Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob KellyIII
..... but the way I understand it even the Hybrids will be outlawed here !
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You may be understanding incorrectly. As the rules are currently written, PHEV's are expected to be a portion of a manufacturer's lineup for quite awhile. PHEV's are hybrids - with gas engines & electric drivetrains, with enough battery capacity to run for at least 50 miles. Who knows how the regs will get adjusted - but this would sunset hybrids with tiny batteries (the standard toyota/honda/hyundai type setup with 1 - 3 miles of battery power), but encourage the same models with a bit larger batteries (like the Prius Prime).
In terms of how hybrids work - there are a bunch of different options.
This wikipedia article does a reasonable job of laying them out.
In most hybrids, there is a gas engine and at least one electric motor. In parallel hybrids, they are arranged with a transmission setup that can take either mode of power in varying degrees, and output it to the wheels. The ECU manages how much throttle the gas engine receives as well as how much is being asked of the electric motor, to make the final output feel "normal". The gas pedal is not really connected to a throttle - it's just an input device that is providing a reading to the ECU. For what it's worth, that's the situation on just about any car nowadays - hybrids or not. Toyota's hybrid system is a parallel hybrid. The concept for the prius was a relatively weak electric motor and relatively weak gas motor - tie them together so they both can provide adequate power when at full power, and the car's acceleration is adequate. This was the case from the very earliest Prius right up until the current generation. But very recently, Toyota has iterated on this so the gas engine isn't quite so weak anymore, and the electric motor is significantly stronger, yet fuel economy went up. The new prius is a 6ish second to 60 car, compared to ~10 seconds prior. It's not a sports car - but it's more than fast enough to keep up with street traffic.
Honda's hybrid system (the version since 2014 in the Accord/CR-V/Insight, ignoring their earlier versions at the moment), is instead mostly a serial hybrid. The car's propulsion is entirely up to an electric motor. The car's gas motor is used to spin at whatever speed is necessary to provide electrical energy to the motor. So the electric motor has always been sized to provide decent performance - and the gas motor was sized to provide enough energy to run the electric motor close to its peak. The advantage to this setup is that the car behaves more like a electric car; the throttle pedal very directly controls the electric motor, so it's very responsive. There is a party trick with the Honda setup, in that once the car is at highway speeds and under low load, there is an electronic clutch setup that engages the gas motor directly with the drive wheels - so at that point the honda would be considered a parallel hybrid. In that mode, the car can be recharging its battery as well. This gives the car slightly better highway fuel economy than it would have had otherwise, as there is no conversion necessary from gas engine to electrical power to electric motor to wheels.
Chevy Volt had an interesting system as well to combine the power sources in different ways to provide various benefits, but in practice it wasn't integrated or sized well - so if someone used the car just as a gas car and never plugged it in, the effective mpg was typically under 30, which any decently designed passenger car with average power can achieve even without any complicated hybrid drivetrain.
The BMW i3 was an early version of a serial hybrid that had a pretty terrible user experience due to its design limitations. Reasonably spritely electric motor, but not that big of a battery. Very low powered "range extender" 2-cylinder gas motor. Car performed quite well under battery power, but once its range was out - using the gas motor to provide electrical power gave way too little performance, making it essentially unusable on fast highway commutes, hills, etc.