Someone please explain what a self-charging hybrid means. Lexus' ads on telly say it runs on TWO power sources. But where does the battery power come from?.....the ICU....petroleum.

So it only runs off ONE power source. I understand about the gethering of kinetic energy when braking and putting it back into the battery, but from where did that kinetic energy come....the ICU. You cannot get energy from no-where.

11 hours ago, KannikaP said:

Someone please explain what a self-charging hybrid means. Lexus' ads on telly say it runs on TWO power sources. But where does the battery power come from?.....the ICU....petroleum.

So it only runs off ONE power source. I understand about the gethering of kinetic energy when braking and putting it back into the battery, but from where did that kinetic energy come....the ICU. You cannot get energy from no-where.

It is not a PHEV, it just has a Hybrid battery ... ICU is something you don't want, but if you have a PHEV or a  self-charging hybrid  you do need an ICE. The battery will be charged, as you rightly say, from regenerative braking and also sometimes from the ICE. Basically a fancy name for a Hybrid.

They are just trying to catch some of huge wave of demand from the battery electric vehicle (BEV) market. Recently the demand has been crazy. People looking to buy.

 

However some automakers like Toyota/Lexus have refused to take the signs seriously. They missed the boat so as to say. Likely they are scrambling to develop something now as they are missing out on sales. However it takes quite a while to engineer and develop a pure dedicated BEV. Furthermore there was a shortage of batteries and such a huge demand, so even then if you develop the car, like some of the Korean manufacturers, they couldn’t ship them because the batteries were delayed.

 

So in the end they threw out their old school pre-existing hybrid tech and rebranded it as “self charging” to try to tap into some of the demand.

 

There are always a enough people out there who will believe that their new car has some sort of new alien zero point self charging EV and they won’t need to plug in like the other EV owners do. I do wonder what they think when they have to visit the gas station to fill up? 

12 hours ago, JAS21 said:

It is not a PHEV, it just has a Hybrid battery ... ICU is something you don't want, but if you have a PHEV or a  self-charging hybrid  you do need an ICE. The battery will be charged, as you rightly say, from regenerative braking and also sometimes from the ICE. Basically a fancy name for a Hybrid.

By ICU I meant Internal Combustion Unit (Engine). But as I said previously, the regenerative braking energy put into the battery comes, originally from the petrol engine. 

I guess that if someone drove VERY carefully and needed very little braking, the battery would not charge very much, and hey, the vehicle is not a hybrid!