A few years ago, the automotive industry has been circulating a saying, there are only two kinds of hybrids in the world, one is Toyota THS, the other is other, which is undoubtedly the highest praise for Toyota in the field of hybrid technology.
However, in recent years, BYD, Great Wall, Geely, Changan, Chery and many other head Chinese independent car companies have suddenly opened up the second pulse of Ren Dou, have broken the barriers of hybrid technology, and launched products that are comparable to Japanese hybrid models, whether it is the efficiency, reliability or production and manufacturing costs of the hybrid system have been further optimized, providing the market with more cost-effective hybrid models.
Taking BYD as an example, DM models sold more than 40,000 units in February this year, while GAC Toyota and GAC Honda sold 16,000 and 11,000 hybrids in February, respectively.
So the question is, why are hybrids becoming more and more popular? Who is better to "mix" the hybrid technology released by major independent brands?
Why are hybrids becoming more and more popular?
For a long time, people's ultimate demand for cars is nothing more than more and more powerful power, but also lower and lower fuel consumption, although the development of the internal combustion engine has more than 160 years of history, but so far the thermal efficiency of traditional fuel vehicles is only 30%-40% of the range hovering. However, with the development of hybrid technology, thermal efficiency can easily break through more than 40%, and there has been a qualitative leap in driving texture.
Nowadays, oil prices are soaring, pure electric vehicles have also continued to rise in price due to subsidies and other reasons, and hybrid models have naturally ushered in excellent opportunities.
For a long time in the future, hybrid models will be the best transition product to make up for the endurance shortcomings of pure electric vehicle models and lead the market to the era of electrification, and will inevitably become the mainstream of the car market.
In fact, hybrid models have been widely available in the market for many years, but the reason why only Toyota and Honda hybrid models are widely praised is undoubtedly because of their excellent fuel saving performance and pricing that is not much different from that of fuel vehicles.
Before the so-called plug-in hybrid models on the market, most of them are based on fuel vehicles, additional drive motors and power batteries, although they can achieve oil and electric hybrid drive, but once the battery is depleted, the motor and motor that stop working will become a burden on the engine, and even consume fuel more than the pure fuel version.
The core advantage of the Honda i-MMD and Toyota THS is the highly integrated design, the motor is no longer a separate unit, but integrated around the engine or even replaces the traditional transmission structure. This results in a more direct power transmission that reduces energy losses while further reducing weight and reducing the load on the engine.
Therefore, even in the state of power loss, the engine and the motor can still work closely together to achieve fuel saving effect.
Nowadays, the hybrid technology released by major independent brands is actually based on a high degree of integration to achieve high efficiency and energy saving effects. However, different technical differences are formed at the structural level and in the matching of motors and engines.
What are the differences between DM-i, DHT, and iDD?
As we all know, the core technology of the automobile industry is very sensitive to invention patents, which is why Toyota, which is the first step, has been able to dominate the technology field for nearly two decades. So how do China's own brands now bypass countless technology patents?
First of all, we need to understand the current types of domestic hybrid technology, from the perspective of technical terms, in addition to BYD's DM-i, DHT, iDD has also appeared frequently in our field of vision this year.
The first is BYD's DM-i technology, fully known as Dual Mode intelligent, which literally translates to dual-mode -intelligent, which is actually a branch of BYD's DM dual-mode hybrid, focusing on economic and fuel saving. Another branch is the dm-p(powerful) with a strong power.
From the perspective of power transmission logic, BYD DM-i and Honda i-MMD are the same way, using dual motor electromechanical coupling unit EHS, from a clutch at the engine output end to achieve engine power and drive motor power series or parallel output.
When the clutch is separated, the drive motor is completely separated from the engine, the vehicle is driven by pure electric power, the engine is in a state of efficient charging with the flameout or driving the generator, which is equivalent to the extender electric mode; the clutch is closed, and the engine and the drive motor are output in parallel, which can bring stronger power.
The power transmission of the whole system is relatively simple and direct, which can effectively obtain the effect of fuel saving, but considering that DM-i is basically driven by pure electricity at low and medium speeds, the requirements for the motor are high.
DHT is one of the more frequent hybrid technologies of its own brand, its full name is (Dedicated Hybrid Transmission) hybrid special gearbox, the current Great Wall Lemon, Geely Leishen, Chery Kunpeng have adopted DHT's hybrid technology route.
In fact, DHT can be simply understood as a variant of the traditional gearbox, integrated into the motor unit, through the combination of different gears, to achieve the conversion of different power transmission modes.
It can also be understood as adding a gearbox to the BYD DM-i so that the engine has better fuel economy in direct drive mode.
Taking the Great Wall Lemon DHT as an example, it is equipped with a high-efficiency hybrid special engine, a drive motor and a generator dual motor, and the comprehensive efficiency of the power system exceeds 50%, and the flexible power distribution is carried out for different road surfaces, so as to maximize the engine efficiency in the full speed domain and all scenarios.
However, an additional set of clutch structure also means that the complexity and weight of the whole hybrid system are further increased, but fortunately, relying on the efficient output of the engine, the dependence of the DHT route on the electric drive is not high.
Therefore, we will find that the Great Wall Lemon DHT uses a relatively low power motor, for reference, BYD Song Plus DM-i low high drive motor power is 132kW and 145kW, and the Great Wall Lemon DHT is 100kW and 130kW.
And Geely's Hoshikoshi L Thor Hi · X adopts a 3-speed DHT, adopts a transmission mode similar to a 4AT gearbox, cancels the reverse gear, and adds a 2.5P motor inside the gear set to achieve 3 gear switching, and the power transmission mode is more refined.
However, in order to achieve lightweighting, Raytheon Power uses a 1.5T three-cylinder engine as the basis, but because the high-power motor acts as a starter, so that the engine speed can reach the working state instantaneously, it directly skips the start and low speed idling stages with the most obvious vibration, eliminating the concerns of the three-cylinder engine vibration.
In addition, Chery's Kunpeng Power also uses 3-speed DHT, but its complexity is the highest in the above hybrid system, using P2+P2.5 dual motor and three-speed dual-clutch scheme, with 9 modes and 11 speeds, the difficulty of matching debugging is self-evident.
However, relatively speaking, the scenes it covers are more comprehensive, achieving lower efficiency, while the combined production cost and system reliability of large and small motors + dual-clutch transmissions are more advantageous.
Finally, Chang'an's Blue Whale iDD hybrid technology, which is different from the above-mentioned dual motor series parallel hybrid architecture, Blue Whale iDD simplifies complexity and adopts P2 single motor + three-clutch series scheme. Structurally also relatively simple, the engine clutch P2 motor 6DCT dual clutch transmission.
This structure is similar to Volkswagen's P2 hybrid technology based on DSG transmissions, except that Blue Whale iDD matches a dedicated Miller cycle engine for this system to maximize efficiency, while the 85kW P2 motor is mainly used to improve power performance and increase explosive power.
Because of this, the small power motor with a 30.74kWh large-capacity battery also allows the UNI-K iDD to achieve a leading pure electric endurance of 130km.
Two years ago, a number of domestic independent car brands have launched ultra-high thermal efficiency "black technology" engines, but the so-called black technology is nothing more than the use of high-pressure direct injection, efficient combustion, low-friction technology, etc., which is not the unique black technology of car companies.
But nowadays, from the perspective of the above-mentioned independent brand hybrid technology, it can be described as a hundred flowers blooming, relying on the advantages of the brand's core technology, extending different technical routes, and can also be regarded as having an exclusive technology with recognition.
In fact, it is really difficult to make a conclusion about which hybrid technology is better at present, and the advantages and disadvantages of technical differences are different.
At present, the rapid mass production and large-scale launch of BYD DM-i does occupy a great market advantage, but with the growth of ownership, DM-i's electric drive-based technical route has also exposed many problems in some scenarios, such as the increase in fuel consumption at high speed and the decline in fuel saving effect in low temperature environments.
With the introduction of hybrid technologies such as DHT, which has both oil and electricity, and iDD, which focuses on the engine, it can also make up for the lack of some scenes.
Therefore, although in the propaganda discourse, a tank of fuel more than 1000km endurance, 4.XL 100 km of power loss fuel consumption, etc. will be used as marketing selling points, but consumers still have to combine the local climate conditions and actual car demand for comprehensive consideration when choosing. For example, in cold areas or consumers who travel more frequently, DHT and iDD will actually be better choices.