alt Hacker NewsThis discussion is all about vehicles with large batteries, but how about hybrids? With light enough and efficient enough motors, all kinds of designs might become practical:
- Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter, and they don’t need large batteries.
- e-bikes with tiny batteries?
- Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective.
- Power tools.
Replies
My first thought too.
While I see Toyota-style hybrids as designed for efficiency, there's also the performance hybrids like the new Porsche 911 T-hybrid where an electric motor spins up the turbocharger to eliminate lag while another integrated into the gearbox adds power. There is no "EV mode" so it doesn't need a large battery.
Arguably the most important characteristic of a sports car is light weight, so lighter motors would be immediately useful there.
> Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter
The hybrid electric motor in a Toyota is already pretty comparable in weight to the motor in TFA, but obviously much less powerful. You can see the main hybrid motor of a RAV4 at [0]. If memory serves both the Camry and RAV4 hybrid models are only 2-300 lbs heavier than their gas counterparts.
There's indeed a huge number of applications where lower weight electric motors could be useful.
The size of this motor is moderately interesting, but the power density doesn't really matter for most of the things you just mentioned. Almost every one of them is limited by the amount of batteries you can put in for both weight and power output reasons.