Going Hybrid

PETROL is expensive and diesel slowly is becoming less of a favourite for many due to the global warming issues.

Car manufacturers have had to come up with alternatives over the years.

Hybrid electric vehicles (Hev) are some of the alternatives manufacturers have come up with.

Hybrid electric vehicles were preferred over electric vehicles then because they could charge their own batteries while using less fuel than a normal car would use.

Last time we looked at the Toyota Prius and this week we will shine the light on another car that came out round about the same time as the prius . . . The Honda Insight.

The Honda Insight was launched around the same time with the Prius but while the Prius looked a lot like other smaller Toyota cars, the insight didn’t come with a usual design style. It was eccentric, weird and somewhat looked like a Citroen Gs. It was a 2 door car with 2 seats and a high back end to accommodate the big batteries behind the seats.

A Hybrid system is basically a system where a car uses more than one means of propulsion. The Honda Insight beat the Prius when it came to fuel efficiency because unlike the Prius which had a 1,5l engine it had a 1l 3 cylinder engine aided by an electric motor and huge batteries.

The Insight is very small and weighs about 850kgs. That is a lot of weight reduction compared to the Prius’ 1 300 kilos. Less weight meant more savings on the fuel bill even though it could only accommodate 2 people.

The biggest advantage of having a hybrid car is you can cut your fuel bill by half or more. Since hybrids use both combustion engines and electric motors, they don’t use a lot of fuel when idling or on start up. The electric motor gets the vehicle in motion and will drive the car at low speeds. The car will be silent and will use no fuel at this point. The combustion engine will aid the electric motors when you rev harder.

As I mentioned last week, hybrid vehicles are environmentally friendly and depend less on fossil fuels. While full electric cars eliminate the need to fuel up a car, they need to be charged but hybrids use regenerative braking to get their electricity and use that to charge the batteries for

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