People these days are under a great shock looking at the increasing price of gas in the international market. Most of us often try to find a better alternative so that we can get rid of this ever increasing fuel prices. More than the common people, it is a great area of concern of the automobile designers who are continuously putting in all the hard word to find a solution to this problem. After long days of research they came up with a new technology called as the hybrid cars. This was majorly done in order to address the fuel issues. After the success story of these hybrid cars, now many brands are coming up with these cars by implementing the latest technology in their vehicles.

The question is what are these hybrid cars and how do they function?

What is a hybrid vehicle? Any vehicle that combines the use of more than one source of energy is known as a hybrid vehicle. To quote a simple example here is a Motorized pedal bike as it functions by combining the power of a motor and also the mechanical power of the rider. Like wise we have so many hybrid vehicles all around us. The locomotives use the energy of diesel along with electricity making it a hybrid. Many of the cities have diesel-electric buses that can use the energy from the electricity or choose to run on diesel in the absence of electricity.

Submarines are also hybrid as they use diesel-electric source of energy. If we talk about the hybrids running on the streets, we have gasoline – electric cars.

How to these hybrids function? Hybrid cars that are of type gasoline-electric run on the energy coming from gasoline and electricity. It has few of the attributes of an electric car and rest of a gasoline car. To answer this question, let us first have a look at each technology in detail. A gasoline car consists of a tank that carries fuel. This tank supplies fuel to the engine which runs the transmission system. This in turn makes the wheels turn and hence the automobile is termed as functioning. Similarly, an electric car consists of couple of batteries that supply electric power to the motor. This motor drives the transmission system which then in turn makes the wheel turn. It can be seen that only the way the transmission is driven differs in the two types of cars. The ultimate goals remains to turn the wheels. The hybrid vehicle takes the good points of the two types of technologies being used. It tries to overcome the shortcomings of an electric car and at the same time reduces the emissive products that a gas powered car releases in the environment and also work towards improving the power performance of the car. To come up with a perfect car, few of the points should be proved correct – Drive for a long distance without refilling the fuel, the means to refill the fuel should be simple and fast. A conventional car is able to match these requirements but it emits lot of harmful gases in the environment while an electric car score a point in this field as it produces no pollution in the environment but can not run upto long distances without re-charging the batteries. To re-charge the batteries is again a slow process.

A hybrid car uses the gasoline engine the same way as used in the gasoline cars but designers have provided an improved version of these engines as they are better in terms of fuel efficiency and also the gas emissions has been reduced by several folds. The electric motor that is used in these vehicles is very complicated and created with latest technology. It is made in such a way that it acts as a generator and a motor as well. When needed it uses the energy from the batteries to push the car and when the car needs to slow down, it acts as a generator and returns the energy to the batteries.

It can be seen that the hybrid cars came into existence to do away with the negative points of the existing gasoline and electric vehicles. Because of these reasons, it is in huge demand in the market today.