Quote:
Originally Posted by sperry
Um... it's a "hybrid" not an "electric car". It's the same reason the car doesn't charge from a plug in your garage. Toyota never designed it to be anything but a gas car with electric assist. Remember, the Prius is relatively unchanged since 1997... so the technology is like 15 years old now. The plug-in Prius (something that people have been doing via mods for a decade) is only finally coming out in 2012.
I give props to Toyota for making hybrid gas/electric commonplace with the Prius... but at the same time, if they had continued to be innovators (or at least licensed their tech out instead of sitting on their patents preventing the competition from innovating) we would have had something like the Chevy Volt in 1998 instead of 2010, and perhaps by now we'd have a large range of sporty electric cars for sale by a bunch of different manufacturers.
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Um, you do know that the gas motor only charges the batteries and doesn't directly propel the car right? The car drives with the motor completely off all the time. Why not allow it to run off the batteries until they become too low to safely run the car? I understand how Toyota designed it. In fact, that was my complaint.
