Plug-in Hybrid Suburban A plug-in hybrid built by college students. Professor Andrew A. Frank of the University of California, Davis, tells us about his modified Chevrolet Suburban and reveals his visionary plug-in hybrid technology. Duration: 155 sec Date: Oct 30, 2007

This car is a Chevrolet Suburban and you might noticethe conventional Suburban gets aboutfifteen miles per gallon, but this car gets thirty.We take out the big V8 engineand the automatic transmission.What's in here is a one point nine literSaturn engine.There's an electric motor right behind it.The one point nine liter and the electric motorgives you performance equal to or betterthan the original big five point four liter V8.We out-towed the stock vehicle at the General Motors proving ground.We drove the entire off road courseat General Motors in Phoenixon the electric motor, using battery power only.Didn't even use a drop of gasoline.These batteries in these cars are lifetime batteries.Lifetime means fifteen years, one hundred and fifty thousand miles.If you plug in the car and you use electricitythat's equivalent to buying gasoline at aboutseventy cents per gallon for this car.When a person realizes it's a difference of four to one in cost, they'll plug it in.The batteries don't take up any space on the interior, at all.They are underneath the floor.Here are the batteries.When it will drive sixty miles, it will only use eighty percent of the charge.Then we maintain these batteries at twenty percent state of chargewith the engine.And the engine then drives the car mostlyand when it's down at twenty percent the batteries are providing the accelerationbut the engine then fills the batteries right back up.This is one of our new transmissions.This transmission is the highest power continuously variable transmission in the world.This will transmit three hundred horsepower almost continuously.This is ninety-five percent efficient.Mechanically, actually, this car is much simpler than a conventional car.There's far fewer parts, mechanical parts, but there's a lot more computers.Diagnostics and all that is all on these computersso it makes the job of a mechanic even simpler.It doubles the fuel economy, when it's using gasoline.And it has more power.When it's using gas.But the first sixty miles, it doesn't even use gas.Endependence.info