Check out this homepage article about Ford's plans to make the Super Duty a plug-in electric. Obviously Ford thinks there's a market for big electric haulers. What do you think?

 

Yeah, I hear the whole bed is gonna be one giant battery.

 

A plug-in hybrid is a HUGE deal for trucks.

Kudos to Ford for being the first

 

And they did not get a Bailout, and yes I do know they do get some Gooberment cash for some of their green stuff.

But a Big Kudos to Ford

 

Diesel-electric locomotives are a sweet deal.... maybe a smallish Deutz diesel turning a generator to supplement the plug-in capacity.

 

It IS still a "hybrid" - the big deal is that you can plug it in and charge up the batteries.

And, I'm sure, has regenerative braking, so everytime you hit the brakes, it recharges the batteries. Which is great in city driving...

 

That's sweet now maybe a SD can get 20 mpg city. I'm curious how strong/what type of an electric motor they will be using. i know electric motors have 100% torque @ 1 rpm but our trucks are heavy and a lot pull heavy. If its not done right i can see a lot of diesel guys moaning because they don't have the pulling power off the line.

 

Who's going to start the "PSD vs. V10 vs. HYBRID" thread?

 

We have to wait until someone here OWNS one

 

Diesel locomotives have been hybrids for years and are very efficient and powerful. If we could start merging that into truck we could move mountains. Well, more of them.

I think it is a great idea, but should always be an OPTION on the trucks, never standardized. At least not until the electric vehicle infrastructure is well rooted.

On the flip side, why would anyone built a big electric vehicle infrastructure if there isnt a lot of demand.

 

Yea, Ford, Good luck with that. A Super Duty Volt, are they nuts. A $90,000 truck that will sell for $120,000, I'll take two.....

 

Once again (see the other Ford hybrid thread here in the SD forum)... Locomotives are not "hybrid". A hybrid has a battery and electric motor, and an internal combustion engine.

A diesel locomotive is a diesel driving a generator, driving an electric motor.

Quite a different thing.

 

The Volt has an internal combustion engine, soooooo how is it different. Where do we dispose of all these batteries????

 

I'm very aware what "Hybrid" means. Hybrid locomotives are a real thing.

Evolution

You are correct, most locomotives are in fact a diesel motor, powering an electric motor. Why? They simplest reason is torque. With an electric motor you can dial down the speed rather than having to shift. Can you imagine shifting in a train?

That is obviously a very basic explanation, but that is the premise of the design.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/tra...ocomotive1.htm

 

And we thought the 6.0 was an over complicated electronic nightmare! Wait until you have to wait for the tech to graduate his night school electronics theory courses to repair your truck, when the early Raymond intellidrive 1 systems we were backed up 3 months just learning how to make the scr's live through the replacement process, then Steinbock went to a/c drives and it took an electronics engineering degree to simply troubleshoot regen braking problems and 1 fault code shut every thing down on all these systems! Now that being said and that I worked on these things for a living, as well as trained apprentice technicians to work on them, there is absolutely no way in heck I would buy one, the technologey to make it rugged enough for my pick-up is still 10 years out!