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History Hybrid Car:Are hybrids really a new technology? History is all about dates and names and can make some of the most exciting things of the past seem as boring as the news in a local paper from someone else’s town.
So don’t blame me if you don’t find this exciting but I’ll try my best!
Electric cars were around since the 1800s and the internal combustion engine (ICE) came at around the same time. There were problems with both as the electric cars were very heavy and didn’t go far and the ICE was very smelly, polluting (sounds a bit familiar doesn’t it?), and at the time oil wasn’t as cheap as it was about to become. So engineers didn’t have it stuck in their heads back then that the ICE was the only way to go and they started to play around with the designs. One of the solutions they came up with was the electric – ICE hybrid vehicle. The birth of the hybrid car. This solved some of the problems of pollution and helped the car travel much further and faster.  In 1900 Ferdinand Porsche developed a hybrid electric car called the Mixte.
The Mixte could apparently travel nearly 40 miles on its battery alone and Ferdinand won a rally and even broke Austrian land speed records with it!
Now that sounds like a promising start for hybrid cars to me.
There were a few electric hybrids out in the following years such as the Woods Motors Dual Power. There were 600 made in total and it had a 4 cylinder ICE and an electric motor.  Most of the electric cars made around this time were generally the same without many advances.
Hybrid cars however were mainly a very unsuccessful bunch of cars.
People just didn’t want to buy them when all of a sudden oil was so cheap and they died away for a long time until recently.
There were a few hybrid cars out in the 60’s and 70’s when the price of oil went up for a while like the GM 512 (which could only reach 40 mph) and the VW Taxi. These died away soon as well though.  So now let’s move onto the late 90’s when the beginnings of the latest generations of hybrids started to appear.
Toyota started to sell their Prius hybrid in Japan in 1997 and sold 18,000 cars that year.
The Audi Duo went on sale in Europe in the same year but was a failure and was discontinued unlike the Prius which kept going from strength to strength.
The Honda Insight was released in America in 1999 and did pretty well by achieving a few awards and getting 70mpg on the highway. But it got nowhere near as much publicity or success as the Prius which came to the American market in 2000. It created a tidal wave of publicity which propelled the hybrid car into the mainstream and to the huge force they are today.  Hopefully hybrid cars won’t die out again like they seem to have done a few times throughout their history.
I think people know now more than ever that turning back to a full ICE isn’t an option and the electrification of transport is definitely the way forward.
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