• ColeSloth
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. Car batteries are lead acid and weigh a lot more than the nickel metal hydride batteries in the hybrid battery.

      Essentially, the hybrid battery is kind of like 168 rechargeable batteries all wired together in 28 sets of 6.

      There’s some after market batteries a website called “Project Lithium” has been selling that use lithium cobalt batteries instead of NMH batteries (lithium batts each have 3.7v as opposed to 1.2v in nmh and lithium batts have a higher storage capacity) that weighs even less at around 45Lbs, but they’ve only been selling them a few years, so how long those last before failure isn’t really a known thing. I knew the OEM toyota battery would last over a decade, so I went that route. Newer prus and other toyota hybrids do use lithium now, but I don’t think they made the switch until around 2015.