Converted Car Gets An Astonishing 100+ MPG

Plug-In Conversions Corporation (San Diego, California) is pleased to announce our participation with the California Cars Initiative (CalCars.org) and Nilar, Inc (www.nilar.com) in the first CalCars based East Coast conversion of a Prius into a PHEV (Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle) at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston. Nilar NiMH batteries are used which give the converted Prius a low-speed electric range of 15+ miles which provides overall mileage of 100+ MPG depending on driving profile. Nilar makes an advanced NiMH battery with characteristics similar to NiMH batteries used in electric vehicles that have attained 150,000 miles of battery pack life. While other battery chemistries show promise, no other battery chemistry to date has been able to demonstrate this longevity.

CalCars is a non-profit advocacy group that performed the first ever Prius conversion, and continues to promote PHEVs as the most viable solution to global warming and oil addiction. Plug-In Conversions Corporation has recently performed the first conversion in San Diego using Nilar NiMH batteries. In addition to achieving 100+ miles per gallon, the conversion dramatically reduces harmful emissions by using grid or solar-produced electricity as an alternative fuel source. Plug-In Conversions will use this first conversion for testing and to provide performance and emissions data to the California Air Resources Board. Plug-in Conversions Corporation distributes Nilar batteries and provides conversion services from its San Diego location.

For more information contact:
Plug-In Conversions Corporation, Poway, California • info@pluginconversions.com • (858) 486-9972

Rick DeMeis, Automotive DesignLine (09/21/2007 12:22 AM EDT)

Big news at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston was a teardown presentation on a Toyota Prius hybrid equipped with an extra pair of battery packs. These energy devices allow the vehicle to run in an electric-only propulsion mode for 14 miles before requiring a power boost from the car's internal combustion engine. The developers say the overall result is an effective mileage of over 100 mpg, depending on driving profile.

The conversion was designed by the California Cars Initiative using advanced NiMH batteries developed by Nilar. According to Nilar founder Neil Puester, the battery consists of thin layers of electrodes (about 4 x 10 inches in area), so the current path between cells is on the order of 0.050 inch, as opposed to roughly 4 inches in conventional NiMH batteries. Simply put, the result is a battery pack equal in power and energy, Puester says, to that of an original Prius battery, but in a package 11 inches long rather than 29 inches.

Kim Adelman of Plug-In Conversions Corp. (Poway, CA), a distributor for the system, noted, based on previous court rulings, the conversion should only impact the Prius battery warrantee rather than that of the entire car. There are also liability issues that need resolution because the batteries are below the trunk floor in a safety crumple zone.

Adelman adds the cost of the 2-pack conversion needed for the 14-mile electric-only operation is $10-12 thousand. Is plug-in performance worth that cost? Right now, early adopters are the ones opting for the cars, according to Adelman—but in light of the "planetary emergency" of global warming and foreign oil dependence, he's looking for more widespread interest, because he says, over a 10 year life of the car, that's about $1k per year, which is much less than the cost of the gas that would be saved annually by a typical driver.

Adelman is limited by some of the restrictions that Toyota built into the Prius, such as the 34 mph speed limit when running solely on battery power. Should Toyota come out with their own PHEV Prius (which, in current testing, goes 62 mph on batteries), Adelman said, they will give Plug-in Conversions an even more fun vehicle to work with.

The additional packs Adelman uses are Nilar nickel-metal hydride packs. NiMH batteries are the ignored child of the current battery boom - everyone is looking towards lithium technology - but Nilar's Kurt Jensen says their time is not over yet. Jensen was also at the booth and spoke with AutoblogGreen about the Nilar battery technology and some of the patent issues that automakers face when working with nickel-metal hydride batteries. He didn't get into great detail about the intellectual property issues that cover this technology, unfortunately. You can hear Adelman talk about the car here (8 min, 5 MB) and Jensen talk about the batteries here (10 min, 7 MB).

And of course they are more environmentally friendly, leaving a fainter carbon footprint. It’s the environmental issue that rekindled Protheroe’s interest in electrics. He recently read a newspaper article about the California Cars Initiative, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit startup of entrepreneurs, engineers, environmentalists and consumers promoting 100-plus mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Protheroe, wanting to know more about hybrids, contacted the people at CalCar and volunteered to help them convert a car to a plug-in hybrid.

With his mechanical engineering background (a degree from Carleton University in Ottawa), he figured he could do more to help. So Protheroe and his son, Chuck, 21, designed a battery box, reducing conversion time from a week to two days. “Now our target is one day, eight man hours,” says Protheroe. “That’ll soon be possible with my ‘factory-made’ parts.”

Protheroe is starting a business to manufacture the components needed to convert a 50-mpg Toyota Prius to a 138 plus or minus mpg PHEV. A heavy-duty battery pack will supplement the Toyota’s existing battery, and a circuit board will interface with the Toyota computer. Once installed, the components promote the electric drive while suppressing the use of the gas engine. “The result,” Protheroe says, “is a car that runs better and can get over three times the gas mileage. The record is something like 188 miles per gallon by some guy in Seattle.”

To recharge a PHEV, you simply plug it into a standard 120-volt outlet, and it draws the cheapest power available, while you sleep.

It sounds so simple, you wonder why everyone isn’t converting to PHEVs.

“It’s not simple,” Protheroe insists. “It’s complicated and the hardware costs at least $10,000. If the car companies were mass-producing them, it would cost maybe half that, but they’ve done everything they can to block it, as they always do.”

Indeed, the car companies have a history of fighting every innovation — seat belts, catalytic converters, air bags — crying plaintively that change will bankrupt them. In each case, Congress stepped in and legislated, but when it comes to hybrids, it has been unwilling to lead or follow. “They can’t even get fuel standards raised,” says Protheroe. “Car manufacturing has actually changed very little in the past hundred years. In Henry Ford’s day, cars got about 20 miles per gallon, and they don’t do much better now.”

According to Protheroe, what he and a handful of other engineers are creating uses off-the-shelf technology. “The car companies say it doesn’t exist, that it’ll cost billions to develop it. That’s total bull. We have all the pieces. I believe there is substance to the conspiracy theory that the car companies and the oil companies are in bed together. It’s appalling. And since few people seemed to be doing anything about it, and since I like to be thought of as a man of action, I got involved.”

Protheroe and his wife own a candy store in Petaluma called Winsome Lass on Western Avenue. He laughs. “I’m an engineer who is captive in a candy store, which gives me plenty of time to ponder these things. That store is going to be the first place on the planet with this conversion technology displayed in the window. I imagine people walking by and saying, ‘Wow, I want that for my car.’”

It's been a big week around the world for those of us tuned into events and legislation addressing the issue of global warming. Locally, the cover story on the Business page of the North County Times (Dec. 12, "Plugging hybrids: The wave of the future" ), revealing Poway resident Kim Adelman's personal commitment to going green by creating a business of hybrid plug-in conversions, powered in his case by solar, was inspiring and something thrilling to look forward to.

Events around the world put Adelman's work in that much more of a positive light and matched the challenge Al Gore made with his mighty speech in Oslo, Norway, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize and asked us what we're going to do to rise to the planetary emergency Adelman also mentioned.

Elsewhere, delegates from more than 180 countries have met in Bali, Indonesia, to discuss and renew efforts with the Kyoto Protocol. Here, in our country, the Energy Independence and Security Act made it through the House of Representatives.

Add to it the bipartisan committee work under Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif, on a bill mandating reductions in greenhouse gases ---- ready to present to Congress early next year ---- and it's fair to say we're taking big steps in the right direction.

It's that disturbing statement by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that came out a few weeks ago that said the effects of global warming are accelerating faster than before that reaches our deeper sense of urgency.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, also honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, clarified that efforts we postpone now will make efforts needed later that much more drastic and difficult.

Contrast the events in Bali, where smaller governments like Japan and Australia are showing big efforts for change, but China and the United States seem to be playing the "I'm not going to if you're not going to" game. Regrettably, they look like a couple of big kids on the block who, rather than agree to the concept of cap and trade, have chosen to fold their arms in some silly standoff.

This isn't a time for standoffs. What we need is responsible domestic and global cooperation and a collective willingness to rise to the purpose to meet this challenge, and that means everyone from voters on up to those who represent us.

The majority of Americans consider global warming a threat. This view should be represented fairly in Congress. It's time our local elected officials hear from us, considering three in our region voted against recent action. Casting one vote during the election represents many other votes to come. It's something to remember when we hit the polls.

Understanding global warming today was made possible by a noble patriot with a purpose. Al Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his devotion to this planet and humanity. He's done his job, Kim Adelman is doing his part, and the rest of us need to do ours.

Mary Oren lives in Carlsbad.

Plugging Plug-In Conversions

By Bill Moore

EV World video interview with Kim Adelman, founder of San Diego-based Plug-In Conversions Corporation

Open Access Article Originally Published: November 17, 2007
Kim Adelman's electric, plug-in Prius is, admittedly, a work in progress. You can tell that from the makeshift tie-down straps holding the car's extra nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries in place and the open bundles of wire snaking through the cargo compartment.

The Prius' cornflower yellow and mint green paint scheme, however, is gorgeous.

It was the Toyota hybrid's stunning exterior that attracted me to car, which Adelman had cunningly parked just off the street to the entrance of Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport. I had to get a photo of it and that's when I ran into the owner and founder of Plug-In Conversions, based in San Diego, California. I had first met him at the premier of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" in LA in 2006. He was chatting with Chelsea Sexton, who has herself become a celebrity of sort after appearing in Chris Paine's highly successful documentary about the tragic fate of GM's EV1 electric car.

After taking me for a short drive down the street and back, I got Adelman to talk on camera about how he became involved with the grid-recharged hybrid car movement, which he describes as a "vortex" into which he was inexorably pulled, in large part because of an email announcement he came across from a battery maker in Colorado.

Click To Play
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the interview is Adelman's admission that having 25-40 miles of EV-only driving range, which requires a significant investment in very expensive lithium batteries, isn't nearly as important as he originally thought it would be. While his personal car, which is the test bed for his conversion kit, has an electric-only driving range (at speeds below 35 mph) of up to 25 miles, he has discovered that a smaller battery can still deliver dramatic improvements in fuel economy. He estimates that even a car with just 8 miles electric-only range will get the equivalent of 100 mpg for the first 16 miles. And assuming you can recharge the car during the day for the drive back home at night, you can achieve the same fuel efficiency as a car with a larger, more costly battery pack.

This is why he is planning on offer three different conversion options, each with a successively larger battery pack with the lowest priced model (8 mile EV-range) targeted to cost $8000 installed, a process that will be done at the owner's location in just one day.

It's a bold scheme, but Adelman concludes it's critically needed because he sees the world caught in a "planetary emergency" requiring bold action; of which plug-in conversions can be an important tool to reducing oil dependence and ultimately greenhouse gas emissions.

Inside NiLar's Bi-Polar Battery

By EV World

Neil Puester briefs EV World on the workings of his firm's new nickel metal hydride battery

Open Access Article Originally Published: February 14, 2008
The lead acid battery that powers your typical electric wheelchair can weigh 110 lbs. and needs to be replaced every year.

By contrast, a comparable bi-polar nickel metal hydride battery from Colorado-based NiLar would weigh between 25-35 lbs. and have a 7-10 year life cycle.

How it manages to accomplish this is the topic of a conversation I had with the company co-founder Neil Puester, whose background in battery development dates back to 1971 and the UTC battery that helped power the Apollo spacecraft, as well as underwater applications.

The lead acid battery that powers your typical electric wheelchair can weigh 110 lbs. and needs to be replaced every year.

By contrast, a comparable bi-polar nickel metal hydride battery from Colorado-based NiLar would weigh between 25-35 lbs. and have a 7-10 year life cycle.

How it manages to accomplish this is the topic of a conversation I had with the company co-founder Neil Puester, whose background in battery development dates back to 1971 and the UTC battery that helped power the Apollo spacecraft, as well as underwater applications.

After working at Optima Battery between 1984 and 1996, he made the acquaintance of Lars Fredrickson in Norway while developing a battery for the Norwegian military. That friendship would eventually lead to the creation of NiLar in 2000 in order to commercialize a NiMH battery that wouldn't result in a patent fight with Energy Conversion Devices and Chevron Texaco, which owns the patents to certain key technologies found in most of the batteries that power today's hybrid cars.

Siting at a table off the side of the exhibition area at EVS 23, Puester generously took the time to explain the history and general workings of his bipolar cell, using the above cutaway model and a competing battery that uses conventional technologies.

What distinguishes the NiLar from a normal NiMH battery is how the internal components are arranged. Think of the traditional nickel metal battery as a jelly roll with three key layers: the cathode, the separator, the anode layers. These are rolled together with their respective positive and negative contact tabs at opposite ends of the roll. A lithium ion cobalt battery will generate between 3.3-3.6 volts. This compares to the typical lead acid cell at 2 volts.

In order to assemble the battery, all the individual cells have to have their respective tabs welded together, positive-to-negative-to-postive, etc. All these little "jelly rolls" are then wedged into the battery case, leaving open space between the round cells.

As Puester explained it, this type of construction means electrons have to follow an energy robbing, heat-producing circuitous path that his bipolar approach avoids.

Think of the NiLar cell as a lasagna, multiple alternating layers where the "tab" isn't a little slip of metal, but as an entire sheet that runs the length and breadth of the cell, as illustrated by the different colored layers in the cutaway. The advantage of this approach is it allows for more efficient flow of energy through the battery, as well as much easier and therefore less costly manufacturing. The biggest drawback, however, is that it generates just 1.2 volts per cell. This means it will take more cells to produce a workable voltage in most electric vehicle applications. A NiLar battery module like that above is rated at both 12 and 24 volts at 9 amp hours. The difference is there are more layers in "lasagna". The operating temperature range of the battery is between 20-125 degrees F (-6 C to +52 C).

Nilar has been granted 13 patents and has an additional 3 applied for; interestingly all of them through its international headquarters in Sweden where Puester claims the patent filing process if faster and more thorough than elsewhere.

During 2007, the company was only able to turn out about 7,000 modules in low volume production, but it plans to ramp this up to more than 20,000 this year. In addition to the wheelchair application, Plug-in Conversions in San Diego is marketing the Nilar battery, mainly for use in Prius conversions. Puester has also identified another promising niche market, but he asked we not share it with our readers since he doesn't want his competitors learning of it. He would only say that the reason this particular niche likes it is because his battery "won't blow up."

The company web site also notes the following characteristics of the battery:

                                          • Offers more than 2,000 charge/discharge cycles
                                          • Maintenance-free operation
                                          • Fast charging
                                          • Fully recyclable