Hybrid Hummer Promises 100 Miles per Gallon

Posted by: superscientist

The Hummer is the poster child of excess consumption and inefficiency, but a Utah company is converting the much-maligned SUVs into a range-extended electric vehicle good for 100 mpg and a range of 40 miles.

Raser Technologies will unveil the Raser H3 on Monday in Detroit. It promises a 90 mph top speed, off-road capability and a lithium ion-battery you can recharge in as little as three hours. What's more, the company says the drivetrain can be installed in other trucks and it hopes to have 2,000 converted vehicles on the road by the end of next year.

That's a tall order, and there is no shortage of companies promising us wonder cars with miraculous fuel economy and impressive range. But Raser is taking a different approach. It isn't building a car from scratch like Aptera Motors or Lightning Hybrids. Instead, it's essentially cribbing from the Chevrolet Volt and Fisker Karma to convert existing vehicles with off-the-shelf parts.

"We've taken the worst environmental offender on the road and made it greener than a Prius," David West, the company's vice president of marketing, told Wired.com. "It truly is incredible to see and hear a Hummer that truly hums."

Because SUVs are popular but get lousy fuel economy, they're great candidates for electrification, said Jim Spellman, company vice president. Spellman came to Raser from General Motors, where he worked on the Chevrolet Tahoe hybrid.

"SUVs and trucks are the number one selling vehicle in America," he said. "Unlike the Prius, which is a mild hybrid vehicle, an eco-friendly SUV will get people's attention."

Spellman says there are practical reasons as well: Trucks are big enough to package the gasoline engine, electric motor and lithium-ion batteries without radically altering the bodywork or designing an all-new vehicle.

"Unlike the Volt and other hybrid cars we didn't have to build an entire car around the battery packs," Spellman said. "There was plenty of room in the back of the Hummer to install them, and they don't affect the ground clearance of the vehicle."

Raser Technologies has been building electric motors and developing geothermal electric plants since 2003, and Spellman says it started "cutting steel" on the H3 prototype 15 months ago.

The prototype we'll see in Detroit at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress on Monday features a series-hybrid drive train similar to the Voltec system in the Chevrolet Volt. Like the Volt, the H3 will be driven solely by electricity. The engine -- the 260-horsepower 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder used in the Pontiac Solstice -- will drive a 100-kilowatt generator to recharge the three lithium-ion battery packs. Fisker Automotive is using the same engine in its Karma range-extended EV.

All together the battery packs have a combined capacity of 40 kilowatt hours and total weight of 600 pounds. Raser claims a recharge time of between 3 and 10 hours, depending upon the voltage of the outlet the batteries are plugged into.

For the sake of comparison, the Volt uses a 16-kWh pack that weighs 375 pounds, while the Tesla Roadster has a 53-kWh pack weighing 992 pounds.

Tying it all together is something Raser calls the Hybrid Master Controller, which is a fancy name for the software that manages the engine, generator, motor and batteries. It was designed by FEV, a hybrid drive train engineering firm that is working on a range-extended EV based on the Dodge Caliber. General Motors provided some expertise along the way, said GM spokesman Kyle Johnson.

"We're well aware of this project," Johnson said. "We helped them with some of the electronics integration and did some consulting."

Getting all the hardware to fit required modifying the Hummer's chassis. The transmission was moved back, the drive shafts altered and the exhaust re-routed. The Raser H3 also has a smaller fuel tank -- 11 gallons instead of 22 -- and it's been moved to make room for the batteries, which are mounted under the vehicle near the rear axle. Despite the mods, Raser says the vehicle doesn't lose any of its off-road utility.

West says production will begin "soon" and the company hopes to have 2,000 vehicles in the form of SUVs and trucks on the road by the end of 2010. He says Pacific Gas & Electric has requested two of them.

No word yet on how the project will be funded or what the vehicle will cost. Raser promises more details when the vehicle is unveiled Monday.

Photos: David West / Raser Technologies. Used with permission.

Above: The Raser H3 uses a turbocharged 2.0-liter gasoline engine to drive a 100-kilowatt generator, which recharges the lithium ion batteries as they approach depletion. It's the same engine Fisker Automotive is using in the Karma range-extended electric vehicle.

Above: Raser says it started with the Hummer H3 because it's big enough to package a gasoline engine, an electric motor, three battery packs and the control unit without extensive modifications.

The Volt will get roughly 40-50 mpg after the battery is discharged enough to cause the range extender to kick in.

This thing weighs, what, twice what a Volt will weigh? At least. And has lousy aerodynamics. It's going to get 100 mpg?

Only by making silly assumptions. Like, counting trips under 40 miles as free mileage. (It isn't, and there are appropriate ways to convert it to mpg-equivalence.) And figuring users will only use the vehicle in certain ways - like, 90% of all use will be on battery alone (which you've already counted as free).

That thing will never get more than 20 mpg on the range extender. If that much.

The EPA needs to get cracking and establish some mileage rules for plug-in hybrids, methinks. The fog is getting mighty thick.

It's got a gasoline engine so it can recharge on the go. and it's STILL only good for 40 miles? That's what you consider to be "range-extended"?

Sounds to me like a really good reason NOT to start with a pig of a SUV like the H3.

No matter what they do, it's still ugly as it ever was, still will drive like the military vehicle is based on, and is still a hazard to anyone in a 'reasonable' size vehicle. I'll still flip off every one I see no matter what kind of mpg is gets.

This is the same misguided idea as thinking a hummer with Bio Diesel is green. Sorry guys but CO2 is CO2 if it comes from gas or vegetable oil and therefore polutes the environment alike. What it does is just taking away the Bio Diesel from better usages.

And just to remind everyone that most of our electricity on the grid is provided by firing coal and so electricity from the grid is NOT green and will produce CO2, too.

Posted by: Anddreas Schaefer | Apr 17, 2009 3:31:31 PM

Well, it isn't very clear, agreed, what the "range" of 40 miles really means. But, the comparison numbers from the Volt and Tesla are illuminating. This thing has a combined battery pack capacity 2.5 times that of the Volt. If you make the simple assumption that this thing weighs twice as much as the Volt, you could expect it to go further on charge alone than the Volt. However, it clearly is vastly inferior in terms of drag, so you might reduce your expectation to roughly matching the Volt's 40 miles range.

This is probably the claim they are making with that "range" of 40 miles.

Agreed that the equivalent mpg numbers are becoming meaningless. A cents per mile figure would be better, with an agreed-upon set of factors such as price per gallon of gas, and price per kWh of leccy.

I completely agree. There is no way in hell this thing would get anywhere near 100MPG. The only explanation is that they are talking about an average MPG one would get while taking a trip of a fixed distance, say 100 miles or so. Then they divide the miles traveled by the gallons of gasoline used --- obviously disingenuous when the first 40 miles are all electric.

However, considering most people don't exceed 50-60 miles per day except on road trips, the vehicle probably would get the equivalent of 100 or more "MPG" on an average work day commute.

That said, the electricity required to travel x amount of miles is far cheaper than the equivalent amount of gasoline, and even more so when the vehicle is charged at night during off-peak hours.

No, the vehicle goes 40 miles on electricity alone before needing to even start the generator.

He's absolutely right. The range needs to be at least . 3 times as far. What is this, a hummer for ants?!?

Yes! Finnally, someone is looking at the buying trend of the public! We want the SUV's -- not the dinky ecofriendly smart@$$ tin cans the enviro-weenies want on the road. Yes it could go into something a little more aerodynamic, but as a proof of concept that fits the market and can be scaled to get profit, its not a bad start. I (and a lot of people I know) have need for something big. With six kids and one with a wheelchair you need a serious vehicle for the road. Anything I can get outta this type of package is gonna be better than the 8mpg 350cid I get now. Its just too bad that I'll have to take out a second mortgage to get it.

When a car takes two "fuels" you can't quote one of them and ignore the other. They should give miles/kWh and miles/gallon.

And, kilowatts are not free. At an average cost of $0.11/kWh a Volt which takes 16 kWh for a full charge costs $1.76 to charge. That sounds good, but only get you 40 miles before the gas engine kicks in.

Looks like the internal cargo area won't be affected by the extra equipment, but can it really go off-roading or tow a huge boat as well as the normal IC version? Isn't that the argument for average people buying these things? I mean, no one buys a hummer because of ego or some self image problem right?

Hybrid, shmybrid. The future of propulsion is in perpetual motion. PayPal me $5 and I'll send you my brochure.

source: http://carjake.com/hybrid-hummer-promises-100-miles-per-gallon