350Dave

I think the 6 cylinder LS 350hL is an idea whose time is coming.

RXSF

lol its all in your mind because they will not make a LS lower hybrid.

Expect the dedicated hybrid from lexus next year to be more towards fuel efficiency. it will probably end with the number 350 as well, but with the old 3.0 liter engine.

200 horses from the engine, about 40 from the electric motor. that would be perfect

litesoarer

Actually...more than likely they will use a 3GR-FSE, which is the 3.0L V6 used in the 2006 GS300, rated at 250hp, +40 to 45 from the electric motor.

Mike_TX

I think maybe some of you guys are over-reacting just a smidge.

Consider this: If you drive the "average" 12,000 miles a year, and even if you average only 18mpg (conservative, IMO), you'll use 667 gallons over the course of the year.

Okay, even if gas goes up another dollar, that's a whopping $667 for the whole year. Sure, I'd rather spend my $667 on something else, but it sure ain't enough to make me jump off a cliff or stop driving or whatever. Most of us waste $600 a year on stuff we don't need.

Hang in there.

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RXSF

...but gas hasnt just gone up a dollar. last year i remember seeing high 2s to low 3s. now its mid 4s. so make that a thousand more for 12,000 miles. then you have to remember some people drive more than 12,000 a year. My car is 5 years old almost, and it has 88K miles. what come out to 22K miles a year. and now, you have to factor in that not everyone gets 18mpg. some people only commute in the city. so what does that comes out to for the people im talking about. perhaps an extra $1800 a year?

I was thinking they were going to use the old 3.0 liter from the IS300 that put out around 215 horses. that was a pretty peppy motor. i dont think we really need a 300 horsepower hybrid. it will for sure have 270 at most to give it some distance from the GS hybrid

Stoks

Actually, I think a lot of people continue to underestimate the trend of higher energy costs. In the short run, energy prices have gotten ahead of themselves. We're due for a pullback, just don't confuse this ebb we may see in the near term, with the unmistakable trend of higher prices.

Looks like GM has finally gotten "religion" on this subject as well with their announcement of closing 4 or 5 plants dedicated to building trucks and SUV's. They also announced they intend to bring the Volt to market in 2010. I promise you that Lexus is seeing what is coming down the road as well, and you'll see their product lineup reflect that over the next several years.

It's going to be a different world over the next 10 to 20 years. Anybody currently driving the LS can probably afford the gas right now, but I'm under no illusion that the next car I purchase will get anything less than 40 mpg city. Probably closer to 60 mpg.

Mike_TX

Well, not to go political, but we're floating in oil and can't touch it ... oil, oil everywhere and not a drop to refine. For example -

Bloomberg announced today that North Dakota has an oil field (the Bakken formation) that is believed to hold 413 billion barrels of high-quality oil. By comparison, Saudi Arabia, with the world's largest known oil field has pumped a total of 55 billion barrels out of it ... so this is almost 9 times the size of that field!

And it's light sweet crude, which means low in sulfur and needing a lot less refining. Hopefully some of this crude will make it to market, but some in Washington are dead set against oil independence. If you just consider ANWR (Alaska), this field and the oil sands in Colorado and Wyoming, we could almost get all the oil we need right here in the good ol' US of A.

But I'm not holding my breath ... too many environmentalists out there are looking for carbon footprints.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=ayj1uo_gdNI4

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Stoks

Mike,

I don't mean to be a "Debbie Downer" here, but the Bakken does not have anywhere near 413 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

Our own USGS has recently released an estimate of only around 3.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Bakken reserve. Now this is not any small amount, but it will literally take years and years of capital investment to even extract those 3.6 billion barrels. The truth of the matter is, it's not economically feasible to extract anything above those numbers unless the price of oil rises to nearly $250 a barrel...and then...it may not be technically feasible.

The reserves in Anwar are laughable. Is there oil there? Yes, there is. But, there's not enough oil there to support more than one year's demand in the U.S. at current consumption rates.

If you really study this stuff, you will not come to any other conclusion than the price of oil is headed dramatically north, unless there is significant demand destruction and significant capital investment in securing new reserves and alternative sources of energy. I'll grant you this, if gas hits $8 bucks a gallon, we'll have that demand destruction. And, we'll be driving automobiles that don't resemble the ones we are driving today.

Lexus will quit worrying about harnessing hybrid technology for pumping additional horsepower, and will focus on increasing mileage.

Trust me, I hope I'm wrong. I just fear I am not.

RXSF

i doubt it will reach $8, maybe when im 80. i too hope that the people who have alternative energy in the palm of their hands will hurry up and distribute it to mainstream america. the prius is the closest thing we have to being relatively less oil dependent. i just hope electric cars or hydrogen or w/e will hurry the #%$@ up before we all die.

Mike_TX

Well, we all just report what we read, but your figure (which is 4.3 billion, not 3.6) is for oil recoverable from Bakken using conventional techniques. Oil companies have had some success there recently using newer horizontal drilling techniques, and the technology is always advancing. I don't know where the $250/barrel price came from, but there's 500 wells there right now and those guys aren't getting $250 a barrel for it. And ANWR is estimated to hold 10.4 billion barrels. But the 413 billion barrel estimate is also a USGS figure.

My viewpoint comes from my having grown up in oil country, and having worked with drillers and producers during my business career. Talk to any good oilman and he'll tell you that if the needless restrictions (governmental, environmental, etal) were lifted from them we could produce all the oil we need for the foreseeable future. And, no, they wouldn't lay waste to the countryside in the process, or kill all the spotted salamanders. The amount of red tape involved is unbelievable, and just not worth it to many of them.

It's true that the "easy oil" like you've seen in pictures gushing up out of Spindletop at the turn of the century is pretty scarce now. It takes a lot more effort and expense to get the oil now, but the price justifies it. But fully 60% of public land is completely off limits to drilling, and 94% of all public land has restrictions of one kind or another on it that limit drilling. Ask your congressman why that is and watch him squirm.

I don't know the answer either, but if anyone is counting on hybrids or electric cars or pills that turn water into gasoline, they're smoking some pretty good stuff. ANY viable transportation device now known requires some form of consumable energy, and until we can harness atomic power for the family sedan, that energy comes from oil or gas. I don't care whether it's at the power plant where you get the power to charge your electric car or the gas station where you fill up your hybrid, it all starts with oil or gas (or coal for some power plants).

What worries me more than anything else is the very real possibility we'll get cut off by one or more foreign oil sources ... watch your gas prices go through the roof THEN!

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clemgrad85

A lot of good points on here about oil, and only time will tell where it will head to. I think one of the great "oil" minds out ther, Boone Pickens, has the right idea in that he is investing up to 6 Billion in some 2000 turbines, making it the largest wind "farm". This is an oil guy and he sees the future. I think he is on the right track....if we can get other sources moving along (nuclear would also be good), regardless of where oil heads in the next 5 years, we can be in a better position. I do agree with Mike in that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by not using our own oil. Heck, Brazil just found a HUGE oil field off their coast that could, key word "could", have as much as 33 billion barrels. Why aren't we looking off our coast? If we could find a couple of these fields, along with developing other resources (wind, nuclear, solar) and improving the efficiency of our existing gas engines, I think we'll be just fine. Unfortunatley, our freakin Congress is dragging their...well....I'll say feet....and doing nothing except getting us further behind the 8 ball.

Stoks

Hi Mike,

My 3.6 billion number comes from the difference between the currently discovered reserves (700 mil barrels), and what the USGS estimates to be undiscovered reserves (3.6 billion barrels). The total would be roughly 4.3 billion barrels potentially recoverable utilizing today's technology.

I'm not trying to get into a sparring match here, but I also have some knowledge in this area. I too live in "oil country" so to speak. Check my state residence. I also own a private investment firm and I have a large number of oil executives and oil company owners as clients. We obviously have discussed this subject matter in depth.

This issue with the Bakken is the risk associated with the drilling activity. I didn't just pull the $250 a barrel figure out of thin air. It's simply an estimated figure that would be necessary to compel oil companies to mobilize drilling activity necessary to fully exploit all of the potentially recoverable reserves.

There is a significant percentage of the total 3.6 billion barrels of projected undiscovered reserves that would entail significant risk due to the nature of the formation. And, you won't reach an economically feasible ratio to fully exploit all potential reserves without oil reaching approximately $250 a barrel.

Additionally, 3.6 billion barrels of undiscovered reserves sounds like a lot of oil. The problem is, it's really not. According to EIA data, this country consumes approximately 7.6 billion barrels of oil and oil products a year. So...I guess we better get cracking figuring out how to extract more of the black stuff out of North Dakota and Montana eh?

I stand by what I have previously posted. Things will get worse. We will be paying more at the pump. But, I completely agree with you on the need for us to open up more domestic land to drilling. Funny thing is, it IS going to happen. It's only a matter of time. When the pain gets severe enough, we'll open it up to drilling.

The sad fact is, this country has been completely devoid of any real leadership on this issue, and we are going to pay for it over the next decade as we try to play catch up with solutions. In the mean time, my bet is we'll see Lexus putting hybrid technology to use in a manner that promotes conservation instead of pumping horsepower.

We shall see.

Mike_TX

I agree this is good information, and it helps us understand why things are the way they are.

Those of us with some grey in our hair remember all too well the "gas crisis" of the early '70's. The sky was falling then, too, and I was one of those people who sat in long lines at gas stations to pay "high" prices for gas.

And I also remember how a number of my oil clients in the '80's went out of business because oil was just too cheap. I still recall hearing an API spokesman say that until oil got up to at least $18 a barrel, we'd continue to see drillers stacking their rigs. Imagine that - $18 a barrel. At the time, it had sunk to about $10. And that was less than 25 years ago.

Since then, we've basically tanked our own domestic oil business, barred oil companies from exploring and drilling in some of the most promising areas in the country, and we haven't built a single refinery in over 30 years. In the meantime, growth and prosperity has increased our oil consumption many times over, and we've continued to depend on other nations (some of them outright hostile to us) to supply our energy needs.

How can we really expect that situation to work? We would never stop growing food and just expect the rest of the world to feed us, but we somehow expect others to furnish us with vital energy supplies!

We got through the '70's and the '80's, and we'll get through the 2000's, too. I personally believe there's more oil down there than people can imagine. But my own worst fear is that some kind of disturbance in the world will create another oil crisis and we'll REALLY go through hell before we wake up and start taking care of ourselves like we should. Too bad we always have to learn the hard way ...

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MythBuster

4.47$ per galon
It does not seem that the Iraqi oil helped at all

It cost me 12 dollars (45 SR) to fill up empty tank.

clemgrad85

Yup....Americans have extremely short memories. As Ross Perot once said, "It's just sad Larry." (Larry being Larry King, for those that don't remember, and please don't ask me who Ross Perot is...or...was?)