"Ridiculously complicated" seems a rather odd judgement for someone who only "thinks you are correct in your description".
I've been enjoying the process of learning more about this power train. It's truly fascinating. I'm going to have a lot of fun poking around in it. :-) The design that urbanlegend1031 suggested is a form of "series" hybrid-electric design. In that form the design devolves to an electrically powered car with a portable generator to charge the batteries. All motive power is ultimately from the electric motor driving the wheels, whether with a transmission or not. The Honda hybrids are a different "series" design, where an electric motor assists a gas engine for efficiency but cannot operate the car independent of that gas engine: the gas engine must be engaged with the transmission to operate the power transfer to the drive system. The Toyota hybrid approach is a "parallel" hybrid, where a gas engine and electric motor(s) are able to operate separately or in concert to produce motive power. A disengageable power coupling between the electric motor(s) and the gas engine distributes the drive energy to a transmission unit, nominally some form of continuously variable gearing in the Toyota literature although I haven't yet divined just exactly what the transmission design is that they're ascribing "continuously variable" to (there are several that come to mind, I just don't know what kind they're using). Yes, it's quite a complex design, but from all accounts they seem to have done a superb job of it and it works very well. I'm fairly sure at this point that this can be the most efficient as well as the most versatile type of hybrid-electric design as it can use the best qualities of either gas engine or electric motor depending upon the circumstances and demands being placed on it. How would you have designed it? Godfrey On Jul 27, 2006, at 9:59 PM, P. J. Alling wrote: > Godfrey, I think you are correct in your description, and it seems > ridiculously complicated that it is done that way. However no one from > Toyota asked me. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
