natnut

In March 2020, Toyota announced that it had developed a newer battery for its hybrid vehicles which were more compact, lower cost, had greater power/performance and more longevity.

Already the 2020 RWD Toyota Crown with the 3.5L multistage hybrid system(Toyota Crown traditionally shares chassis and engines with the Lexus GS), has a 0-60 mph of 4.5s which is 1 second faster than the 3rd/4th gen GS450h.

I wonder, when our traction batteries need replacing, we could retroactively fit the newer tech Toyota hybrid batteries into existing 2007-2011 and 2012-2019 GS hybrids and suddenly get a performance/fuel efficiency boost?

Links :
https://priuschat.com/threads/toyota...rmance.214690/

https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/co...did=ag478_mail

Lwerewolf

Crown is on its own platform. Acceleration/top speed gains should primarily be from being able to utilize full engine power at more speeds - different transmission, look it up. The 450h's engine is the same (well, 3gs is -fse otto cycle, hence relatively bad mileage), the crown, lc500h and ls500h have an EGR system and that's about it, I think. Might have GPFs as well, but regardless.

You'd probably have to replace the whole drivetrain - ECUs, inverter, battery, transmission (CVT with a 4-speed auto at the end, the 3/4gs have a 2-speed auto for MG2 only), wiring, whatnot.

fillerf

if i remember correctly the electric motor in the GS can handle much more than what the battery is able to provide.
But everything is connected to everything, I suspect. battery vs ECU, monitoring , maybe cabling , drive train and so on will need modification
Probably easier to got the engine tuning direction because the 3.5L could also provide much more grunt.
But as far as i know there is no tuning available for the gs450h , and I have not seen anyone doing it on the internet either....
There are not so many GS450 around , so i suspect there is not much motivation for develop anything...

Lwerewolf

The battery supplies around 36kw at peak "boost".

The electric motors are the CVT:
http://eahart.com/prius/psd/
http://prius.ecrostech.com/
particularly:
http://prius.ecrostech.com/original/...OnAsIDrive.htm

...and some more for the nuts among us:
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/947393-e...y-drive-system - mostly applies to gs450h
https://slideplayer.com/slide/14432904/ - This is a toyota motor europe presentation, hence some values reflect the different final drive for EU and apparently singapore/australia/etc models. It's an LS600h but the transmissions are extremely similar - including the PSD and MG2 2-speed ratios... supposedly MG2 gets up to only 10k RPM, but I've seen these cars (ls600h) go at speeds which imply otherwise, unless I'm missing something else

So anyways - you need the motors to be powerful in order to be able to "translate" the engine's power, and boost a little on top of that. Funnily enough, you effectively have an on-car dyno due to the way the power split goes (electric motors ). It also lets the car throttle the engine if it sees unexpected horsepower levels - the Prius is notorious for that, many people have tried to boost it.
The limit to the old system (basically every hybrid other than multistage crown s220/ls500h/lc500h) is that usually the engine cannot achieve full power at relatively low speeds. This is particularly exaggerated in a european gs450h - it actually pulls harder once you get to 160 or so KPH, where the engine can start spinning all day at redline... until you get to MG2's rotational limit in high gear - approx. 277KPH. Hence the difference between JDM/US-spec 3GS's and EU 3GS's... and all 4GS's - 3.266 final drive became standard, for whatever reason.
At any rate, MG2 has a rotational range of around -10200rpm to +10200rpm, which keeps ICE speeds below max until way above any legal limit (excl. autobahns). The multi-stage system with its 4-speed auto effectively extends the max RPM range of the system greatly - improving low-speed power, max EV-mode speed and top-speed potential.

So yeah, if you want to swap over a complete multistage drivetrain (other than the ECU if the old one can interface) - go ahead.