Thread: HCCI Video ...
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Old 09-17-2009, 12:19 PM   #17 (permalink)
SVOboy
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertSmalls View Post
A 15% improvement is huge. It would save you $2600 over the life of an Aura (which is worth $1800 up front, at 5% interest, so the beancounters would correctly vote against it), or it would turn your 40mpg into 47mpg.

This is the kind of thing that could be used in addition to a hybrid electric system, like Honda's lean burn hybrids and Toyota's Atkinson cycle ones. In fact, here's an article from 2005 about Honda's HCCI efforts, which I'm guessing didn't lead anywhere:

Honda's Experimental Hybrid May Help in Race With Toyota - WSJ.com

"The aim is to tap, on average, as much as 40% to 50% of the thermal power generated by a gasoline engine per unit of fuel"

Regarding customer acceptance: Just have the car's speakers play a diesely sound when the car's not in HCCI mode. Heck, you could even play it during idle stop, if that's what the consumers want to hear.
It would probably be easier to noisecancel the engine sounds than to trick people into thinking there was always a diesel sound, eh?

Anyway, I don't have much hope for HCCI since they have been working on it for a while and they never bother to talk about it.
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