Lotus Technology announces hybrid technology

[Jinba ittai]

Lotus should be looking ay Hydrogen, that's the way to go.

Battery technology is going to sufficiently improved before the hydrogen economy can be built out. My 2 cents anyways.

 

[Tomwa]

Agreed. While I would love for hydrogen to work, because it means we can keep ICE and sound and feel around, it means engine development and improvements from centuries of effort and advancement continue.

I just don't think it's likely. The infrastructure just isn't there and the economy of energy is not favorable. While "gas stations" conceptually would not change, the problem is, what you are left with is, stations what? Doing their own electrolysis to store compressed hydrogen in tanks.

Shipping compressed hydrogen around as a regular as we do for gasoline doesnt make sense. But the electrolysis energy requirements also don't make sense and there's no current known benefit of scale. If you've got that much electricity, storing it to batteries is easier and comes with less losses. (70-80% Energy loss converting water to Hydrogen)

Then we get hydrogen into the cars, the size of tank needed to support combustion is quite a bit larger than a gasoline tank. While hydrogen is over 2.5 more energy dense than gasoline, storage density sucks. You need a very small amount of hydrogen to go fair distances, but without cryo temps to push hydrogen to negative hundreds of degrees C, you are looking at pressures like 350psi but even then you are looking at a storage volume approximately 5x what gasoline needs.

Then... Well that large volume might get you pretty far, and environmentally it's clean (sufficiently so, I'm sure there's oil vapor and that would burn so there would be some minimal hydrocarbons.) but, burning hydrogen is only 20-30% Energy efficient. Maybe we could push that to 35-40% with improvements and technology, but .. that's 20% of 70% in the worst.

Batteries by comparison, electric to chemical, back to electrical, at this point is something like 65% efficient at the worst, and is more like 80+% efficient today, and stations don't need to store energy tanks on site, you can plug in at home.

 

[Davebeats]

I'd love to see a solid state battery or plug in hybrid being offered. My next daily driver will hopefully be one of those.

 

[Tokion]

Don't-cha just love politician-speak? Long-winded face-saving way of saying "EVs didn't work out the way we thought, so we're going to focus on what the customers actually want." Toyota has been saying this all along, while publicly refusing to go all EV. They've been developing hybrid tech the whole time, and made a profit last year instead of losing billions like most everyone else.

Unless Geely has a good hybrid solution in hand, they should partner with Toyota for engine technology. If Lotus Wuhan doesn't want to do this, Lotus Hethel certainly should for use in sports cars.

Great post Eagle7

I felt the replies to the questions of this interview were mostly off the mark, and it totally ignores that the solutions already exist, especially from TOYOTA, but also from others. I am all in favor of LOTUS developing great hybrid cars. But the truth is that their current electric range of models are inefficient (see Harry’s Garage) because of extreme overweight. The 134 cannot appear fast enough; but I suppose it is frantically being re-developed as a hybrid due to altered world-wide (outside China) market-realities where pure electric cars are getting harder to sell (except in Norway, which is the only country truly succeeding with close to 100% electric market penetration - due to a dedicated governmental policy program.)

I would like an Emira hybrid with the lightest possible hybrid system (most efficient lightweight battery technology) and the M139. Mercedes has already worked it out; so it is only a matter of Geely making a deal - and the engineers must re-engineer the Mercedes system to work in the mid-engined RWD Emira (maintaining relative lightweight).