Are Any Hybrids Electric Drive with Diesel Generator?

[disago]

Basically I want a diesel locomotive for the road but with slightly bigger batteries.

Diesel generator charges a battery that’s small enough to be cheaply replaced but large enough to give maybe 10 miles at 75mph. No direct drive from engine to road - I want the generator running at its perfect load at all times not subject to dealing with changes in power demand, speeding up and slowing down.

Does anyone make such a thing?

Why don’t they ALL make this thing?

I can recharge at around 30 litres of 10kwh fuel per minute, that’s what 18,000 kw per hour? Fast chargers are like 250kwh right? Ok I can’t use all those kWh as tractive motion but I can get 35% of the energy to push me down the road, that’s still 6300kw/h

I can radically simplify the generator engine - don’t need all the troublesome sensors and valve actuators we put on vehicle engines over the past 3 decades. A generator engine running at peak efficiency all the time just doesn’t need so much junk to reduce harmful emissions - it just runs less for the same output which is a far better emission reduction strategy (0 emissions vs “reduced” emissions).

Seems obvious.

[Matthen]

Nissan are doing this with the e-Power, but with a petrol engine not a diesel engine (emissions stuff I guess).


link


As to why not everyone is doing it - batteries are less complicated and easier to maintain, at a guess.

[Herbs]

i3 REX had this setup but again, petrol.

Was ace and eliminated range anxiety, got killed off a few years when they launched the bigger battery version which was a shame.

Not aware of a diesel one.

[cossy400]

BMW X3 30D mild hybrid gives battery boost and charges whilst driving.

We have one or though you cannot simply drive on battery power everytime you the throttle it uses both engine and battery.

[Phunk]

Nobody does this as no one wants a diesel and replacing batteries isn’t really a thing.

The closest you’ll get is a Volvo V60 PHEV

[cossy400]

BMW X3 30D mild hybrid gives battery boost and charges whilst driving.

We have one or though you cannot simply drive on battery power everytime you the throttle it uses both engine and battery.

[Evanivitch]

The massacre of kWh and kW was huge.

For reasons of costs and emissions, diesel hybrids are very few and far between. So must use petrol.

A Vauxhall Ampera was a good example of a 10kWh battery (35 miles) with a 1.4 petrol generator. Worked quite nicely.

[Pica-Pica]

I’m sure there have been diesel hybrids, but this type of set up suits a nat. asp. petrol. Honda hybrids have this set up of, pure electric drive, electric drive with petrol engine topping up battery, direct drive from petrol engine via a clutch, all on the same vehicle. Used on Honda Jazz, Civic, and their hybrid SUVs.

[otolith]

You're talking about a series (or serial) hybrid rather than a parallel hybrid.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a46275944/se...

They exist, but they are rare.

Mazda make one.

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/01/20220114-...

[Lo-Fi]

Clarkson, Hammond and May built one. The 'Eagle Thrust' thingy..

[rpguk]

These follow that principle of a small diesel engine acting as an efficient generator for a fully electric propulsion system. Apparently this particular implementation wasn't great though.

[kambites]

Matthen said:

Nissan are doing this with the e-Power, but with a petrol engine not a diesel engine (emissions stuff I guess).

As much refinement as emissions, I would imagine. A diesel engine running constantly at fixed RPM in a vehicle as small as a passenger car would need an awful lot of isolation to make the NVH acceptable.

[phil4]

Years ago I had a prius.

and at times that would do just that, again with petrol... it was very disconcerting as the engine note didn't always relate to the speed. So the one thing the anti-EV mob want... engine noise, really isn't something they want in this form.

[barryrs]

I'm starting to see more hybrid excavators on site that have gone down this route.

[Evanivitch]

otolith said:

You're talking about a series (or serial) hybrid rather than a parallel hybrid.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a46275944/se...

They exist, but they are rare.

Mazda make one.

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/01/20220114-...

Ampera was largely series hybrid.

[RizzoTheRat]

Herbs said:

i3 REX had this setup but again, petrol.

Was ace and eliminated range anxiety, got killed off a few years when they launched the bigger battery version which was a shame.

Didn't it also fall in to the wrong category for subsidies, tax breaks or something? It seems like a sensible way forward to me, it's a really common form of power in ships and trains. Mind you if you're going to do it surely you want a gas turbine instead of a piston engine

[kambites]

RizzoTheRat said:

Didn't it also fall in to the wrong category for subsidies, tax breaks or something? It seems like a sensible way forward to me, it's a really common form of power in ships and trains. Mind you if you're going to do it surely you want a gas turbine instead of a piston engine

I suspect there's just not enough demand for such a car to be worth making one, at least in Europe. The number of people for whom such a car would be better than both a conventional plug-in parallel hybrid and a BEV is probably tiny.

Regarding tax/subsidies I'm pretty sure a plug-in hybrid is a plug-in hybrid, irrespective of whether it's parallel or series.

Edited by kambites on Wednesday 21st August 10:58

[ZesPak]

There are some obvious downsides with this though.

One of them is battery size. Both power delivered and recharge speed (regen braking) will be seriously impacted by a smaller battery, with no backup of an ICE engine to deliver extra power when needed.

Most PHEV have a little over 100hp.

[samoht]

Merc did a diesel plug in hybrid, although while it has ~20 miles electric only range, when the engine comes in it connects to the wheels directly (parallel hybrid) rather than only acting as a generator like the Nissan e-Power.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mercedes/e-class/108...

[otolith]

Evanivitch said:

Ampera was largely series hybrid.

It was a very complex system capable of operating substantially in both modes, yes, but I don't think there was a scenario in which all of the output from the engine went to the generator. Or not in these schematics for the second generation car, anyway.

Engine, two motor/generators, power split device, multiple clutches.