Avalon Hybrid Built for the endless weekend.

Under the hood (and the floorboards, where the batteries are) there are a lot of new bits. Mets said that the transmission is all new and the engine is the new 3.6-liter Pentastar engine without cooled exhaust gas recirculation and the two-step valve lift. The Pacifica’s engine also uses the Atkinson cycle, which is a good fit for hybrid vehicles.

“Basically what you do is you leave your intake valve open during the combustion,” Mets said, describing Atkinson cycle. “You’ll lose a little bit of power when you do that but you also lose a lot of the pumping losses that you would have. The vehicle is more efficient. We can afford to lose a little bit of internal combustion power because we have the 16-kilowatt hour battery that can provide all the power you need instantaneously. You don’t have to worry about the horsepower aspect of it. Basically you want to tailor that engine to be more efficient as a generator than anything else.”

Since this is an automotive site I thought it may be entertaining to put together a listing of some of the greatest quotes as they pertain to the automobile industry and racing. I’ve included the photos of those who said them as well who knows, maybe their pictures will give.

From the engine, power goes through Chrysler’s all-new dual-motor electronically variable transmission. The two electric motors in the transmission are mated to the engine via a planetary gear set. “In addition,” he said, “we added a one-way clutch to that gear set so that now we can take what’s normally a generator-only motor and make that do double duty and have it go back and be a generator when it needs to be one and be a drive motor when we want it to be one so that we can actually drive the vehicle with two electric motors. Now we can play the best efficiency game between the two motors. We can be very efficient in electric mode and certainly not be handcuffed like you would if you couldn’t switch back and forth. Plus we don’t lose any regen capability because as soon as we have the opportunity to regen, we can swap that back and get it back into regen mode and off we go.”

Under the hood (and the floorboards, where the batteries are) there are a lot of new bits. Mets said that the transmission is all new and the engine is the new 3.6-liter Pentastar engine without cooled exhaust gas recirculation and the two-step valve lift. The Pacifica’s engine also uses the Atkinson cycle, which is a good fit for hybrid vehicles.

“Basically what you do is you leave your intake valve open during the combustion,” Mets said, describing Atkinson cycle. “You’ll lose a little bit of power when you do that but you also lose a lot of the pumping losses that you would have. The vehicle is more efficient. We can afford to lose a little bit of internal combustion power because we have the 16-kilowatt hour battery that can provide all the power you need instantaneously. You don’t have to worry about the horsepower aspect of it. Basically you want to tailor that engine to be more efficient as a generator than anything else.”