Green Power: Hybrid Cars

Mike Skibicki

4/5/12

Freshman Comp.

Prof. Foster

Green Power Essay

Green Power: Hybrid Cars

Transportation has been, and still will be very important to our every day lives. Throughout history, many evolutions and changes have been made in transportation technology, and it continues to grow at a rapid pace. At first, people used horses and horse trailers as their main transportation. Then in the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine was invented. Later, there was the invention of the combustion engine, and it is the beginning of the automobile industry. Many changes and improvements have been made in the development of automobiles. However, until today, the 21st century, people are still using gasoline as the many fuel for cars. Now in 2012, we have hybrids, the new generation of automobiles. Hybrids are fuel efficient, fuel economic and environment friendly, and they are the dominant cars for the next two decades.

A hybrid can be simply defined as a vehicle with two sources of power combined. A modern hybrid vehicle, such as a Toyota Prius, uses both an electrical motor and a gasoline engine, and they work together to provide the power needed for a comfortable ride. Hybrids actually have been around longer than we think: From 1897 to 1907, the Compagnie Parisienne des Voitures Electriques (roughly, Paris Electric Car Company), built a series of electric and hybrid vehicles, including the 1903 Krieger. With front-drive and power steering, the Krieger wasn't built in much quantity. One model ran on alcohol, and there was another version with what has been described as a gasoline-turbine engine (History of Hybrid, ¶ 4).
Before the full development of gasoline vehicles, hybrids were already introduced to the world. Later on, because of the introduction of self-starting gas engines, the production of hybrids had rapidly declined. A hundred years later, “the first modern commercial hybrids, the Toyota Prius, went on sale in Japan in 1997” (History of...