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A friend of mine that works for Toyota brought a prototype hybrid
gasoline/electric car over to my house so we could go for a drive. I was
quite impressed to say the least!
It was smooth and very quiet. The engine would start periodically under high
throttle and occasionally in cruise to charge the batteries. I was amazed at
how tractable it was, actually better than most passenger cars I've ridden
in.
The gas mileage was incredible. The regenerative braking recharged the
batteries a little every time you stopped. This vehicle is still not offered
for sale in the US, but I'm sure it would be quite expensive compared to a
conventional car. It seemed to be reliable enough to let a product planner
drive it unsupervised over the weekend. My understanding is that these
hybrids have accumulated hundreds of thousands of road miles in Japan on a
trial basis, and may already be available for sale overseas.
On a final note, I have a stock M998 HMMWV, and I can say that there
definitely is room for improvement!
Brandon
----- Original Message -----
I remember seeing articles about hybrid
electric vehicles back in the 70's. This is just a logical extension of the
thought process. I would imagine that the technology has improved
dramatically in the intervening 30 years. I don't know that this is the
direction that the military should be going, but I'll at least give it the
benefit of the doubt, for now, and wait to see what comes out of it.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 01 2000 - 05:30:06 PDT