[geeks] electric cars

[Dan Duncan]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> " Trains are also diesel hybrid-electric, at least in the US.  They
> " have been for quite some time.
>
> locomotives have had electric transmissions since just about their
> invention around ww1.  there have been hybrids but the few i know of
> were rare one-offs made for specific jobs.

Your basic locomotive is a series hybrid-electric.
http://travel.howstuffworks.com/diesel-locomotive.htm
Maybe the one-offs were parallel hybrid models?

> yeah - in an autoweek drive, a diesel jetta got almost the same
> mileage as the prius, and much more comfortably.  a diesel prius would
> be easy - it's the echo/scion/yaris engine, which has a common rail
> tdi version in other markets.

Diesels are hard to find in the US, and even manual trannies are getting
as rare as hen's teeth.  The vehicles that offer 4wd (or AWD) and a
manual tranny rarely offer them TOGETHER.  I ended up paying quite
a bit more to get the combo.

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# I drank what?  -Socrates