550 Km Prius Gives Hope For All Electric Vehicles

A Toyota Prius-based taxi in Cairns, Australia had clocked up 550 kilometers in travel before it required a battery pack replacement, that's around 340,000 miles for those living in the olden days.

This is obviously good news for Toyota as it may alay some of the fears behind people taking up their whale-shaped hybrid but it's also good news for all electric vehicles and hybrids.

The NiMH battery tech in use by the Prius is pretty old in comparison to packs in some of the newer vehicles coming or already on the road. To hear that a battery pack will sustain thousands of charges and discharges for up to 550 Kms (easily twice more than I'd ever drive in a single vehicle) means the rather hefty replacement cost may never need to be forked over and maybe when it does happen battery tech will have improved enough to make them cheaper and more efficient.

The taxi company mentioned that their Prius cost half as much to run and half as much to maintain as a regular vehicle in their fleet. Imagine the savings if they used a car that didn't rely on fossil fuels for propulsion.

Publicity Stunt: Batmobile vs F1 Car

So the British Grand Prix was on at the weekend, The Dark Knight will be out next week and both events feature over the top super cars... what to do, what to do. It seems some PR person or persons thought that having the Batmobile (AKA The Tumbler) drive around a race track with Toyota's F1 racing machine would do the trick and going by the number of cameras seen in the video it seems to be a success.

Unfortunately the Batpod was also there but luckily it's so hard to drive even a highly trained F1 race driver can't get the stupid thing to work.

The video over at Autoblog is pretty boring but the photos look pretty cool. BTW, they don't actually race because you wouldn't want to embarrass Batman as I'm sure the F1 would kick The Tumbler's ass.