Why aren’t there more hybrid vehicles before we go to all electric cars & trucks?
In: 22
Mountains
Wait what?
Yep, mountains. An ideal hybrid has a tiny engine – perhaps 0.3L and 25hp of power. The small engine is light, cheap, efficient and relatively easy to make the emissions clean.
To make the car drivable you have a decent sized electric motor which does the acceleration.
The engine has just enough power to keep the battery topped up while cruising, so you only need a relatively small battery.
All in all, like this, it shouldn’t work out much more expensive than a normal car.
This formula works well in most places – except where there’s a large mountain and the design falls apart. The engine is too weak to make it up a hill without motor assistance, and the battery is too small to do this for more than a few miles. A car that reports 400 miles of range which suddenly drops to 5-10 miles when faced with a mountain isn’t really acceptable and is pretty dangerous. (I think there are legal/safety requirements too).
So to solve the problem you do one of the following (or a combination)
1. Make the battery larger – you need conventional EV sized battery
2. Make the engine larger – you need a conventional car sized engine
Most manufacturers choose #2, by fitting an engine that can make it up the mountain by itself. This is cheaper than fitting a huge battery and means the manufacturer doesn’t need to find space somewhere on the car for a large battery and doesn’t add too much extra weight – but it does significantly detract from the advantages of a hybrid. It ends up more expensive than a conventional car, and isn’t as efficient as a hybrid could be. This means for a lot of people, a hybrid just isn’t that attractive a solution.
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