Dear Lazywebz... (Automotive Edition)

[bjarvis]

Last night, as I was driving home from a night shift at the data center, I was thanking $deity every, oh, 10 seconds or so that the passenger cabin of my Civic was warm & toasty despite a nasty windchill factor in our region. Most conventional gasoline & diesel engine vehicles use heat from the engine's operating combustion to warm the passengers and defrost the windshield.

How do the Prius, Leaf & Volt warm their human passengers?

I suppose those with an internal combustion engine could run the engine to generate heat but that would have a huge impact on gas mileage. They could use their battery power to run electrical heating elements; I have no idea how much of an impact that drain would have on their range.

Can anyone with first-hand knowledge enlighten me?

Comments

[snousle.livejournal.com]

A somewhat nerdy point - the drop in MPG you experience is not as consequential as it appears to be. Suppose your car goes from 40 mpg to 30 when you turn the heat on. You'll be using an additional 0.0083 gal/mile for heat.

If you have a less-efficient car to start with, and you go (say) from 20 mpg to 17 mpg when you turn on the heater, that's using 0.0088 gal/mile for heat. So the cost of heat is higher in the less efficient car, even though the difference in MPG appears to be lower. MPG is a very counter-intuitive measure of fuel efficiency!