at a briefing today in Nagoya, Japan, that Toyota is building an electric vehicle with a Tesla battery pack. The Japanese company's in-house lithium-ion pack uses fewer, larger-format cells than the 6,831 commodity...
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Electric-Car Drive Report: 2002 Toyota RAV4 EV Crossover
One of the best parts of the electric-vehicle world is the camaraderie. Someone knows someone who passes us along to a friend who knows a guy ... you know the story. Which is how we ended up in San Francisco on a sunny Friday, driving a well-used--but still reliable--example of one of the...
John Voelcker -
Expanding the Prius Lineup: Minivan, Compact Hatch, or Coupe?
While the all-electric cars being launched as 2011 models--the Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt, and Coda Sedan--get lots of attention, their total U.S. sales won't break 100,000 in their first year. Toyota, on the other hand, sells more than twice that number of hybrids here each year, making it by far...
John Voelcker -
March Debut Expected For New 2012 Toyota Prius Alpha Minivan
Speculation about what models will join an expanded Toyota Prius lineup has run rampant since Toyota confirmed at January's Detroit Auto Show that it would add more body styles to the current five-door hatchback. One candidate: the Auris Hybrid, effectively a hybrid version of the Corolla hatchback...
John Voelcker -
So, IS This the Next Toyota Prius Model? Should It Be?
Toyota's plans to expand its Prius hybrid into an entire line of vehicles still aren't completely clear. Rumored new models have included a coupe version and a tall station wagon or "people mover" small minivan. Now a road test of the Europe-only 2011 Toyota Auris Hybrid raises the question: Will...
John Voelcker -
Why Can't Toyota's Plug-In Prius Recharge Its Larger Battery?
Toyota has come under some fire from electric-vehicle enthusiasts for what some perceive as a grudging, halfhearted approach to building vehicles that plug in. Its first U.S.-market plug-in vehicle--not including a thousand or so RAV4 electric crossovers a decade ago--will be the 2012 Toyota Prius...
John Voelcker