It’s a common question: what is a hybrid and how does it work?
First off, a hybrid car like the Toyota Prius is not the same as an electric car like the Nissan Leaf. A hybrid car is also a different machine than the upcoming plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt.
Bear with us as we take you through a few definitions: Unlike a battery-powered electric vehicle (or electric car for short), a hybrid retains its internal combustion engine (ICE), but adds electric equipment like batteries and motors to maximize efficiency and put some of the energy to use that's wasted in an ICE-only vehicle.
Read Hybrid Cars: A Brief History to learn where it all started
Read Electric Cars: A Brief Overview to learn more about how electric cars work
Gas-electric hybrids like the Prius, the Ford Escape and Ford Fusion Hybrid and the Honda Insight (also known as parallel hybrids, or some modification thereof) are also different from some of the new plug-in hybrids like the soon-to-be released and much-discussed Chevy Volt.
2010 Ford Escape Hybrid / 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid / 2010 Honda Insight
In gas-electric hybrids like the Prius, the internal combustion engine (or gas engine to keep things simple) does the heaviest lifting and the electric motor provides an extra power boost for accelerating, passing, or hill climbing. This tag-team approach typically allows for a smaller internal combustions engine and higher MPG. The electric motor is also often able to be the sole source of propulsion in low-speed situations like city driving.
At the risk of oversimplification, a plug-in hybrid Volt (and other upcoming models like the plug-in Ford Escape or the luxury Fisker Karma) are basically a reverse-engineered Prius (there will also be a plug-in Prius, too). In other words, the electric motor will do much of the heavy lifting and the internal combustion engine will only kick in after the energy in the electric motor has been consumed (in the case of the Volt, that’s likely around 40 miles).