You don’t
often hear 'hybrid' used in the same sentence
as heavy duty pickup, but if alt-power entrepreneur Ian Wright has his
way, that's about to change.
Mr. Wright
is the founder of Wrightspeed, a company dedicated to developing an
electric car, called the X1. The X1 prototype (pictured above) is a
proof-of-concept along the way to a practically produced roadster that
will be capable of outrunning most of the world’s
fastest petrol-powered supercars. The prototype can zoom 0 to 60 miles-per-hour
in 3-seconds with a 100-mile battery range.
But it's
not the hoontastic goal of having a speedy, battery-driven two-seater
that’s driving Mr. Wright. That kind of car won’t
save the planet.
If you want
to make a dent in oil dependence and CO2 emissions, you need to target
the vehicles that make up the biggest portions of those items. To Mr.
Wright, that means pickup trucks.
Mr. Wright
isn't picking on pickups. The native New Zealander
proudly owns a used 1997 Ford F-350 7.3-liter diesel dually Super Duty
that he uses to haul lumber, 12,000-pounds at a time, to a saw mill on
his personal property. The truck has 178,000-miles on the odometer.
"If
you want to do something about oil consumption, you can't
ignore pickup trucks. The numbers in the U.S. go something like this:
69% of the oil we use is for transportation. 81% of that is highway transportation.
Only 9% is air and 5% is marine. Rail doesn't count for much, only
about 2%. If you look (more closely) at highway transportation, about
95% is trucks and high fuel consumption cars. Then, if you look at the
truck portion only (about 57% of highway oil consumption), 95% of truck
sales have 14,000-pound gross vehicle weight ratings or below [Classes
1, 2, or 3]. Big rigs are only around 250,000 out of 8,000,000 trucks
sold. (Big rigs) do a lot more miles, but the fleet population is low.
And big rigs are pretty good loaded on a gallons per pound/mile basis.
An 80,000-pound big rig does well (fuel economy-wise). What aren't
good are the pickups we drive. When I'm towing 12,000-pounds, it's
not bad on a gallons per pound/mile basis, but when I drive it to work
with just me in it, it still doesn't do better than 14 miles-per-gallon.
Three out of the top five selling vehicles last year in the US were full
size pickups, so pickups are a big opportunity to save oil for the US,
because, to a first approximation, that’s what people drive and
to a first approximation, that's where all the fuel goes," describes
Mr. Wright, outlining his position for focusing on pickup truck fuel
efficiency.
Mr. Wright's
solution to the low fuel economy ratings of pickups is to design a
hybrid electric powertrain. The alternative engine technology developed
would be licensed or built in cooperation with a third party supplier
and sourced to the truck manufacturers during assembly.
Hybrid powertrains
come in three flavors: parallel, two-mode, and serial.
