Back to Basics with Hybrids?

A few years back China, that emerging powerhouse that surpassed US auto sales in 2010 and projected to grow on the order of 40 million vehicles per year by 2020 or sooner, saw that petrol was not the way to go moving forward due to supply issues in the future. Hence in the uniquely Chinese way of dictating things they said: "Develop Electric Vehicles." Even Warren Buffet jumped in with a major investment in BYD, a then battery maker and now pioneering Chinese built electrics. I believe electric vehicles will only get better. True - one still needs a power source but that source does not have to be petroleum liquid based.

While hybrid powertrains are seeing wider applications, is it time to step back and say that their complexity may not be worth the extra cost, especially in light of improvements in internal combustion engine efficiency?

No, of course it is not time to "step back", any more than it is time to step back from Androids and iPhones to land lines.

"Improvements in internal combustion engine efficiency" are not happening quickly, and have occurred in very small, incremental steps. Interestingly, the Prius engine is the first gasoline engine that has demonstrated a significant leap in basic efficiency from 31%-32% (previous state of the art) to 38%, both figures at peak. Hybridizing is only one part of the Prius's efficiency.

Hybridizing allows the Prius engine to run at close to that peak more of the time. Although the Prius is complex, it sells well (very well when the price of gas is high). The upcoming plug-in Prius will use even less gas, and for many commuters, its operating cost savings on electricity will pay back the incremental purchase price difference (std Prius vs plug-in) quickly enough to make it attractive. (The std Prius is already far less costly to run than any other car in the $22,000 - $26,000 range.)

If one were to make an argument based on data or actual history, then one can say that hybridizing has driven engine efficiency increases. Gasoline engines in non-hybrids have evolved very slowly, from about 25% peak efficiency to 31% peak over several decades.

Aircraft with hybrid powertrains? Name one.

Personally, I feel a lot of energy is being wasted on hybrid technology. Everyone knows that hybrids are a transition technology whose inevitable aim is fully electric vehicles. We should be investing our brain juice in resolving EV problems instead. In any case, the EV is more than ready for mass use in warm climates and the only thing holding it back a is lack of proper infrastructure. As progress is made on energy storage, EVs will become more usable in colder climates and the combustion engine will be a thing of the past (for cars anyway). This of course is not welcome news to the petroleum industry which I believe is the real advocate of hybrid vehicles. The longer we remain connected to the oil pipeline, the better it is for them.

Airplanes however would require insane amounts of energy from heavy batteries. As far as I can tell, we are a long way off from EV airplanes. What I've seen so far are series type hybrid planes. In essence, the series configuration allows for the development of an EV with a gas generator as a battery stand in. This can be useful to develop EV airplane technology so that it is mature by the time ideal power storage is available.

On this note, I would like to add that I believe this to be true for cars as well. That parallel hybrids took center stage in the first place seems completely illogical to me. An Otto cycle motor has a very small optimum efficiency range and the only configuration that can insure optimum operation conditions is the series configuration. Moreover, controlling electric motors for optimum performance and an Otto cycle motor for optimum efficiency is much easier to do in series than in parallel hybrids.

Additionally, I want to agree with K_Fry on a point: gas engine efficiency has improved marginally in the last 40 years. The last substantial improvement was the VVTi introduced in the Toyota Echo 13 years ago. There is not much room for additional improvement. I predict that the Otto cycle will never reach a peak efficiency of 50%. And seriously, 50% is real crappy if you think about it. The Otto cycle does not have a future in automotives.

Personally, I feel a lot of energy is being wasted on hybrid technology. Everyone knows that hybrids are a transition technology whose inevitable aim is fully electric vehicles.

Depends upon what you mean by "hybrid." The "original" modern hybrid cars (the Honda Insight and the Prius) were almost entirely "gas savers" in which the electrical aspect was coincidental rather than a key. In other words, hydraulics could have been used, as it has been in FedX and UPS hybrids. (Neither the Prius nor Insight architectures were designed with plug-in use in mind: conversion is impossible with the Insight, and klutzy with the Prius.) The Prius and the vehicles that license its tech are extraordinarily complicated. They represent a very convoluted path to an electric vehicle, in the sense that you would throw out essentially all of the technology used in the Prius to make an electric vehicle: even the electric motors are integrated into the transmission, so there is not room for the HP required for a full performance electric.

(Getting a plug-in Prius conversion to go 50 mph on batteries alone was considered a breakthrough. The early conversions could only do 35 with the engine off.)
The RAV4 EV from Toyota (the original one and the upcoming one) are much different entities than the Prius -- far simpler. The Ford Focus EV is a clean sheet design in terms of power architecture (whereas the hybrid Fusion and Escape already exist but are not becoming EV's). Different development paths.

On the other hand, plug-in series hybrids (like my Zing!) can easily become purely electric. It is easy, but costly, to replace the engine/generator with additional cells. I will probably eventually offer this as an option, although it will increase cost and weight while reducing efficiency. I would not be surprised if most people find that 15,000 miles per year (40 miles per day) on electricity is all they need, but that the security of being able to go outside daily range will be invaluable, even if rarely used.
The Volt has odd architecture, owing to too-fast development and the desire to use off-the-shelf pieces. It is almost a series hybrid, but has all the complexity of a Prius, aimed at improving the poor gasoline-only efficiency that came with its low-efficiency engine and relatively high weight. For an EV, they would be better off starting from scratch, in terms of power architecture. Then, they could have five seats, which may people see as an advantage of the LEAF.

That parallel hybrids took center stage in the first place seems completely illogical to me.

If you view them only as gas savers, then they make sense. The parallel architecture is complicated, but the results are impressive: the Prius offers the room of a mid-sized car but gets twice the mileage around town, and more than 1.5 times the mileage on trips.

In cruise, series hybrids are not all that efficient, because there are several energy conversions going on. On the Zing! I debated doing the same thing that GM did with the Volt -- enabling direct-to-wheels drive, to avoid the losses in the generator and motor. Instead, I am favoring simplicity, getting more efficiency out of the engine, and relying on the already high efficiency inherent in the vehicle (low weight, good aero). The Volt could be 1000 lb lighter and could have 30% less aero drag. Then, they could ditch the complexity of direct-to-wheels drive, and become a true series hybrid, while getting closer to Prius gas mileage. A smaller battery pack could be used. Cost could be substantially lower.

The only true series plug-in hybrid (other than my Zing!) that is more-or-less in production is the Fisker Karma. It highlights just how bad things can get when you focus only on luxury and greenwashing at the expense of real efficiency. There is no "green" sedan that weighs 5300 lbs. Weight and size are insurmountable hurdles, even before the behemoth is started. The series architecture means that the low efficiency of the engine is compounded by additional losses in the generator, controller and drive motors. (Even the drive motors operate at low efficiency when they can produce 400 hp but are producing 1/10 that during much of the drive cycle.) So the Karma gets 20 mpg, and can be out-accelerated by a V6 Toyota Camry. The Camry, of course, gets much better mileage. The Fisker gets 52 MPGe when running on batteries alone. This largely bogus number sounds good until you realize that it is twice the energy consumption of the LEAF, itself no pillar of efficiency, and three times the consumption of the old GM EV1.

Good observations, in any case, and I agree that the days of the ICE in cars are numbered (although some projections show half the cars in 2050 still using them.) There are a couple E-airplanes flying that have looked pretty good, one with about 200 mile range, if I recall. (Could be great for sport fliers, burning holes in the sky near the local airport. There is already a really good electric glider.) (Aerobatics come to mind: my old plane had neither inverted oiling nor inverted fuel, so the engine would quit when hanging upside down -- no such problems with electric planes.)