Deflated Prius owner.

[fury]

Wouldn't be surprised to see China leading the way sometime soon.. with a massive demand for vehicles in the future, and an obvious distaste from external influence such as OPEC, and probably less corporate oil slavery at the top of government, maybe this is a path they will investigate.

[fdrx7]

With just diesel generators, if you did happen to drain the batteries to the point where it can't or very slowly moves the car (probably the diesel motor kicks in to prevent this anyway like the Prius), how long would it take for the batteries to get to a point where it's capable to providing acceptable performance?

Depends on your driving profile. But the systems never let you run the batteries down below a safe charge level (SoC). Most manufacturers go for around a min of 30% SoC (even on mobile phone batteries) otherwise the cycle life of the batteries falls fast. To give you an idea - the big buses run down to ~30% and then over the next hour charge to ~80% before shutting off. They can then run on electric for a coupe of hours again.

Performance never changes because it's bloody hard to be taking more power out than you're putting in. The faster you go the more you have to brake so you just get more regen. On sports cars it's a bit more difficult. They draw shitloads of power and brake so hard you'd need megawatts of regen ability to recover. Using supercaps instead of batteries can help here because they can park silly amounts of energy in a brief period but have bugger all bulk storgage. So while you can recover enough juice to give you - say - 75kw for the next 10 seconds. That's all you've got. It's just dead weight until you hit the brakes again. Does give you interesting options like RWD with the motors in the front hubs giving 4WD out of the corners....