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Comment by mrDmrTmrJ | Hacker News Reader

Let's say you want to make a hybrid car lighter-weight. Where is this useful?

Power density and cycle life are truly impressive. Energy density is super low

You would use these to provide peak power in a system that had short term power needs that were high above the average power needs AND had that power requirement as a bottleneck. Energy is the bottleneck for cars though, not power. unless you're wanting your prius to accelerate like a ferrari

Maybe it would be useful for less losses with regenerative braking? These would presumably be able to charge much faster and then trickle that power out to the normal battery. You'd need actual power numbers for a car to determine if it would be useful or not.

In other words this is for "boy I wish I didn't have to have so much extra battery capacity in order to get the power I need" situation which... cars don't have. Maybe in F1?

> unless you're wanting your prius to accelerate like a ferrari

That's the point of a hybrid.

It’s the best part of any electric drivetrain. Especially when you can remap the throttle to really launch from zero. :)

(I find that electric acceleration makes highway merging much safer.)

My EV has the opposite problem, something like half throw is full throttle and then the rest of the pedal does nothing. They do it for marketing reasons but I still don't like it

My ICE car does the same. The only use for almost half of the pedal travel is shutting down the speed limiter when it's active, with no change at all when the limiter is off.

That’s annoying. The Genesis throttle maps are what you’d expect: Eco counteracts a leadfoot, Comfort has good pickup, Sport is borderline irresponsible in neighborhoods, Boost is unreasonably fun.

I have completely failed to tell any difference between my EV's drive modes. It supposedly has eco, normal and power, but all they seem to do is set a limit on the motor output. Power seems to have no difference from normal.

Interestingly it seems to have some applications for high peak power and regen, they had a car in the Dakar rally:

https://www.jtekt.co.jp/e/products/capacitor/capacitor_mobil...

https://www.jtekt.co.jp/e/engineering-journal/assets/1019/10...

Regen braking,

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