Hey, I got mentioned in another blog!

My hat goes off to Keith Barry for tackling this interesting subject.  It’s been my long-held belief that hybrids and electrics can make excellent race vehicles.  The sheer raw torque of an electric motor is frightening.  You want it to go and it goes, unlike gas engines that need to rev up into higher RPMs to really get going.  It’s a distinct advantage.  And hybrids like the Toyota Prius that basically have no gears in the transmission might not do as well as they could for gas mileage on high speed turnpike driving, but for low speed acceleration, there’s never any time spent changing gears, giving it another interesting advantage in races like autocross. 

Further, the braking force of a hybrid is not like a normal car.  The majority of the braking is done through “regenerative braking”.  Which basically means turning those electric motors that speed up your car into brakes that also slow down your car.  They act as generators, producing electricity (instead of consuming it) by creating a drag right on the hybrid transmission.  It’s a very wonderful feeling, because when the regenerative braking is working, the braking force is centered right down the transmission.  It’s like downshifting or engine braking.  It’s remarkably smooth and centered, a stability that really can’t be beat.  Unlike the normal wheel brakes, especially when they’re antilock brakes.

So hybrids should make excellent autocross racers.

In theory.

So, yeah, racing a Prius …

Don’t.

Been there.  Wanted to do it.   The perks sounded good.  And mostly, it’d just be really great to prove that hybrid cars aren’t slow.  They don’t have to be just for sensible drivers.

But the reality is not something that Toyota made worth while.

As I said, the electric motor’s torque (or in the case of the Prius, the two electric motors’ torque) can give the car great acceleration off the line, especially combined with a low or no gear hybrid’s transmission.  But at least with the Toyota Prius, there are flaws.  The first flaw comes in the form of the traction control (trac).  At the slightest hint of a loss of traction, the trac on the Toyota Prius instantly kicks in by automatically doing two things: It drops the electric side of the Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD), and it drops you to about 20% power.  What does this mean?  Well, for starters, your car will suddenly and quite literally crawl. Imagine trying to power-steer through a turn, your tires chirp, and suddenly your car practically stops regardless of how far down on the gas pedal your foot is.  It’s dangerous in driving, and it’s practically a race killer.  With sticky enough tires you might get lucky enough to not trip that trigger, but it’s a constant threat hanging over your head.

But that’s not all that trac threatens to screw you over with.  Let’s examine it a step deeper while we’re at it.  Whenever you even so much as start to slip, trac does two things, remember?  What was the first one?  That’s right, it drops the electric side of the HSD.  What is the predominant brake force of the Toyota Prius, being a hybrid?  That’s right, the regenerative braking.  What does that mean?  That means that the majority of your braking force, the super-stable braking advantage of a hybrid, suddenly vanishes at the slightest sign of a skid.  It’s incredibly dangerous in winter and other bad weather.  The actual wheel brakes on a Toyota Prius are incredibly tiny.  They don’t need to be larger.  They’re hardly ever used.  … Except when you need them the most!  So you skid and you go from the best  brakes you’ll ever experience to the worst brakes that you’ll ever see on a car, all in the single beat of a heart.  Oops.  Bad bad bad!

Now, this is all done to protect the vehicle.  As said, the raw torque of the electric motor(s) is phenomenal.  Enough so that, rumor has said, left unchecked it can literally rip the teeth right off of the gears.  So drop the electric side and you make sure your transmission doesn’t suddenly turn into lots of little pieces of metal exploding out of the casing.  That’s a good thing, I guess.  But the extreme response, from all to nothing in a heartbeat, is an incredible danger to the driver: in every day driving and in racing.  Surely there must be a better way to protect the car without putting the life of the driver in danger.

Toyota, apparently, doesn’t seem to think so however.  Because for as many years as the Toyota Prius has been out (even if you just count the “newer” version based on the Matrix body) this design “choice” (read “extreme flaw”) has not changed.

And so, the Toyota Prius is nothing like it’s hot Matrix cousin.  This dog don’t run.  If you try to race a Toyota Prius, you’re practically running through a minefield, just praying that you don’t misstep.  The trac brings out the worst in the Prius.  And the risks to the car are so great that I really couldn’t condone disabling the trac.

So what can you do to race in a Prius?

Well, for starters, there’s about a hundred stiffening devices to add to the car with more roll than a bakery.  Surprisingly, the engine in a Toyota Prius is already equipped with a cold air intake to improve gas mileage.  However, the stock air filter sucks.  Or, I guess, doesn’t suck, it chokes.  A lot of people driving a Prius have noticed that the car “hesitates” when you floor it.  I used to think this hesitation was just the computer trying to decide how to best accelerate, gas/electric/both.  Nope.  Tired of having to go to Toyota for an air filter, I installed a K&N performance air filter.  The hesitation completely went away.  Just like that.  (Which means, as little air as the Toyota Prius uses, the stock air filter somehow manages to not even provide it with that much.)

That’s just to make the Prius drivable.  Now to counter (as best as possible at least) the bad effects of trac.  First, don’t lose traction.  So the best tires that money can buy are in order.  And second, prepare for the wrath of trac + HSD.  Get yourself better brakes.  With the braking system of the Prius as goofy as it is (you’ll definitely need a dealer or major Toyota shop to help you as a special tool is needed to work on the brakes because of a highly complex valve system that needs a computer to operate) I’m really not sure if you can put better calipers in play or not.  But there are at least better performing brake pads that you can get.  Anything is better than nothing.

And if any driver needs to know their vehicle, a Toyota Prius autocross racer especially needs to really know their car.  Because you’re going to have to push – but never cross – that very fine line of traction to keep trac from kicking in.  Because once it does, you’re losing pretty much your whole engine and your braking force.  You’re losing time at the very least, and possibly going out of the cones (or even out of control if you’re in the middle of a tricky maneuver) when the trac hits the fan.

And if you can afford it, you’ll be much happier to race your Prius if you turn it into a plug-in hybrid.  You know, that costly mod where you fill the storage space under the trunk with batteries to jump the capacity of the high voltage battery?  Yeah.  Because nothing says pep in a Prius like green bars.  Not only do you increase your HV capacity, but you also give yourself the ability to top it up at will.  Which will do wonders for you, more so than anything you can try to do to increase engine performance.  (Not that you shouldn’t try, but hybrids have priorities, and for once the gas engine isn’t the priority in a race car.)

All-in-all, for a car as heavily related to the Toyota Matrix as the Toyota Prius is, it’s a very different animal.  Which is a real shame.  Toyota could have just gone the other way and made one truly excellent car.  Maybe one year…

My sincere hope is that other hybrids don’t suffer the racing ignominy that the Toyota Prius does.  Besides making for some unsafe driving from the day-to-day commute, it makes for a lousy race.  But the performance potentials of hybrids just blow pure gas engines away.  Electric motors really offer a lot, in acceleration, and in braking.  We’re still on the dawn of the Day of the Hybrid, and one day soon we’ll see just how sexy hybrid can be.

Motorcycles are great.  The wind in your hair.  The acceleration.  The maneuverability.  The gas mileage.  There’s a lot to love.

But there’s also a lot to not love so much.  Like bugs in your teeth, rain, and being turned into hamburger when some jerk in a car does something stupid.

Which is why one of my next automotive feats of engineering would be a hardtop covered motorcycle convertible.

The cover isn’t really that hard to imagine.  Two lower panels clip into place into sockets built into the bike.  These two lower panels then hold in place an upper panel that is the “door”.  I figure the upper panel would shift upwards a few inches, and then swing open on a hinge in the front so that the back end lifts up, allowing you in and out.

That part is relatively easy.

The hard part is, how do you make a completely covered motorcycle not fall over when you come to a stop?  You can’t put your feet down.  Something has got to balance the bike.

That’s where a strange idea I’ve had for a while now comes in.  The rear wheel is actually two wheels.  At high speeds they’re compressed together to act like a single wheel.  You get all of the maneuverability and driveability of a motorcycle.  But at low speeds the wheels separate enough to safely balance the bike like it was a trike.  That way you don’t have to put your feet down to balance at a stop.  You don’t even need a kick stand now.

Nifty, eh?  I’m not sure if the rear wheel expander should work by a spring (which I’m afraid might wear down over time) that the forward movement causes the spring to compress so that it expands as you slow down by mechanical force, or just a small hydraulic system that’s tied into the speedometer.  Or maybe there’s another better way to do it.  I don’t know.  Not having a shop to R&D in and tons of money to throw at projects, I can’t actually test anything.  All that I can do is dream.  But I’ve already thought of two ways that might work well.  That’s a start.

So why would you want a motorcycle that has a cover?

Well, for starters, remember this is a hard-top convertible done by removable panels.  By day it’s any ordinary motorcycle.  Well… almost.  Any ordinary motorcycle that has an expanding rear wheel so that at 10mph or less it turns itself into a trike so that you don’t have to hold up your bike at a stop sign.  But by night … or well, really, by bad weather, it offers all of the amenities of a car.

What do I mean “of a car”?

Well for starters no more bugs in the teeth.  The wind is out of your hair, so rain and windchill are no longer factors.  On top of that I figure there can be a heater and AC built in, so that especially when covered, you have those simple creature comforts.

But it’s about a lot more than comfort too.  It’s also about safety.  The panels aren’t just simple panels.  They’re a lightweight external shell suspended from a motorcycle roll cage on the inside.  So now when bike meets car, or bike meets road, the rider is offered a lot more protection than a brain bucket.  For the first time the bike actually protects from impact.  And to that end, I can even see miniature air bags arrayed in the frames to further protect the rider.  So now you not only have an all-season biking option, but you’re infinitely safer from Bad Things That Happen.

And again, when it’s a nice sunny summer day, just take off those panels and it’s basically any other motorcycle.

It’s about options.  It’s about safety.  And it’s about smaller vehicles that have better fuel economy and don’t congest the roads quite as much.

Maybe it’s crazy, but at Arah’s Automotive … who cares? 

Do you ever have ideas about things that you are dangerously undereducated on? Like you know just enough to be dangerous? Yeah, I do. And one thing I’d love to learn more on, through hands-on experience if at all possible, is exploring new and innovative automotive designs. Mostly I’m drawn to cars and motorcycles, which considering I’ve never even ridden a motorcycle may seem a tad weird. But just because I’m not an expert doesn’t mean I don’t have any ideas.

If I had millions of dollars, one of the first things I’d love to do is start my own out-of-the-box automotive design business. And one of my first R&D projects? Electric disc brakes.

Instead of a hydraulic system that pushes pistons into calipers that grab a disk, why not simply have a capacitor-backup (for safety) electro-magnetic caliper system? Imagine how much better response time an electromagnet has compared to a hydraulic piston and what that could do for traction control, anti-lock brakes, and so forth. But for that matter, imagine a system where water can’t get into a brake line because there is no brake line.

Toyota is already replacing their hydraulic power steering system with the electric power steering system that they pioneered for the Prius hybrid. They liked the electric system so much better that it’s moving into other cars now. It has fewer parts. It has less ways to break. It needs less maintenance. And best of all, it works better.

I think the same type of move could easily be done for brakes. More responsive brakes with less maintenance and failure points? Who wouldn’t want electro-magnetic brakes? Especially as more cars become hybrids, more cars are going to have electrical systems capable of supporting new ideas like this. The general concept is still ultimately the same anti-lock disc brake design. You just replace a complex and high-maintenance hydraulic system with simple maintenance-free electromagnets.

Yep. If I could open up Arah’s Automotive, electromagnetic antilock brakes would be one of my first projects.

Since I don’t have the money to do that in real life, I’ll just have to imagine. So I’m imagining Arah’s Automotive here, on my blog. This is where it begins.