Chrysler?s dipping a toe into the plug-in pool, dispatching 10 plug-in hybrid pickups to bake in Arizona to see how the truck tech does in the real world.
The Dodge Ram 1500 plug-in hybrids dispatched to Yuma, Arizona, are among 140 headed to 12 cities nationwide. Chrysler wants municipal fleets to beat the snot out of the trucks for three years to see how they fare in tough conditions.
?Cities have been carefully selected to help the Chrysler Group collect a wide range of data,? said Abdullah Bazzi, head of the automaker?s advanced hybrid vehicle project. ?Temperature extremes found in the cold of North Dakota or the heat of Arizona can have a severe impact on battery life and charging efficiency.?
Of the 10 trucks dispatched to Yuma, eight will be added to the police department?s patrol division. The remaining pair will roll into the utilities department fleet. Chrysler and the feds, who helped bankroll the pilot project, want the trucks rack up at least 16,800 miles annually.
No problem, Yuma officials said as they received the trucks Wednesday.
?There?s a match here between our need and Chrysler?s needs,? Greg Wilkinson, Yuma city administrator, said in a statement. ?We?re obviously excited to test these vehicles to supplement our existing fleet and to get them at a time when funding in the budget to get new vehicles has been tight.?
Yuma wants to see the trucks deliver a 50 to 60 percent improvement in fuel economy over the trucks they?re currently driving. That shouldn?t be tough, given that the Dodge Ram 1500 gets a combined city-highway average of 15 mpg.
Although the trucks picked up an electric motor, they?ve still got the same 390-horsepower 5.7-liter Hemi V8 found in the conventional rig. The liquid-cooled 12.9 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery under the seat provides juice. There?s a 6.6 kilowatt charger under the hood. No word on the motor specs, but Chrysler says the combined output of the engine and motor is 500 horsepower.
In addition to the electrical assist, the engine shuts down as many as four cylinders at highway speeds to boost fuel economy. The truck automatically disengages the front axle whenever it determines that four-wheel-drive isn?t needed, further saving fuel.
Project chief engineer Curtis Semak told Automotive News the truck has an electric range of about 50 miles. That sounds a bit high, given that we got an average of 32 from the 16 kilowatt-hour pack in the Chevrolet Volt. Semak says the plug-in Ram delivers 32 mpg in combined gas-electric mode. Once it drains the battery, the truck will average 22 mpg, he said.
It all sounds good on paper, and Chrysler wants to see how it does in the real world. It is sending the trucks to cities in North Dakota, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Arizona, California, Texas and Missouri. Chrysler says the vehicles will accumulate up to 6.5 million miles during the next three years; data will be collected via satellite to evaluate everything from drive cycles and charging patterns to thermal management, fuel economy and emissions.
No, you can?t have one. Chrysler has no plans to mass produce the truck. They?re part of a $97.4 million demonstration project funded in part by the Department of Energy to develop technology for future models.
Photo: Chrysler
Source: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/05/chrysler-plug-in-hybrid-pickup/
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