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Essay about A Brief History of the Hybrid Vehicle

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Brief History of Hybrid Vehicle Development

First built in the early 1900s by inventors tinkering with combinations of the electric motor and the gasoline engine, hybrid vehicles were dropped when gasoline-fueled vehicles became more reliable and easier to start, and gasoline fuel more readily available. Research and development of hybrid vehicles was revived by concern about oil dependency in the1970s and about air pollution in the late 1980s.

A number of hybrid vehicles have been built and tested since 1980. Some of these vehicles have impressed analysts with their performance and low levels of exhaust and petroleum consumption. Interest in hybrid vehicles jumped in late 1993 with the announcement of funding for two major …show more content…

It usually gives the car a range of 50 - 100 miles which is much less than that typically provided by a fuel tank (300 miles).

The electric motor is the device that provides motion in an electric car. It converts the energy it receives from the batteries into motion which is used to turn a transmission which then in turn rotates the wheels. It is able to spin up to 15000 RPM and has up to 100 kW of power. Since this motion is connected to the transmission, the transmission also spins the wheel up to this rate. Thus, electric cars would tend to move faster than gasoline powered cars.

Components Common To Both The Electric Car And The Gasoline Powered Car

The transmission is the device that does the actual turning of the wheel in both cars.

There are several ways of combining the two sources of power found in a hybrid car.

The Parallel Hybrid Car: This has a fuel tank which supplies gasoline to the engine. In addition, it has a set of batteries that supplies power to an electric motor. Both the engine and the engine motor can turn the transmission at the same time and the transmission then turns the wheels.

Figure 3 shows a typical parallel hybrid. The fuel tank and gas engine connect to the transmission. The batteries and electric motor also connect to the transmission independently. As a result, in a parallel hybrid, both the electric motor and the gas engine can

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