Next-Gen Prius to Get Technology Tested in Toyota’s Le Mans Racer

Race on Sunday, sell on Monday; the old adage is most certainly used by automakers’ marketing departments as they try to make some short of connection between their on-track success and the models they actually sell to the public.

The truth is, though, that these days racing technology is so sophisticated, and thus costly, that its use on everyday cars is all but prohibited. Sure, some of it eventually trickles down eventually on production models but not quite in the same form – even if those PR departments would like us to believe otherwise.

Toyota, however, went the other way around, as it is already testing certain parts of the current Prius replacement in its TS040 Hybrid Le Mans racer, which currently leads the championship standings.

“Our components already have parts from the next-generation Prius”, president of Toyota Motorsport GmbH Yoshiaki Kinoshita told Autonews. Although he wasn’t willing to go into much detail, Kinoshita said that they weren’t mechanical parts but rather preproduction prototypes of microchips and microcontrollers that are tested for longevity in the harsh environment of endurance racing.

One thing the racer and the street-going hybrids have in common is the need for fuel efficiency. The TS040 has been redesigned in order to reduce its consumption by 25 percent compared to the 2013 TS030 car while, at the same time, increasing a much higher output of 1,000HP to the previous racer’s 750!

Kinoshita revealed that one technology that most certainly won’t feature in the fourth-generation Prius is the racing car’s electric power storage system. That’s because the former uses supercapacitors for its braking energy storage and subsequent release, an energy flow that happens much faster than in any street car that’s perfectly OK with batteries.

Then there are the semiconductors, which manage the energy flow between the hybrid’s battery, motor and generator. Toyota revealed last May that it has developed a silicon carbide semiconductor that can increase fuel efficiency by 10 percent and that it plans to commercialize it in around six years’ time. Probably after they have been thoroughly tested on a future hybrid racer for a sufficient amount of time, we presume.

By Andrew Tsaosusis