Quote:
Originally Posted by Calum
Street cars are limited to a 12 volt electric system and as many manufacturers have found out, that greatly limits ideas like this. BMW proposed moving to a 48 volt system for just this reason, but as far as I know, they were shot down.
Clearly hybrids have found a work around to the rule or are exempt so I'm not sure why a loop hole hasn't been found to allow a setup like this.
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Hybrids have high voltage circuits for the get-moving bits and 12V for the rest. That's essentially what you have to do if you want to use significant amounts of electrical power for anything, because even 48V doesn't cut it at all. What would see a huge improvement if they went to 36V or whatever is alternator efficiency, but if you need DC-DC converters and stuff to not fry switches and relays you might as well go all the way. Well, that's not exactly true, I think you can design an alternator that sees those efficiency gains without working off higher voltage with some trickery (someone on ecomodder did this), but it makes more sense these days to just have a full mild hybrid system in place if you're the manufacturer.
By the time mild-hybrids are ubiquitous (shouldn't be more than a few years), every car will have a nice >100V circuit to work with
