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Next-Gen Toyota Prius Getting TS040 Racing Technology

They say racing started immediately after the second car was produced and that’s probably the best thing that could happen to the automotive industry. That’s because it generated competition and helped a lot with car improvements. One of the most influential series today is endurance racing and it looks like the next-generation Toyota Prius will benefit from it.
Toyota TS040 Hybrid 1 photo
Photo: Toyota
Toyota Motor Corp. currently leads the WEC season’s manufacturer’s championship and, according to a report from Automotive News, it is testing technology aimed to be used in the 2016 Prius hybrid.

President of Toyota Motorsport GmbH, Yoshiaki Kinoshita, confirmed they already have tested pre-production parts for the next Prius, all aimed to increase performance and fuel efficiency.

The company hasn’t disclosed the exact parts, but they’re said to be mostly electronic related, such as microchips and microcontrollers. This is adding up to the automaker’s earlier statement that it’s developing silicon carbide semiconductors to be put on sale around 2020.

Don’t worry, it won’t be a rocket

The electrical improvements we heard about won’t transform you next-gen Prius into a roaring-buzzing street legal sportscar. They are mostly aimed at minimizing losses in the electric system, thus boosting efficiency and lowering fuel consumption.

And no, you won’t get a supercapacitor too soon neither. That’s because it won’t work that good on a passenger car. The TS040 is using supercapacitors because it needs to recover braking energy in about 3 seconds when it usually slows down from 186 to 60 mph (300 to 96 km/h).

Starting this year, the revised FIA WEC rules started to count in fuel consumption more, forcing automakers to decrease engine sizes and add turbos. Not Toyota though, which managed to achieve a 25 percent fuel cut by increasing its gasoline V8's displacement, add an extra electric motor, AWD and reach 1,000 hp.

A massive enhancement, but this will most probably translate into a 10 percent fuel efficiency improvement on the 2016 Toyota Prius hybrid, as it happened with each generation so far.
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