General thoughts on Hybrids

valhalla360 wrote:

JRscooby wrote:

Yes, reaction time. But I bet the 'bot is more likely to be paying attention, and will react quicker. And if your car is talking to another it knows is 500 ft ahead, and that car must make a sudden reaction to say a deer jumping into the road, your car using that info, and the info from the other 2 cars between, should be able to smoothly miss the hazard.
But to get back closer to what is available today. It would be possible to remote start the engine, drop the transfer case and transmission into gear, and let the toad push some on the MH. If the motors are already spinning, and only need power applied, sounds much easier. And if the Jake wire would send a signal to put the toad in re-gen, great. Even better if the car could sense when the battery was over 80% charge the car would drive some when MH was cruising to be certain to have room for the re-gen when you what the whoa.

Yes, the computer is unlikely to get distracted and will have a faster reaction time...hence 10-20ft spacing but there are limits and margins for error that must be kept. 4-5ft is pushing what can reliably be maintained due to variability in perceiving that the brakes are on, braking performance of the vehicles, road conditions, etc...

As far as pushing the MH...there's a reason for the saying...don't put the cart before the horse. Especially given the tiny percentage of cars to be sold that would utilize this feature, it's just not worth the trouble.

The computer is fast but there will always be factors involved that can make vehicles stop at different rates. I think that you are better off keeping the two tied together for several reasons.

I don't recommend pushing the motorhome with a toad, just reducing the amount of drag that it has on the motorhome with the focus being to use when needed most. However, many people that I have spoken with that are pulling toads don't have brakes in the toad and say that they are not needed. This would indicates that some pushing is not harmful.

I think that people would pay good money for a prospective toad to be compatible with a standard 7 pin trailer connector and I really don't believe that it would cost much to add that to modern vehicles. Or at least have it readily available as a dealer installed option. On most new cars all you need is to hook the wires to the car's existing PLC through dry contacts except the brake controller would need an A to D converter. All together about $100 plus a few lines of code that only need to be written once. I see a lot of toads on the road and considering that adding brakes and lights to them can easily cost $2,000 plus they are a nuisance to use. There is a lot of money available for the taking to whoever does this.