how do hybrid cars work?
In: Technology
There are two types of hybrid cars.
There is electric assist, which Toyota prius is based. So the electric engine is used for light acceleration or to maintain highway speed or eco speeds and the gas engine takes care of faster acceleration, manual gears, overdrive and recharging.
The second is electric primary. The electric engine takes care of all driving and the gas engine is to recharge or take over if the battery is too low.
Gasoline engines are very inefficient at low load levels. An engine producing say 5 horsepower needs almost as much fuel as an engine producing 10 horsepower.
Hybrids improve efficiency by never running the combustion engine at 5 horsepower. If the driving situation requires 5 horsepower and the battery is fully charged, they just turn off the combustion engine and use the electric motor instead. And once the battery is empty, they turn on the combustion engine, run it at 10 horsepower, use 5 horsepower to drive the car and the remaining 5 horsepower to charge the battery.
That way the combustion engine never has to run in its most inefficient load range. It either runs with a decent amount of load when charging the battery, or it doesn’t run at all, when the electric motor is powering the car.
Basically, instead of one big gas engine, there’s an electric motor and a smaller gas engine. Electric motors are more efficient at low speed than gas engines, and they can turn into generators when you’re slowing down instead of just turning that into waste heat. The point is to use the different motors when you’re at their most efficient speed so you’re wasting as little energy as possible. You can even turn the gas engine off completely when you’re stopped in traffic and save even more fuel.
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