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My energy density is in the liquid fuel, where your 400 pound battery equals one gallon of fuel at 6.5 pounds.
The accumulator is a capacitive storage device which can recover the energy of a one 70-0 stop in 25 revolutions of the wheels at 80+% efficiency, wheel to wheel.
How efficient is your electric car in the exact same regeneration scenario? About 30%. If you believe it is more please provide documentation to support your position. This is especially significant if you do not have some form of transmission to spin the generating motor at high enough speeds to actually recover more energy, to say nothing of the controller or battery you need to accept energy at 100+ KW per second.
Don't use the position that we are hypermilers and do not have to stop that quickly. Hypermilers are a minuscule percentage of the driving population. Even the best hypermiler gets caught by red lights at precisely the wrong time.
The accumulator is better compared to a very high power capacitor. To compare it to a battery is a fallacious argument. It serves as a super high capacity recovery and reapplication energy storage device, without the cost, or deterioration involved with a battery. Lets at least compare apples to apples.
This drive will make electric cars more efficient, but that is the topic of a separate post where certain information must be understood and applied to realize the potential. It's commonly called a launch assist rear axle in the front wheel drive vehicle like the leaf.
On a deserted country road with no traffic or traffic lights it would not help, but that is not the real world in which most of us actually drive.
The source of energy can be fuel or electricity as I said before, but for the purpose of this discussion just consider the liquid fueled example.
Now lets get into the more theoretical. How much has battery technology improved in the last 5 years? I keep hearing about the breakthrough, but I see no breakthrough, even at a cost of $100,000 unless you want to use something like the NASA flywheel battery.
Combine this drive with a constant load HCCI engine, like the one Argonne Labs is running today, at efficiencies approaching 60%, then you have today's technology and 150-200 MPG on renewable liquid fuels that can be custom engineered for the engine and requiring no after treatment for emissions because they are that clean to begin with.
regards
Mech
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