How Does a Hybrid Car Get Better Gas Mileage?
Acceleration can be very inefficient. Cars weigh thousands of pounds, and need to be able to get up to highway speeds quickly. Conventional cars use big engines that can give a big burst of power when the car needs it to speed up. Once the car is at cruising speed, however, the engine only needs to put out a little bit of power to keep the car rolling. If the car is coasting or rolling downhill, the engine doesn’t even need to be on. Having a big engine running all the time wastes a huge amount of fuel in conventional cars. When a car accelerates, the potential energy inside the gasoline is turned into kinetic energy, or movement. A 3,000-lb. auto rolling along at 60 mph has a lot of energy, but conventional cars have no way to utilize any of that energy. When you stop a car, most of the energy is just converted to heat and wasted. The brake pads rub against the rotor, creating friction which slows the car down. There is no way to store and reuse the energy used to get the thing rollin
