Thread: Hybrid Hilux announced

Originally Posted by gonetropo

providing you have the appropriate amperage on board you can turn 48v into whatever voltage you want. pretty much its a dc-ac-dc converter. heck i can turn 12v dc into 22kV (or more) if i want to. the conversion is pretty efficient but just like 12v dc to to 240v ac inverters they draw on average 20A dc input to 1 amp ac output

Yeah, nah imho. The higher the storage voltage, the easier it is to get the ponies to come and do the real work when you call on them...as in amps. Thats why Teslas (ssshhhh, I know what you think of them) store energy at around 350 volts. A 48 volt storage medium will require the amps to be 8 times higher than a 350 volt storage medium, when you want a shit ton of torque on hand. Then the copper wiring, bus bars etc etc need to be 8 times fatter etc etc, making things heavier and dare I say, get warmer.

And while I am not keen on wagons set up to take on the Darien gap being used as shopping trolleys, the batteries will generally outweigh all that paraphernalia.

Another big negative in my view, is the significant reluctance on behalf of the EV manufacturers to get involved in the whole-of-life battery management. They simply sell you them, then wipe their hands of the half tonne toxic suitcase bomb sitting underneath their vehicle. While robots were able to build the batteries, the process to safely dismantle them at the end of their life has not yet been mastered by man or machine with any great amount of regularity.