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Kowowow ,

Ooh I would love to do this with my car and have a hybrid awd

rikonium ,

If y’all remember that Kia Soul that got launched by a wheel, it’s a more dramatic example but a potential downside to what amounts to a spacer. It’s certainly a cool proof-of-concept but I can’t see it taking off since I doubt it’ll be as efficient as a factory hybrid and the upfront cost, labor, troubleshooting, explaining it to a mechanic will eat fuel savings.

PatFussy ,

Yeah. Okay.

https://media.tenor.com/ZfsBAF4sn04AAAAC/not-how-it-works-confused.gif

atzanteol ,

Conversion to a hybrid seems more complicated, not less.

They’re adding a bunch of weight to the rear wheels - I’m sure that’s going to effect things? How does it trade-off with the ICE smoothly? How much per model customization is needed?

It’s an interesting idea - but there are a lot of details being left out…

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever ,

Your goal should not be to buy a hybrid or to “upgrade” to a hybrid. At this point, anyone buying a new vehicle should either be sticking to ICE or going full BEV. Anything else is. generally, a waste of money and tradeoffs.

But the point of this is more to extend the life of existing vehicles. That beater Camry that you have been driving for ten years? For a couple grand you can help the environment and probably make that back in gas over a few years if you mostly drive city.

You definitely lose out. Your trunk space is likely to shrink considerably (since even a 100 km battery is going to have some heft) and your overall gas mileage likely will go down when in ICE mode because of the weight of everything. But, again, if you are mostly commuting to work with a lot of stop and go traffic, it is a good upgrade to consider.

atzanteol ,

I drive an '07 ICE pickup. Would adding a battery / motors to it for the remaining 5ish years of its life really be worth the impact to the environment for those batteries just to save a bit of fuel over that time period?

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever , (edited )

That’s for you to decide. But the environmental impact of batteries is drastically reduced if you actually recycle them and so forth.

As for cost effectiveness?

Quick google of a poorly documented site that looks “about right” says the average price of a gallon of gasoline was 7.079 Australian dollars and 4.459 USD, respectively. Normalizing, that is 4.54 and 4.459 USD. And it gets a lot higher in other countries, but those seem the two pertinent to this discussion. www.globalpetrolprices.com/…/gasoline_prices/

So doing a bit of math:

X city miles / N city Miles Per Gallon * 4.5 USD per gallon = M dollars per retrofit

So get the price of the retrofit, your average city (stop and go) miles per gallon, and figure out if you are likely to travel that distance. Because the effectiveness of a hybrid drops drastically for extended highway (although 100 kilometers is a decent charge size), whereas they use trace amounts of gas during stop and go city driving.

But also, like with anything, it is a bit of a gamble. Do you think gas prices will go up or down? Do you expect to continue driving your current route? And so forth.

Also, that rough equation assumes inflation will increase (because it always will) and attributes cost of charging at night as well as lack of perfect efficiency in regenerative braking to that.

Haraknos ,

It sounds like a hoax… How can such a small thing pull a 1,5 Tons vehicule ? And why is there so few data about this ? At the same time I really want to try this, please let this be real!

WagnasT ,

New EV supercars are using similar axial flux motors. I was hoping someone would come up with this because spinning the axles directly with wheel mounted motors seems like a much easier retrofit than replacing the engine and gear box. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICTi2Z_X5Kw

Usernameblankface ,
@Usernameblankface@lemmy.world avatar

That looks very familiar. I saw something similar advertised in a Popular Mechanics. I don’t remember whether it was an article or an ad, but it was there.

Burn_The_Right ,

NADA, Ford and Shell lobby to outlaw it in the U.S. in 3… 2…

ccderg ,

Wheel spacers are already illegal, atleast in Finland

TenderfootGungi ,

I wish they were in the US. People raise their trucks up a foot or two dand set the wheels out wide (wider than fenders is illegal, but have never seen enforced). They usually change the wheels for wider tires, but adding wheel spacers is common.

Aurenkin ,

Why bother with all that when you can just buy the patent?

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