Car Insurance - Hybrid Cars December 10, 2007
Posted by admin in : Tips On Car Insurance Selection , trackbackAuthor: Chris Rowlands
Article:
The Hybrid car was for a long time seen as belonging to the
science fiction genre. These days it is in actual fact a reality
with many manufacturers releasing their own version of this
environmentally friendly car.
The hybrid car has now largely overtaken the electrical car due
to the shortcomings of the latter. The solely electric car tends
to be sluggish and suffer from a lack of range between charges
which can themselves be extremely slow. Obviously the electrical
car is much better for the environment as it has no emissions
whatsoever. Of course by charging from your mains supply you are
increasing your carbon footprint but charging by solar energy
will negate this issue, although unfortunately this is again a
very slow method of charging.
The question is; how much more economical and emission friendly
are hybrid cars, how is this achieved and how does this impact
on your running costs such as car insurance ?
Before we can look into this we need to understand how the
hybrid car works. Power is, in most cases provided by a standard
petrol engine (which drives the front wheels) combined with one
or two electric motors (which power the rear wheels). This is
known as a parallel hybrid system and is the most commonly used
system and the one that we will focus on for the purpose of this
article. The less common hybrid is called the series system and
in this case the petrol motor powers a generator which can
either charge the batteries or directly power the electrical
propulsion system. In this example the petrol motor never
directly powers the vehicle.
Getting back to the parallel system, selection of propulsion
type depends on the speed you are driving, for example; Many
hybrid cars will use the electric motors for city and urban
driving and at higher speeds utilise the traditional petrol
engine. In some vehicles the system will automatically shut of
the petrol engine when waiting at a red light or in a traffic
queue. In general if a short burst of rapid acceleration is
required the propulsion systems will act in synergy giving
maximum power.
Usually the Power supply for the electric motors is charged
directly from deceleration or braking of the car, meaning you
should have a pretty constant supply of electrical energy for
most journeys. This is done by capturing the kinetic energy that
is normally released by the brake pads in the form of heat. The
battery is charged by harnessing regenerative braking, whereby
the electric motor is engaged to slow the wheels of the car
down, forcing the wheels to effectively drive the motor and
create energy much in the same way as a dynamo on a pedal bike
draws its power to light the lamps.
In the majority of parallel hybrid systems the petrol engine is
a smaller and lighter than standard version built to return
higher efficiency and performance.
If you imagine 2 identical cars, one with a 1 litre engine and
one with a 2 litre engine the reason the smaller engine uses
less fuel when driven at the same speed as the larger engine is
actually quite simple. Both cars have to output the same amount
of power to drive the car at that speed, but the smaller engine
uses less power to drive itself meaning that in total it uses
less power and returns a higher fuel economy. This usually
impacts on your motor insurance policy as a car with a much bigger engine will usually be
much more expensive to ensure.
Comments»
Good article - interesting and informative, thanks. it was very helpful in deciding what insurance I need to do