Okay, let’s now drive it in real life. You’re off to office and start the car. At start-up, only the electric motor is used, and you’re still using it when you exit your building compound and slowly build up speed while you reach the main road. Now, you have reached the main road, which means you can pick up speed. At this moment, the engine has also got into the act. Now both the engine and motor drive the wheels. While at it, that clever little generator also recharges the battery with whatever power is surplus. All this is happening inside, and you’re blissfully tackling the traffic. You get a clean stretch, and stomp on the pedal. The Prius accelerates with a surge, thanks to the battery which supplies additional energy. Wow, now you have left the traffic behind, and approach a roundabout. Time to cut down the speed. At this time, the Prius understands that all that energy build-up shouldn’t be wasted. So the motor, driven by the car’s wheels, acts as a generator, and turns that kinetic energy into electrical energy and it gets stored in the battery. This bit is called regenerative braking, which you’ll appreciate in the stop-go-stop-go part of your daily commute (now you know why that braking section was included in my lap). You have come to a full stop at the roundabout because the cop says so. Fine, the engine has automatically shut off, and when the cop allows you to move on, the Prius proceeds ahead, using the...? C’mon, have you been paying attention? Yes, the electric motor. Very good. And so on and so forth. And the best part is that the system is self-sufficient, you just have to fill fuel once in a while and don’t have to charge the car at all.
Now what makes this Prius better than the earlier one is that it is much more responsive. This is thanks to improvements in combustion in the IC engine, a new high power and high torque electric motor, a faster rotating generator that allows for better acceleration at low and medium speeds, and a more compact battery that features a higher power density than the previous one. And there are other significant improvements in the new Prius that I place in the category called P2C2E (Process Too Complicated To Explain – borrowing from Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories).
Nevertheless, the new Toyota Prius is an amazing machine, and there’s hope for mankind after all. I would love to drive one here in Mumbai, and experience it over a longer period of time. The kind of technology I appreciate is the type I don’t have to try to understand.
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