Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

I was won­der­ing today what the car mar­ket will be like in 10 years once hybrids as used cars become more com­mon then they are today.  I’m sure by that time the foun­da­tion tech­nol­ogy that hybrids are built on will be rock solid, but what about from the used car perspective?

We are used to check­ing the brakes, trans­mis­sion, and even how the engine sounds (I’m assum­ing if an all elec­tric car is mak­ing any noise that’s a bad sign), but hybrids have some unique issues that need to be addressed.   The first being the com­puter.  The com­puter in a hybrid is much more com­plex then even the most advanced con­sumer sports car.  Reg­u­lat­ing bat­tery charges with the use of gaso­line isn’t rocket sci­ence, but you can’t fig­ure it out on an aba­cus either.   What sort of diag­nos­tic tools will the aver­age con­sumer need to check out the hybrid the guy is sell­ing on the side of the road?

The other issue that is a larger prob­lem then the com­puter that the con­sumer may or may not have input into, it’s the prob­lem of the bat­ter­ies.   How will con­sumers be able to ver­ify the bat­tery age?  How will they be able to ver­ify that the bat­tery are actu­ally com­pletely oper­a­tional?  What if the bat­ter­ies take charge but your total usage of them is about 10 miles per tank of gas?  If you are get­ting poor mileage because of the lat­ter sce­nario would it even be a sav­ings in gas?   Hybrids run­ning off a gaso­line only aren’t nec­es­sar­ily the effi­cient side of the equa­tion, they receive their ben­e­fits from the bat­ter­ies, the bat­ter­ies aren’t up to snuff you will be using more gaso­line then buy­ing a nor­mal gaso­line pow­ered small car (bat­ter­ies aren’t light…yet).

I also would like to see bat­ter­ies at Auto Zone or some such store so we can actu­ally do main­te­nance and change the bat­ter­ies our­selves.   Once this becomes the norm, maybe we’ll see User set­tings such as change the bat­ter­ies every 60000 miles for opti­mum per­for­mance.   Until all the things are in place and the tools exist for a user to do a com­plete diag­nos­tic (we need some­thing sim­i­lar to a check­sum to ver­ify that there has been no tam­per­ing or cus­tom mods done to the car which may or may not cause issues) I’m not going to trust used hybrids.

Aren’t we sup­pose to make new tech­nol­ogy more reli­able and effi­cient?   There is still some gap­ing holes in the hybid deployment.