Goodbye Prius, Hello Volt

Newsweek has a story that's worth reading on why first-generation, Prius-style hybrids may be the first victims of a shift to plug-in hybrids. Why dump these relatively new cars? Because the market will need to make room for their much more efficient younger brothers and sisters. Of course, Prius maker Toyota disagrees:

"The fact that the Prius has been around for 10 years does not mean it is old news or obsolete. In fact, it keeps getting better and better," says John Hanson, a company spokesman ... Hanson says Toyota is doing research on lithium-ion batteries, and plans a plug-in hybrid prototype for next year. But he insists that for now its tried-and-true batteries are best, and that lithium ion isn't ready for prime time. "Battery science is not where it needs to be," he says.

Recently, we've seen a bit of news on the hybrid in the school bus industry. Next generation buses may be far from some district's economic reach now, but with more hybrids coming to market, the school bus industry will soon have its own similar questions to answer.

Generational Digital Divide in Your Garage?

Talk about the Digital Divide between those with access to information technology and those without it is well over a decade old. But what about the divide between how the older and younger technicians and mechanics look at technology? As Bill Siru discussed in March, there is only going to be more technology and it's going to require more training.

Education Week points to an interesting survey on the differences between how Boomers (ages 44-60), Generation X (ages 29-43) and Generation Y (ages 28 and younger) use technology. One interesting question for this blog is about the blogging. Only 28 percent of Boomers think it's acceptable to blog about work-related issues while 40 percent of Gen Y workers do. Even more striking, 62 percent of Gen Y access a social network (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc) from work, but only 14 percent of Boomers do.

All of those in the survey were in white collar jobs and most of the technologies were PDAs, social networking, email, etc., but the survey could pose some interesting questions for those in the school bus maintenance and heavy-duty diesel repair industries:

• Are older employees reluctant to use laptops, PDAs and other digital diagnostic tools or are they eager to learn?
• Are younger employees more inclined to use the Web, email, social networks, this site etc. to solve difficult problems in the garage or find out about new technologies?
  
• Are younger employees more interested in learning about alt-fuel technologies (i.e. CNG, Propane, Hybrid-Electric, Electric, Hydrogen)?
• If your younger employees are coming in with knowledge of "new" technologies (Web, laptop, digital diagnostics, alt-fuels, etc), how are you reaching out to your older employees?
• Do you have a clear and up-to-date policy about what technologies (cell phones, email, social networks, etc) are acceptable at work?
  

Better, Faster, Cheaper: New Battery May Technology May Be on Horizon

A better battery may be coming for the next generation of hybrid-electric school buses. Several sources report on a new report in Nature from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a new design for lithium ion batteries that allows the batteries to recharge more quickly. The similar lithium ion batteries are already in some hybrid-electric school buses and scheduled to to be in the Chevy Volt. But these can't accelerate quickly says Professor Gerbrand Ceder . The paper discusses a solution which has applications for laptops, cell phones and hybrid-electric vehicles. A great report at MSNBC, explains the science the behind the idea. The report also says that hybrid vehicle applications have some complications because the batteries are electricity-chuggers:

The ideal situation would be to have a network of high-power electric charging stations, which would allow you to juice up your electric vehicle on the road much as people fuel up their gas guzzlers today. Ceder and Kang estimate that an 180-kilowatt power source could give a full charge to the typical plug-in car's 15-kilowatt-hour battery in five minutes.

For school buses, with dedicated, regular runs, this probably wouldn't be as much of a problem. According to Scientific American story on the same report, the batteries would also be cheaper. This, coupled with increased production, would likely drive down vehicle costs. [On a side note, for willing to dirty their hands with the coments from the peanut gallery, comments below on the MSNBC story have a fascinating discussion of the real "greeness" of hybrid technology.]