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Comment by skyyler | Hacker News Reader

Something closer to how diesel-electric trains work has always made sense to me, compared to the Prius.

Honda's hybrid system is a bit closer to that, but in practice it's not as reliable or efficient as Toyota's - they haven't been iterating on it for as long.

> Honda’s two-motor hybrid system can operate as either a series or parallel hybrid. The majority of the time, the system operates as a series hybrid. Its electric propulsion motor drives the wheels directly, while the gasoline engine connected to the electric generator/starter motor functions as an electrical generator, supplying power to the hybrid battery and/or the propulsion motor. Under certain driving conditions, such as steady-state cruising at highway speeds, the system switches seamlessly to parallel hybrid operation, with the gasoline engine connecting to the front axle via a clutch, and vehicle speed is proportional to engine speed (rpm).

Source: https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-automobiles/releases/relea...

Diesel-electric trains have no battery, though. The Chevy Volt hybrid was pretty close in that the gas engine acted only as a generator to charge the batteries and could supply enough power for the motors in case the batteries died. I’m not sure why Chevy killed it.

From the sound of Toyota's profits, I'll bet Chevy isn't sure, either. :)

General Motors (GM) has a longstanding issue where what they care about most is global platform sales. They tend to only prioritize platforms that can be used to sell as many vehicles as possible. Regardless of how brilliant and well-engineered it might be, if it's not one of their better sales vehicles (or a halo car like the Corvette), they kill it. Often, they are just impatient, and if they'd take some of these great platforms and developed them and nurtured them, they could've expanded them into one of those global top sellers, but they tend to keep a close eye on shorter timelines.

The Volt was an _incredible_ piece of engineering, but it was also an incredibly expensive architecture that was basically mandated as part of the government bailout of GM. Sadly it was perceived as a money loser and that was that, traditional hybrids just hit lower price points.

Diesel electric trains need extreme amounts of torque to pull all that weight. There is no reason at all to assume what works for a train would be a good choice for a car.

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