Quote:
Originally Posted by S Keith
You are confused because you haven't embraced the reality that 100% of the propulsive energy used by the car ultimately comes from gasoline. The battery needs to be just large enough to allow the hybrid system to work. Excess capacity is wasted. Additional electricity use necessitates replenishment with gas power.
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Additional electricity use does not necessitate replenishment with gas power
if that additional electricity was recaptured from braking and otherwise would have been wasted as heat or used to turn the engine over unnecessarily. At issue here is this: do the braking events encountered by a "typical" hybrid driver justify a larger battery capacity? Toyota decided, after weighing a number of factors, that 1.3kWh was large enough in the Prius for most drivers and was the best compromise of weight, cost, packaging, longevity, etc. Does this mean that a
particular driver like the OP can't benefit from an increase in HV battery capacity? Of course not. Perhaps his commute, like my parents', takes him down a mountain to a valley floor, generating more braking energy than the battery has capacity to store and he'd like to take advantage of that.
Without knowing the details of his use case, blanket assertions like "excess capacity is wasted" are inane--precisely because we don't know what constitutes "excess capacity" for his use of the car. It is entirely possible that a 1.9kWh battery would be necessary to store all the braking energy captured before opportunity for discharge on his typical commute, in which case 1.9kWh would not be "excess," just as it is entirely possible that another driver with an otherwise-identical car would be perfectly served by a 0.8kWh battery. We simply don't know. There have been plenty of times, driving in the mountains of Idaho and western Washington, and once in Tennessee, when I could have used a slightly larger battery in my car, and I presume the same is true for the OP.