Hybrid Cars - An Introduction

A hybrid car is a passenger vehicle that is driven by a hybrid engine, which is any engine that combines two or more sources of power, generally gasoline and electricity.

There are many people who have heard a lot about hybrid cars but are still not sure what exactly is the fuss about. What I can assure you is that once you are through with this short article below, you won’t ask:
What the difference between a conventional car and a hybrid car??
Can a hybrid car match up to the performance of our conventional cars??
How do hybrid cars manage to achieve high fuel economy??
Are there any real benefits of using a hybrid car??

Let’s begin by finding what makes a hybrid car different from others.
A gas-powered car has a fuel tank, which supplies gasoline to the engine. The engine then turns a transmission, which turns the wheels.An electric car, on the other hand, has a set of batteries that provides electricity to an electric motor. The motor turns a transmission, and the transmission turns the wheels.
The gasoline-electric hybrid car is just what it sounds like -- a cross between a gasoline-powered car and an electric car. The hybrid is a compromise. It has the best of both the gasoline and the electric cars. It attempts to significantly increase the mileage and reduce the emissions of a gas-powered car while overcoming the shortcomings of an electric car.A gasoline car meets these requirements but produces a relatively large amount of pollution and generally gets poor gas mileage. An electric car, however, produces almost no pollution, but it can only go 50 to 100 miles (80 to 161 km) between charges. And the problem has been that the electric car is very slow and inconvenient to recharge.A gasoline-electric car combines these two setups into one system that leverages both gas power and electric power.
You can combine the two power sources found in a hybrid car in different ways. One way, known as a parallel hybrid, has a fuel tank that supplies gasoline to the engine and a set of batteries that supplies power to the electric motor. Both the engine and the electric motor can turn the transmission at the same time, and the transmission then turns the wheels. By contrast, in a series hybrid, the gasoline engine turns a generator, and the generator can either charge the batteries or power an electric motor that drives the transmission. Thus, the gasoline engine never directly powers the vehicle.The structure of a hybrid car harnesses two sources of power to increase efficiency and provide the kind of performance most of us are looking for in a vehicle.

Now let’s check out the performance aspect of a hybrid car.
The key to a hybrid car is that the gasoline engine can be much smaller than the one in a conventional car and therefore more efficient. Most cars require a relatively big engine to produce enough power to accelerate the car quickly. In a small engine, however, the efficiency can be improved by using smaller, lighter parts, by reducing the number of cylinders and by operating the engine closer to its maximum load.This explains why two of the same model cars with different engines can get different mileage. If both cars are driving along the freeway at the same speed, the one with the smaller engine uses less energy. Both engines have to output the same amount of power to drive the car, but the small engine uses less power to drive itself. But how can this smaller engine provide the power your car needs to keep up with the more powerful cars on the road?
The gas engine on a conventional car is sized for the peak power requirement (those few times when you floor the accelerator pedal). In fact, most drivers use the peak power of their engines less than one percent of the time. The hybrid car uses a much smaller engine, one that is sized closer to the average power requirement than to the peak power.

Its time to find the secret behind its high fuel economy.
Besides a smaller, more efficient engine, hybrids use many other tricks to increase fuel efficiency. To squeeze every last mile out of a gallon of gasoline, a hybrid car can:• Recover energy and store it in the battery: - Whenever you step on the brake pedal in your car, you are removing energy from the car. The faster a car is going, the more kinetic energy it has. The brakes of a car remove this energy and dissipate it in the form of heat. A hybrid car can capture some of this energy and store it in the battery to use later. It does this by using "regenerative braking." That is, instead of just using the brakes to stop the car, the electric motor that drives the hybrid can also slow the car. In this mode, the electric motor acts as a generator and charges the batteries while the car is slowing down.• Sometimes shut off the engine: - A hybrid car does not need to rely on the gasoline engine all of the time because it has an alternate power source -- the electric motor and batteries. So the hybrid car can sometimes turn off the gasoline engine, for example when the vehicle is stopped at a traffic light.

Finally let’s see if there are any benefits of a Hybrid Car.
You might wonder why anyone would build such a complicated machine when most people are perfectly happy with their gasoline-powered cars. The reason is twofold: to reduce tailpipe emissions (which ensure cleaner air for all of us to breathe, slows down global warming and also gets you tax concession) and to improve mileage (which leads to more savings, less trips to gas station and longer drives at a stretch). And above all a hybrid car owner is looked up with much respect that his peers driving the conventional car can’t expect. These goals are actually tightly interwoven.

List of some famous hybrid cars:
Honda Accord Hybrid
Honda Civic Hybrid
Lexus GS 450h
Nissan Altima Hybrid
Saturn Aura Green Line
Saturn Vue Green line
Toyota Camry Hybrid
Toyota Prius