BRACEYOSELF777 said:
It cost money to move mountains friend. The TITAN is a V8 and makes almost 400ft lbs and 300+ hp. You can tow up to 9000lbs. None of this adds up to good gas mileage. Why did you buy the truck? If you wanted a truck with decent gas milage, you should of went with a 4 banger compact truck or like everyone else is saying...forget the truck....but a car. These Chevy's with their fuel management crap......they don't save anymore fuel than we do. A teacher in the school where my autoshop class ask how my gas milage was on my truck....I told him I average 15-16 hwy/city w/22'' rims. 16-17 w/stock rims. Around city...this guy gets 13mpg w/4.8L V8 in the newer Silverado. A truck is a truck...no matter what they try to do to save gas.
I agree, and my contribution to the train of thought here is gonna get long...
Horsepower versus torque is where it all happens in any hybrid vehicle. In electric motors, you have all torque available at all ranges of speed, unlike an internal combustion engine. You have to design the vehicle to take advantage of this; you have to do stuff like use field shunting to get the best efficiency out of the motors (back-EMF). Short answer: For best efficiency, you should eliminate the drivetrain entirely and put motors at each wheel, with each sharing ¼ of the load. That would give you 4WD all the time. Really, we should be looking at the example of a diesel-electric locomotive instead of a Prius, since the duties of each are radically different.
So let’s take a good hard look at what you’re trying to do with each, the same way you'd choose a power tool:
The Prius
In the Prius, you’re trying to accomplish moving a minimum amount of people and gear from one place to another at slow speeds (traffic-jam speeds) as efficiently as possible. To do this, the best answer is to completely switch off the engine and move the car with the battery power. When you look at this as the vehicle’s main mission, it’s pretty good at it – makes sense, right? Think about it – the Prius is essentially a single-mission vehicle. It just happens to also work for grocery-getting; that’s within the mission profile. But hey, guess what – you get it out on the open road for a long trip, and viola, it hits you: you can get a lot better gas mileage with something else. That’s because you’ve now departed from the mission that the vehicle was designed to meet efficiently.
A pickup truck
What’s the main mission? Is there one? Crawling through mud and sand? That’s one mission. Carrying home a half ton of stove pellets? That’s another one. Carrying stove pellets and getting up and down hills on a muddy or snowy country road? That’s another one. (Welcome to my place… :hahano: ) Towing (including safely handling and stopping) 8500 pounds? For sure, that’s one.
Okay, so far I have five different missions, and you notice that nowhere in here is the mission of idling in a traffic jam, mostly because a pickup truck isn’t designed with commuting in mind. It’s marginally useful for that mission, because it’s somewhat outside of its mission profile. Just like you pay the price in efficiency with the Prius when you take it on a long trip.
So how could you get ‘traffic jam’ incorporated into the mission profile of a pickup? The easy way would be to shut the engine off any time you’re stopped. But then you get the problem of what happens when the light turns green and you want to go. Everything else gets more difficult from there. Shutting cylinders off really isn’t a great idea, because it affects the dynamic balance of the engine. Personally, I would like to see longevity results on these engines where the cylinders are being shut down, held up against the method of shutdown (locking valves open, just turning off the spark, etc.). Anyway, in any hybrid version of a pickup truck, the drivetrain would have to be radically different, for one thing. There’s no way you can just plug in some kind of motor and expect to make a real difference, yet retain the utility in the vehicle.
The real problem lies in your basic need to have the necessary power available to get the job done. So when you think about the amount of drawbar pull you need to get a heavy trailer up to speed and maintain that speed on the freeway or up a hill, then your options for using a tiny powerplant go out the window. You HAVE to use something with enough power. And unfortunately, that carries more weight, and with the need to carry more weight, comes the need for more horsepower to move it. Suddenly before you know it, you’ve got a ¾ ton pickup rated only for a half ton.
So if I had infinite amounts of money available, I’d design a system that has a gas engine that runs at variable RPM to power a big generator (diesel is too heavy, since I’m adding so much weight with the generator), then crank the output from that through an inverter bank and then to AC traction motors on each wheel. A small(er) battery pack would handle traffic jams. You’d still have to start the engine periodically for battery recharge, but a good controller can take care of that. This setup would also take care of short-trip, around-town stuff.
Okay, so now we’ve redesigned the truck. But there are some real drawbacks: the truck would be more efficient in a traffic jam, but look at the cost you just added to it. For instance, if a Prius wasn’t a hybrid, what would it be? An Echo? Okay, so let’s figure this out: It’s about $12,000 more for what’s essentially a hybrid version of the Echo or the Yaris. Let’s figure about the same ratio for our Titans. That would make a Titan Hybrid cost somewhere past $50,000. Would you pay that? I wouldn’t, either.
Okay, Nissan, where’s our effecient diesel…? I'd opt for less go-power and better mileage if it would still tow my trailer at speed.
