[Spike]

Just read in one of the car mags that a company called Blitz (?) has developed a Turbo kit for our little Prius.

"This kit is designed to wake up the Toyota Prius hybrid, because while buying green may make you feel good, driving green can be a snooze. The device bumps the 1.5-liter, 76 horsepower gasoline engine to 130 horsepower using an intercooled turbo that's based around a small K2 turbocharger. Combined with the 67 horses kicked out by the electric motor, the get-up-and-go totals 197 horsepower. So far, the kit is just a proof-of-concept -- it will go into production if enough power-hungry hybridheads speak up. Price to be announced, 626-839-8350 for info."

don't flame the messenger
there is a nifty little pic of it installed in an engine bay, the install looks quite good, but I am too lazy to scan it in

 

[hyperion]

I wonder if they have any idea at all that this is not a standard type of internal combustion engine. With "blowers" you add more sustained RPM and we don't know what the little beast is turning now and more compression and the book now states 14/1 in the Prius which is greater than that used in a Ferrari

 

[BAM]

Cycle

The reason the Prius has such high compression ratings is because it doesn’t use the Otto cycle used in most cars but instead the Atkinson cycle, and if you were to add a turbo it would be called a Miller cycle. The problem with adding a turbo boils down to having to fiddle with the Prius' engine computer and altering the way it changes between it's three motors/engine. The best way to add more giddy-up to the car would be to add a larger maid drive motor. The motor would add much greater power to launch the car from a stop then what adding a turbo could.

 

[flare]

it'll be more like 164 hp. Cargo doesn't use the estimated 110 hp in their arithmatic

 

[DanMan32]

Motor HP is limited by the power it is given. You have 2 sources of said power: borrow power from the ICE that we already accounted for, or from battery. Battery cannot at present deliver the power the motor is rated for.

 

[RSnyder]

Don't bother to turbo your Prius. Someone in the Prius_Technical_Stuff yahoo group did it and discovered that although the engine could put out more power, the computers didn't/couldn't get that power through the motors/transmission to the road. The best it could do was keep the battery topped off.