
Oi!
Oi! Is it my imagination, or is the jeep's transmission installed backwards?
Quickly, alert the design team before it's too... oh wait, it's gone to prototype stage.
Other motor makers announce one electric car. Not Chrysler - this week it announced three of them at once. And an interesting selection they make: a roadster, a van and an off-roader. Chrysler Jeep EV Chrysler's ENVI EV line-up: the Jeep... The latter's the Jeep EV. Like the Chevy Volt, it has a lithium-ion battery to …
What's with the "But it's a rear wheel drive", a sports car _should_ have rear wheel drive. It'd be rubbish if it didn't. Can anyone name a sports car with FWD?
NB: Just because a car has 'sport' written on it, doesn't mean it's a sports car. (As I am fond of telling the PFY at work: Your Clio sport is just a normal Clio with a slightly larger engine and all the bolts tightened up properly.)
Two critical bits of information are missing from the article: (1) Can you plug the vehicles in instead of using the gasoline engine, and (2) What is the expected price of each vehicle?
If the answer to (1) is "no", then they're just hybrids, so Chrysler is misleading us. They're significant improvements on existing hybrids, but they're still hybrids. (My Prius handily beats 50 mpg on long trips, but drops to 36 in our day-to-day use because we make lots of short (<5 mile) trips. If these really do use up their electric charge FIRST, before charging, and give 50+ mpg for short trips, they'd be a big improvement over both existing hybrids and diesels).
If the answer to (2) is, "We don't know that yet", then they're just concept cars, and really not worth reporting on or getting excited about.
.... they won't use any fuel at all... they are not assisted hybrids like the Prius hence Chrysler not calling them hybrids... the petrol engine is not connected to the wheels in any way... BUT surely over the 40 mile per charge range the engine is running constantly to keep the battery topped up hence the 50MPG so seeing as this only applies to longer trips it is less efficient than many diesels for longer journeys.
Granted if you rarely make such trips it represents an excellend advancement but then wouldn't you prefer to buy a cheaper car with no petrol engine at all, maybe some more batteries, that costs less?? I know I would!
"Chrysler claims eight gallons of fuel will allow the Jeep to run for 400 miles. "
So why can't ALL of Chrysler's cars get 50 MPG? If you can do that with the inherent power losses involved in converting internal combustion to electric to drive the wheel motors, why not just drop the battery and announce your 50 MPG fuel economy?
While I applaud car makers bringing more electric vehicles on the road, why oh why are they focusing on these ghastly vans, SUVs and sports cars? Soccer moms and guys with small willies aren't the only people in the market for an electric vehicle. When I saw "Jeep" in the headline, I was hoping for something along the lines of the 2-door Wrangler. You know... something small-ish. Even the Chevy Volt is a big 4-door sedan. Let's see some smaller electric cars go into development.
And, as for the 40-mile range, in 1904, electric cars with more primitive batteries had a 40-mile range. After 104 years and improvements in battery technologies you'd think they'd be able to go a little further than that by now.
Fire, because even steam cars would be an improvement over petrol.
To see what kind of numbers these cars turn in a mixed usage test. One of the downsides to living in the Los Angeles area is the fact that for most of us the MPG claims made by car manufacturers usually mean exactly shit. Due simply to the fact that the bulk of our driving is mixed use or in the midst of rush hour traffic which means our actual gas milage relates more to a mixed usage rating than what is claimed by the car maker.
We use a / in all 'per' units, eg. Mb/s, f/s, lb/ft etc.
I'd have thought that in a discussion about cars, it would we clear from the context that m/h doesn't mean metres per hour, men per horse or anything else but miles per hour.
However, if readers find this too much of a leap, we can use mph instead.