What price glory? What is the payback on another $7 grand dumped into your Prius?????
By REBECCA SMITH and JOHN MURPHY
At the Detroit auto show next month, one of the most highly anticipated new vehicles will be Toyota Motor Corp.'s third-generation Prius hybrid. It features a roomier interior and better gas mileage than the current model, the best-selling hybrid in the world.
But even these advancements aren't good enough for Daniel Sherwood and Paul Guzyk. The two green-minded mechanics have been modifying Toyota's Prius hybrids, which get an impressive 50 miles per gallon, and converting them into plug-in electric vehicles, doubling the fuel efficiency of a car that many people already see as the be-all of fuel economy. They can't wait to do the same to Toyota's newest Prius model.
Messrs. Sherwood and Guzyk are at the forefront of a small but growing automotive insurgency. While Toyota promises to deliver a factory-built, plug-in electric car by late 2009, and General Motors Corp. says it will bring its Chevy Volt plug-in car to market in 2010,
impatient mechanics already are making them with off-the-shelf parts.
"I don't know if Toyota meant to do it, but they gave us a car that's easy to hack into and easy to improve," says Mr. Sherwood, an electrical engineer and co-owner with Mr. Guzyk of 3Prong Power Inc., which has set up shop in a defunct Cadillac dealership building in Berkeley, Calif.
It charges about $7,000 for the conversions, one of several such shops in California doing such work.
An electric-powered car works essentially like a regular hybrid -- it runs on batteries and has a gasoline engine as well. But electric-powered cars run longer in all-electric mode. Plus, they include an extension cord, so the batteries can be recharged by plugging the car into a 120-volt outlet.
Beyond the Prius, some shops are converting the Ford Escape hybrid into a plug-in car.
To convert a Prius, the mechanics add a heavy tray of wheelchair batteries to a tool-storage space beneath the cargo deck at the back of the Prius hatchback. They strengthen the suspension, tweak the electronics and software and -- voila! -- the car that emerges from the shop is a plug-in hybrid, able to run as a pure electric before tapping its gasoline engine. Conversions take a couple days for a well-equipped garage with knowledgeable mechanics.
For some conversions, they are able to add lithium ion batteries that have four times the energy density of lead acid batteries, meaning they'll go four times as long between recharging or, at moderate speeds, before tapping the gasoline engine.
Getting those batteries is difficult and, since they're expensive, it can double the cost of a conversion.