Capitol Hill Blue Forums Hot Topics & Breaking News The RoundTable RoundTable for April, 2016

Don't complain about your airline's delay on social media, you might lose your slot on the flight when the plane finally arrives.

Mediate

What a spirited Sunday Round Table - NOT.

I think I’ll word on redesigning my just newly and modestly named blog, The Hal Brown Organization or THBO,



For my loyal, one might say intrepid and brilliant readers I figure since I decided to choose a dot org domain for my blog I’d name it The Hal Brown Organization... I’d appreciate any feedback on the now look which makes the sidebar a place of lesser posting, and puts the earthshaking stuff in the much larger left.

That sounds like a lot of fun.
Of course now the hot tip is the Subie flat four but then you need a cooling system, lots more work, but you can easily squeeze 250 HP or more out of them with very little tweaking.

With that much horsepower, VW bugs are an inherently unstable platform. They are shaped like a wing cross-section because the original designers wanted it to work well at 60 MPH on the autobahn with just 36 HP. When you hit 120 MPH, they flip because the wing takes off! I think the Karmann Gias are much better aerodynamically.

When I was young, I rebuilt a lot of VW engines. Now I'm into electric cars. Much cleaner and no exposure to parts cleaning solvent (which I never liked about the VWs). I bought an old Prius and replaced the battery, so my daily driver gets 46 MPG and cost me $3500.

The devil made me do it…
I just had to put this on http://halbrown.org this morning, dildo picture and all:

Hey ground effects, it's what's for dinner!
But hey, I am on record as saying I am not a fan of the Bugs anyway, I just get a kick out of seeing what people do with them.
A friend of mine knows the owner of "The Dung Beetle" which is a 340 HP turbo powered Bug which routinely does nine second quarter miles at around 140 MPH through the traps.
He says it gets a wee bit dicey but he has a couple of ground effects goodies mounted for that purpose.
But yeah, I think they're death traps and wouldn't own another after my first one in 1971.



I own an 07 Prius but I have to ask, was your replacement battery a brand new factory OEM or a remanned unit because I hear tell the remanned units are only about twelve to fifteen hundred bucks.
Mine only has about 85K on it and I just bought it about a year ago but I am getting tired of waiting for the weak battery to keel over.
The factory warranty is supposed to be 10 years or 100 thousand miles but if I can get a remanned unit for that cheap it would be worth the money and effort.
I'm getting about 38 combined, which is good but not great because I know lots of Prius owners who are getting much better, even more than your quote of 46.

I have a 2007 Ford Escape Hybrid with over 100k miles on it. It still gets between 28 and 32 MPG (depending on season), and I have had no indication that the battery is weakening.

Oh to be sure I know of Prius taxicabs with 300K on them where the battery is stil pretty good, and they still get at least 38 mpg if not more.
Yeah the Escape Hybrid is a damn good example, and 28-32 is spectacular for an SUV.

You're all so very very good. I drive a lifted Jeep Cherokee 4x4. Gets maybe 12mpg on a good day(downhill with a tailwind) But I don't drive much so I usually just fill it up once a month whether it needs it or not.

Mine is an 03 and it had the original battery failing when I bought it last year. I went online (ebay) and bought a set of 38 2005 cells for $1000. (Very good deal.) I replaced my 2003 cells with the good 2005 cells because I wanted to move up to the next battery design. (There are three types of batteries in American Prii.)

After a few months I started getting battery check engine codes, so I took that battery out and carefully measured each cell voltage. Three cells were much lower, so I went online again and bought three good 2005 cells. I reassembled the battery with the bad cells replaced and ran it for a week. Then I ran it in reverse a while to drain the cells as much as possible, took them out, and measured again. I resorted the cell order to match each pair of cells as close as possible to the average pair voltage. Put it back in the car and I have never seen a battery error since.

So it is certainly possible to DIY, but you do have to be careful not to electrocute yourself! And old prii with 38 cells have REALLY heavy batteries!