The Future of Hybrid Vehicles in the Face of the Ecological Crises

Los Angeles, or the many municipalities within LA County that comprise the sprawl known as Los Angeles, is the second most populous urban center in the United States-- a nation whose Commander and Chief admitted to the world during his State of the Union Address on January 23, 2007, that it is addicted to oil. The foremost populous city is New York. However, it would become evident to even the most casual observer that LA is the perfect staging ground for an article addressing concerns over vehicular emissions and alternative technologies that aim to pull us back from the brink of our suicidal addiction.

I was sitting on a patio in Venice Beach overlooking the bowl of Los Angeles this morning, immersed in facts and figures concerning the oil, hydrocarbon emissions and transportation crises in the United States, when the angle for this story hit me. I had been pouring over notes all morning, my back and eyes were beginning to stiffen and burn. I shut the computer down, rolled a cigarette and poured myself some coffee. Leaning over the railing, I scanned over LA-- starting with a little sliver of the Pacific I could see between the shoulders of two buildings, moving out over Venice, up through Santa Monica, and on into the base of downtown LA, where blocks of office buildings began their climb to the sky. I followed those buildings up and was amazed to find that they had no roofs. LA has no city skyline like New York or Chicago. It was built by magical architects-the progenerators of the interminable building. These are buildings that rise up out of the ground, and then, somewhere at about the twentieth floor, pan out into a huge mesa of golden brown smog, spreading their arms over the valley, over the hills and out to sea.

It was as I was contemplating this miracle of urban planning that I noticed how much the city resembles a living being. Downtown LA is the nerve center. All of the outlying incorporated municipalities are the vital organs that are dependent on the nerve center, and in turn supply it with whatever vital nutrients it may need. This delivery system is a massive tangle of concrete tributaries and capillaries flowing to and from the city center. We might be able to imagine ourselves as being individual blood cells flowing down these capillaries. After all, a living being dies when the blood supply to its nervous center is cut off, just as LA would cease to exist if we stopped living and spending our human capital there.

Each person traveling through this arterial system must have their own form of transportation (especially in a city such as LA that spans 100 miles north to south, and roughly 80 miles east to west). If you were to look out of one of those tall office windows in one of the magic office buildings on any given night of the week, you would see a perfect example of a circulatory system: The rivers of white lights from incoming traffic, as blood cells not yet oxidized. Moving away from the downtown area, you would see the blood cells as an oxidized river of red from the tail and brake lights of thousands of cars, trucks and vans. It is a perfect system, except for the fact that it is a system that is strangling the entity that it strives to support.

The sustainability outlook of this current system is not good-for many reasons: continued unbridled population growth for one. Availability of potable water is another problem, reliable energy production another. One recurrent theme that seems to be the lynchpin of the whole mess is the depletion of non-renewable resources.

So there I stood, leaning against the balcony railing, looking over LA-lost in thought and holding a cigarette that was about to burn down to my fingers. It was at that moment that I saw it: A hybrid car, the Toyota Prius to be precise. It was rolling to a stop out in a lane of traffic directly beneath me. A woman on a bike was peddling across the intersection and the flow of traffic from the city had been forced to take a momentary break.

I gave the car a good looking over from the balcony and noticed that the rear of the car had two stickers on it; one by the rear passenger's window and one by the bumper. The stickers advertised the fact that the car had been retro-fitted with the very EDrive technology I was taking a break from researching. The EDrive system allows you to plug your hybrid car into the wall socket in your garage at night, and expands the already excellent fuel efficiency of the vehicle.

The Prius has been available on the global market since 2001, and has risen drastically in popularity since the price of crude oil spiked at $72 per barrel in April of 2006. Due to the innovations introduced to the auto market by the Prius, Toyota has been propelled to the position of the world's foremost auto manufacture. Conversely, General Motors, producers of the gas-guzzling Hummer, was slammed down to junk-bond status in May, 2005.

The Toyota Prius utilizes a system where, at lower rpm's (0-1,200), one of the vehicle's electric motor/generators (MG1) provides emission-free mobility. For travel at higher rpm's, the vehicle switches to an internal combustion engine modified for more fuel-efficient performance. A second electric motor/generator (MG2) comes into play in the range of 1,200 to 1,540 rpm's and supplies 50 kilowatts of charging power to the nickel metal hybrid battery (NiMH).

A Prius retro-fitted with the EDrive technology, known as a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), further enhances the fuel efficiency and low-emissions performance of the Prius.

The EDrive system, developed by Monrovia, California based Energy Control Systems Engineering Inc., can be installed in any 2004 or later Toyota Prius for between $10,000 and $12,000 and doubles the vehicle's fuel efficiency (estimated at 100 mpg, or 1000 miles per tank).

By replacing the standard NiMH battery system (75 lbs) with a lithium ion battery system (250 lbs, fitted under the carpeting in the trunk), the EDrive system increases the available energy to the electronic drive system twenty-fold.

The standard battery control system is also replaced by customized computer hardware that increases the rpm limit at which the car's drive system is switched from electric drive, to the gasoline engine.

When you take one of these PHEVs out on the interstate, and gasoline consumption becomes necessary at higher speeds, the EDrive hardware allows the vehicle to perform as a true hybrid vehicle, with both electric drive and internal combustion drive systems working in tandem-further reducing gas consumption and emissions.

While the car is not in use, the lithium-ion battery system can be recharged by plugging the car into any 110 volt electrical outlet.

Some concern has been raised by skeptics that no real decrease in hydrocarbon emissions can be experienced by trading emissions from one form of fossil fuel (gasoline) for another (i.e. coal used in energy production). And it should be mentioned by way of full disclosure that the first test EDrive Prius was released in 2006 as a result of a contract between EnergyCS, California's South Coast Air Quality Management District, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison.

However, the amount of electricity consumed per charging session of the PHEV system (approximately 9 hours), equates to only about $1 and alternative sources of power, such as photovoltaic cells, can be utilized to recharge the vehicle's EDrive system.

According to Southern California Edison and other proponents of the technology, the move toward PHEVs is a move away from dependence on foreign oil. Less than three percent of domestic energy production is petroleum-based, whereas 60 percent of the petroleum used in transportation is derived from foreign sources.

Given these facts, the Prius out under my balcony in a river of fuming, oil-dependent vehicles, seemed to represent the future of urban transportation, a move away from the current deleterious levels of hydrocarbon emissions, as well as a move towards a more stable overall economy.

Down in the street, traffic began to slowly roll again, as the girl on the bike pedaled on down the sidewalk and the lights turned green. Following the traffic, I looked down the road, back out into the city under the smog, and there it was-another monolithic sign of the times: a giant white GM Hummer, lurching into gear. The beast had something scrawled across its rear window in tall pink cursive script. From where I stood on the balcony, I couldn't quite make out what it said, but I'd put my money on "Avarice".