General Fiat 500 Hybrid owner handbook to download?

[Officina red]

In these instances it’s all very subjective, the amount of money you can get off one car can vary from one day to the next or depending on what person you speak to at the dealer. I have a friend who buys all his new cars through a broker, who plays one dealer off against another. All In all the o oh real way to compare one car to another is the actual book price.

Also your opinion of one car is clearly not going to be the same as someone else’s. Case in point many of the journalists love the up Gti.

I don’t agree about the book price, nobody should ever pay that, at the least go to carwow , i find the best car reviews are the German reviewers on YouTube (they do English reviews as well) their the most fair and straight forward.

I do agree that the 500 is not a real hybrid, I read a review of the Suzuki swift, and they explained it’s “hybrid” was really a enhanced stop/start

But I’ve always said very few people buy the 500 for any practical reasons, it’s bought for style, the looks , retro outside, stylish insides, it’s something different that can be bought relatively cheaply.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

As I already said, you cannot say what the price someone will pay, while I agree that you’d rarely pay book price, the only way to compare one car to another by price is by the book price.

There is no other realistic or fair way to do it

 

[Samuel D]

In all honesty if I where buying one I would not want an automatic and I would want the cheaper car so to that end the hybrid is the only choice.

However do I think that the hybrid technology is as good as they claim...? no, its not, its not a 'proper' hybrid and if it were it would be a much better car.

So you want a cheap car and more elaborate hybrid technology at the same time. No can do.

Currently on the market are cars with:

• pure ICE like the Volkswagen Up
• 12 V hybrid like the Fiat 500
• 48 V hybrid like the Golf Mk 8
• high-voltage hybrid like the Prius
• plug-in hybrid like the Outlander PHEV

Each step involves more complexity, bigger batteries, and higher costs than the previous one but saves more fuel.

There’s no inherently right choice here, because customers don’t all have the same driving patterns, spending power, access to charging points, and tolerance of complexity. Moreover there are diverse and continually changing incentive schemes across Europe for each tech level or the emissions outcome of each level.

A-segment cars are facing a squeeze from two sides: regulators who want lower fuel consumption and customers who, while also wanting that, don’t want to spend money on electrification because they expect small cars to be cheap.

In this context, Fiat’s choice of a 12 V system is defensible. Unless I’m mistaken, none of its A-segment competitors have any electrification. Fiat has the luxury of being able to charge a little more for a 500 than VW can for an Up or Hyundai can for an i10, because of the 500’s brand history and design appeal. And FCA more urgently needs to cut CO2 emissions than most brands (for reasons that aren’t entirely fair given that FCA already has lower fleet-wide emissions than Hyundai, for example, buy hey).

It is widely known that "mild" hybrid cars, including those from audi and alike with 48V setups, are purely there to get better figures on the new WLTP standards, and reduce emissions for the company, as there is simply no other point to them

If that is “widely known”, which is another of your claims offered without evidence, it’s wrong. The reason for electrification is fundamentally to reduce fuel consumption. Your cynicism does not prevent it working; nor does political support prevent it incurring other harms, like those associated with battery manufacturing. WLTP closely matches current typical use, which doesn’t necessarily mean your driving (in my driving I trivially beat the WLTP figures, especially in warm weather).

To Throw a spanner in the works here, you can have for £15920 (cheaper than the 500 hybrid launch edition at £16,900) a VW up GTI which is 115hp verses 70, it will do 0-60 in 8.8s verus 14s, and will still get you 53mpg on the same cycle as the hybrid and 121g/km of co2 on the same cycle, so all in all like for like, if you just played a numbers game the UP GTI is the obvious choice compared to the 500 hybrid launch. And the up does it all without a motor and battery hybrid set up.

Good for Volkswagen, but the numbers aren’t so straightforward. I have no interest in the overpriced Launch Edition, and the low-speed portion of the WLTP cycle (city traffic) shows greater benefit for the Fiat 500 versus the Up as you’d expect from the hybrid tech. Meanwhile, the Up GTI has daft wheels, turbocharging, direct injection, and other features I would prefer to avoid, especially in a Volkswagen.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

So you want a cheap car and more elaborate hybrid technology at the same time. No can do.

Older proven technology, this is fiat's first go at anything hybrid, and there is no guarantee that it's going to be reliable. Never be the first to buy something, let someone else figure out the problems.
They've been making the Prius for some 20+ years, and some of them are still going now.

In this context, Fiat’s choice of a 12 V system is defensible. ~
And FCA more urgently needs to cut CO2 emissions than most brands

Hit the nail on the head

(for reasons that aren’t entirely fair given that FCA already has lower fleet-wide emissions than Hyundai, for example, buy hey).

Only because of the tie in with tesla.

If that is “widely known”, which is another of your claims offered without evidence, it’s wrong.

The reason I don't post evidence is because people never bother to actually follow links.
However if you are actually interested, go and google "Whats the point in a mild hybrid"
Same as all the tiny turbo cars popped up about 10 years ago, its all to save CO2, its not done for the benefit of the customer.

The reason for electrification is fundamentally to reduce fuel consumption. Your cynicism does not prevent it working

is it ?

in 1989 a Citron AX was able to do 100 mpg, if the name of the game was purely MPG, then we would see a marked increase over time of the ability of a car to get better MPG, but we don't, many new cars get worse MPG than they used to, yes I know they change the goalposts when it comes to testing, but in the past 20 years ago, if it said it would do 30 mpg on the brochure then 9 times out of 10 it would. Now the cars are designed around CO2 emissions, that's all plain and simple. The MPG always seem to stay the same but the CO2 emissions improve.

Meanwhile, the Up GTI has daft wheels, turbocharging, direct injection, and other features I would prefer to avoid, especially in a Volkswagen.

The Fiat has a battery that's small and untested as yet in the real world, the electronics is all new and the motor is new. It also has "daft wheels" that you don't want in favor of steel wheels (you can put steel wheels on an UP, or any other small car for that matter) So really you're trading one set of features for different sets of features. I'm not saying go buy an up, I'm saying on a comparison it makes the 500 "hybrid" look bad.


As I keep saying, if you're going to buy one then do so, you've obviously made up your mind that it is 1,000,000% the best and only car in the world.

Just how long it will last on the parisian streets before someone remodels it's appearance remains to be seen, so from that point of view i'd just buy an old 1.2.

 

[Samuel D]

Fuel consumption and CO2 emissions and are not independent things. They’re two ways to describe exactly the same thing.

When you burn petrol or diesel (carbon) in air (oxygen) you get CO2 (carbon dioxide).

The CO2 produced is directly proportional to the weight of fuel burned. So if you burn 10% less fuel, you produce 10% less CO2.

Therefore when the EU places limits on CO2, it places limits on fuel consumption. The 95 g/km CO2 target is the same as 4.1 litres of petrol per 100 km or 69 miles per imperial gallon (57 miles per US gallon).

Because diesel is a bit heavier than petrol, 95 g/km CO2 equates to 3.6 litres of diesel per 100 km or 79 MPG in the UK (66 MPG in the US).

This target was set when the NEDC test cycle was in force and refers to that, but the test cycle is actually the WLTP multiplied by a constant that approximates the old NEDC. You might see this referred to as NEDC2. The goal of this normalised test was to make sure companies weren’t rewarded for cheating the NEDC better than others. The WLTP, as I’ve said before, both produces higher fuel consumption figures and closes the cheating loopholes.

Today with RDE2 (Real Driving Emissions 2) we’re finally approaching a technology-neutral approach to all of this. For decades, diesel cars in Europe were arbitrarily allowed to produce more NOx and particulate matter (soot) than petrol cars, leading to the great market distortion that made diesel engines popular in passenger cars even though they are poorly suited to that. (Diesel cars essentially don’t exist outside of Europe, even in countries like Japan with high fuel prices.)

RDE2 restricts NOx emissions in a real driving cycle on the road to 50% higher than the laboratory-measured emissions. This is still far too slack, of course, but it’s a move in the right direction. It will get tighter in the future. It’s already tight enough that diesel cars now need a whole battery of combustion and exhaust-gas treatment technologies to meet it. One of those is a lower compression ratio than diesel engines of the past, in order to reduce combustion temperatures. Unfortunately that reduces fuel economy too.

For these reasons and others, diesels are becoming more expensive, complex, heavier, and less fuel efficient (although car aerodynamics, gearboxes, etc., have more or less compensated for the decreasing engine efficiency), while petrols are becoming more efficient and remain substantially cheaper. That’s why manufacturers are desperately moving away from diesel tech.

 

[chris3234]

I'm not sure I'd say petrol's are really getting any more fuel efficient these days

 

[Samuel D]

The rise of SUVs, crossovers, and electric gadgets has offset some of the engine improvements, but the thermal efficiency (work done per unit of input) of petrol engines has continued to climb.

While diesels have got lower compression ratios (from about 20:1 to about 15:1), petrols have gone to higher compression ratios. This Fiat 500 Hybrid engine has a 12:1 compression ratio. That would have required rocket fuel in the past to prevent knocking. It achieves this on 95 RON petrol.

Downsizing, turbocharging, charge cooling, direct injection, Miller cycle, various lean-burn strategies, exhaust gas recirculation, cylinder deactivation, techniques to reduce pumping losses from a conventional throttle (e.g. MultiAir), and many other schemes have improved the efficiency of petrol engines. Most of these enhancements cannot apply to diesel engines or were already required and present for the last twenty years (turbocharging, direct injection, etc.), so there has been no similar improvement on the diesel side.

In many ways, petrol and diesel engines have been converging, principally by petrol engines becoming more like diesels and the compression ratio of the diesel coming down.

There are other tricks. The 500 Hybrid (FCA GSE ‘FireFly’) has its crankshaft slightly offset to the side of the row of cylinders to optimise friction for the combustion cycle – the cycle with highest friction due to the highest cylinder pressures and thus highest forces – at the expense of friction during the compression cycle. The result is lower peak friction and lower net friction over the four cycles, plus lower wear.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

so there has been no similar improvement on the diesel side.

really?? aside from massively increasing the fuel pressure over the years which seriously improves economy. the likes of Multijet technology, and other multi injection per cycle methods. Also diesels need the compression to provide the heat, if anything the compression ratios go up, as the higher the compression ratio, combined with multiple injections of fuel and carefully managing the timing of the injections makes for very fuel efficient engines.

There are other tricks. The 500 Hybrid (FCA GSE ‘FireFly’) has its crankshaft slightly offset to the side of the row of cylinders to optimise friction for the combustion cycle

This sort of information is not going to excite anyone at a party.

I have an off set crank isn't even going to get as much interest as "I have a fiat 500"

Necessity is the mother of invention.

The necessity is ever increasing standards for CO2 emissions.

 

[Samuel D]

aside from massively increasing the fuel pressure over the years which seriously improves economy.

More alternative facts. Why do this?

Higher injection pressure (shorter injection times) and multiple injections per cycle generally have a slightly negative effect on fuel consumption, but more importantly they reduce soot and noise. These techniques also tend to increase NOx emissions, but who cares if you’re faking the tests? Now that faking the tests is no longer possible, they dump AdBlue into the exhaust instead to take care of NOx. AdBlue at least works, although it makes buying and owning a diesel car even more expensive.

I have nothing against diesel engines in appropriate applications. They shouldn’t be used for 10-mile commutes in passenger cars, but unfortunately they were sold to all sorts of drivers who should never have considered a diesel, such as people who live in cities. France is even worse than the UK for this problem, because France taxed diesel at a significantly lower rate for a long time (now being corrected with complete alignment expected by 2022 … if the yellow vests don’t prevent it).

 

[PuntoHowTo]

More alternative facts. Why do this?

Wind your neck in. I thought you wanted a proper discussion?, Now you're turning into Trump, sooner or later you'll start yelling "Fake News" and stomping off.

Here are a couple of quotes from some very quick googling feel free to do some of your own research, before coming back with anymore "alternative facts" accusations.

"High pressure injection delivers power and fuel consumption benefits over earlier lower pressure fuel injection, by injecting fuel as a larger number of smaller droplets, giving a much higher ratio of surface area to volume. This provides improved vaporization from the surface of the fuel droplets, and so more efficient combining of atmospheric oxygen with vaporized fuel delivering more complete combustion."

"If fuel is injected into the engine at higher pressure it will burn more cleanly and efficiently. The common rail is a high-pressure reservoir of diesel."




Also this was a thread about the fiat hybrid engine, you seem to have become a bit preoccupied on the down sides of diesels rather than admitting any down sides to mild hybrids. Lets be honest here you can slap a mild hybrid on a diesel, but there is no point as an equivalent sized Turbo diesel would perform as well in testing in both economy and CO2 as the hybrid.

The old 1.3 multijet is still a very strong an economical little engine, and as fiat invented the multijet/multiple injections per combustion cycle technology, what you're arguing is fiat invented something bad despite them then proceeding to sell it to multiple car manufactures and as a crate engine all over the world. Boy fiat sure had the world fooled. The 1.3 was actually derived from the 1.2 petrol. (they are both actually 1250cc engines) but the diesel outperformed its older brother in every aspect.

"The injectors are electronically controlled to vary the fuel volume, and to vary the fuel pressure from about 8000 psi to over 27,000 psi. Higher pressure means better atomization, which yields a more efficient explosion."

 

[Samuel D]

I don’t need to Google it. That’s as likely to produce nonsense as fact, since Google searches the free internet. You can say anything you like on the web (see this thread).

Car journalists these days often know more about infotainment displays and what each car brand is supposed to represent in the popular imagination (e.g. German cars handle best, Citroëns suck, Fiats are unreliable, Toyotas are boring, etc. – all prejudiced nonsense of course) than how engines work.

I didn’t say multiple injection was “bad”. It was necessary to reduce soot and make diesel engines quieter, i.e. tolerable in expensive cars. No-one today would put up with the filthy, rattling, surging VW 1.9 TDI of sainted memory. But that crude engine had BSFC figures (brake-specific fuel consumption) as good as or better than anything you can get now, dipping under 200 grams of diesel per kWh of work done at optimum speed and load.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

I don’t need to Google it. That’s as likely to produce nonsense as fact, since Google searches the free internet. You can say anything you like on the web (see this thread).

Non of those quotes are from journalists, you won’t look things up and you know all the facts but then accuse me of not knowing what I’m talking about? I can at least look things up. Not that I had to, they have been cranking up diesel high pressure fuel pumps to ever higher levels for over 20 years.

Again you make nonsense statements about putting multijet fuel systems in fancy cars, yet fiat developed this and put it in a Punto and a panda and a fiat 500. Fiat didn’t develop it to put in a VW seriously what planet are you now on?

Honestly you can rant against diesels all you want but it’s 100% clear to anyone else reading this that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re not prepared to even look up the truth about the statements you’re making... these are the corner stones of someone who loves “alternative facts” take a piece of information get it wrong then refuse to admit your mistake or acknowledge that there is information that disproves you.

Getting back on subject, you don’t now how diesels work and you have everything bad to say about them good stuff. That does not affect in anyway the CO2 and MPG figures of the hybrid engine. It does negate the Fact that no matter what technology you want to praise or slam all of them are there for one thing, to improve emissions. Other countries that do not have such tight emissions requirements are fitting the same engine without any hybrid nonsense, why is that so you think? Other countries are even still churning out Diesel engines in small cars not because they are cheap or the most environmentally friendly but because people buy them and they are very efficient. They are not buying mild hybrids in these places.

 

[Samuel D]

The question was why manufacturers have increased injection pressure over the years, not if they have. That sort of debating tactic is pretty poor form.

You said it “seriously improves economy”. False. It opens the possibility of multiple injection events per cycle to more precisely control combustion, leading to more complete combustion. For practical purposes this has no effect on fuel consumption, but to be precise, it slightly increases it, because fuel is ignited at a sub-optimum time in the cycle. The main benefits are less noise and soot, as I said earlier: improvements that were needed to make diesels popular in passenger cars.

Hybrid technology costs money. That’s why cars are sold with differing levels of hybrid tech and none at all. In South America, customers apparently have less money to spend on cars. This does not prove hybrid tech in Europe is a con. Dear me.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

You said it “seriously improves economy”. False. It opens the possibility of multiple injection events per cycle to more precisely control combustion, leading to more complete combustion. For practical purposes this has no effect on fuel consumption, but to be precise, it slightly increases it, because fuel is ignited at a sub-optimum time in the cycle. The main benefits are less noise and soot, as I said earlier: improvements that were needed to make diesels popular in passenger cars.

Still wrong, not all diesel cars multi inject. But they all have high pressure pumps, not point arguing with you the reasons why because you prefer the make it up method rather than the look it up.

Also you’re still trying to keep the topic on diesels which is irrelevant really and ignore the fact that the hybrid is marketing gimmick and only there to help fiat with its fleet emissions standards.

 

[AGH1965]

in 1989 a Citron AX was able to do 100 mpg

100 mpg in 1989? What do you mean? When driving at a constant speed of 50 mph on a level road?

100 mpg = 2.8 l/100km, which means less than 3 l/100km. If an average of 2.8 l/100km would have been possible in 1989, then the world wouldn't have had to wait another 10 years till VW introduced the LUPO 1.2 TDI 3L. As the 3L in the name already suggests, this rather expensive little car was purely meant to reach an average of 3 l/100km, which is 'only' 94 mpg. This average was not even a real-world average; it was just the NEDC result, but still it was impressive that the LUPO 1.2 TDI 3L reached this in 1999.

 

[Samuel D]

Still wrong, not all diesel cars multi inject.

Name a diesel car available today that doesn’t have multiple injection. Just one will do.

Don’t let this be like the link to the 43 MPG review. Just do it.

Also you’re still trying to keep the topic on diesels which is irrelevant really and ignore the fact that the hybrid is marketing gimmick and only there to help fiat with its fleet emissions standards.

It wasn’t me that started the diesel conversation. You did that by saying your five-year-old diesel Golf had CO2 emissions similar to the Fiat 500 Hybrid, although you had to mix NEDC and WLTP emissions to make that point.

Thereafter I’ve had to keep correcting your false statements. This is a very modern problem: the people who talk guff can throw out false statements faster than anyone can refute them.

It takes you no time to make a false claim (like higher injection pressure “seriously improves economy”), or attack straw men (“they have been cranking up diesel high pressure fuel pumps to ever higher levels for over 20 years”, which no-one has disputed).

But if I wanted to convince a reader that you were wrong, I would have to break down each statement and prove it’s wrong from first principles or with reliable references. I did that on a few occasions in this thread, but it’s not sustainable because of the asymmetry of effort. And for that reason, you know I’ll eventually give up. I can tell you’re following a well-worn playbook.

This is why politics looks like it does today, and why people are emboldened to believe their own version of reality and share it with others. The guy at the pub has the same platform as an expert. When they’re called out, they just reverse the accusation, as you did by saying I’m “turning into Trump”. It’s a problem everywhere you look.

But I’m done, so you can have the last word. Keep it real.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

But I’m done, so you can have the last word. Keep it real.

That’s absolutely fine, and means there is no point in doing this then.

Name a diesel car available today that doesn’t have multiple injection. Just one will do.

Don’t let this be like the link to the 43 MPG review. Just do it.

Don’t like being compared to trump but shout about “alternative facts, doesn’t want to look at evidence or anything anyone else has to say and then strops off.....


Last word had

 

[AGH1965]

No-one today would put up with the filthy, rattling, surging VW 1.9 TDI of sainted memory. But that crude engine had BSFC figures (brake-specific fuel consumption) as good as or better than anything you can get now, dipping under 200 grams of diesel per kWh of work done at optimum speed and load.

Slightly below 200 g/kWh impressive? Heavy-duty truck engines do a lot better!

 

[varesecrazy]

100 mpg in 1989? What do you mean? When driving at a constant speed of 50 mph on a level road?

100 mpg = 2.8 l/100km, which means less than 3 l/100km. If an average of 2.8 l/100km would have been possible in 1989, then the world wouldn't have had to wait another 10 years till VW introduced the LUPO 1.2 TDI 3L. As the 3L in the name already suggests, this rather expensive little car was purely meant to reach an average of 3 l/100km, which is 'only' 94 mpg. This average was not even a real-world average; it was just the NEDC result, but still it was impressive that the LUPO 1.2 TDI 3L reached this in 1999.

We are comparing 'apples to oranges'

It was a tiny Diesel engine.. in a Plastic tiny car

There was a reasonably well publicised

'Mileage challenge' on a set route along the coast of Southern England
Brighton area

The record was @120 mpg in a turbodiesel

Tiny thing.. Daihatsu IIRC
typical Japanese 'phonebox on wheels'

These mpg's are Possible.. but not in a practical way.

Some journalists several years ago did the
Lands End to John'O Groats trip end to end of mainland GB..
To prove a point:

Some new mainstream car (polo..?) Had a fantastic petrol consumption figure..

Some bright spark reasoned you could travel the approx. 600 miles on 1 tank of fuel

Challenge on..

They used a team of drivers.. so the car never cooled.. and travelled 'off peak' in the height of summer so @18' / 26'

They used 'mega-mileage'strategy.. lots of coasting..
used brakes 2 times.. on different days .. etc

And had a support van 20ft : 7m behind..

Why..?

Because they travelled at 40mph..

Achieved-Yes
Practical - probably not

 

[Samuel D]

Slightly below 200 g/kWh impressive? Heavy-duty truck engines do a lot better!

Depends on what you mean by “a lot better”. I would say they do a little better, since I’m not paying for a truck’s diesel for a year as an owner does.

Big Scanias and Volvos get maybe 5% better minimum BSFC than that old car engine, but a truck usually operates with its engine closer to its minimum BSFC than does a car with a grossly oversized engine.

The reasons that car diesels have stagnated in efficiency for the last couple of decades apply to lorries too, especially in Europe. In America, the government introduced fuel economy targets for trucks in 2011, and progress since then has been rapid, albeit from a poorer starting level than in Europe. But progress was mostly not in the engine but the whole truck (aerodynamics, transmission, tyres, etc.). Today American and European articulated trucks are similarly efficient (~30 litres / 100 km) despite their different appearances.

Two-stroke cathedral diesels in ships are appreciably more efficient, maybe around 160 g/kWh for the very best ones. Scale helps.