How Hybrid Vehicles Could Save The Internal Combustion Engine

Photo by Jiachen Lin on Unsplash

Hybrids have been around for a long time. As a matter of fact, one could actually make the argument that every automobile that has an alternator and a lead acid battery is a hybrid, but I won’t make that claim here. With electrification really starting to hit the mainstream in terms of vehicles sold and are available the question has to be asked about what we do with the internal combustion engine. Does it continue to exist alongside electric solutions or do we just bury it entirely. Surprisingly, we already have a solution in place. Hybrid vehicles, here’s how.

Efficiency

Gasoline engines have never been overall efficient, at least from a thermal perspective. With high efficiency engines reaching just above 50% thermal efficiency under ideal conditions and after some extreme engineering. What this basically means, is that all the energy that is produced by our engine (the combustion) is wasted or lost as heat. So, if we pair these combustion engines with an electric power train you now get hybrid power which will drastically improve the efficiency. Thanks to increased fuel efficiencies and reduced emissions compared to an engine only solution, internal combustion engines could continue to be used for a long time into the future especially if the fuels that are used to run these engines were heavily based on…