An 8 page paper. A hybrid vehicle is one that uses two sources of power, such as gasoline and electric batteries. These are on the cutting edge of automotive technology. This paper discusses how such vehicles are powered and introduces the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight. The writer also reports what American manufacturers are doing in this area. Finally, the disadvantages and advantages of hybrids are described. Bibliography lists 12 sources.
Name of Research Paper File: MM12_PGhybrid.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
vehicles won. Today, there is a similar situation that is about to occur. Gasoline-powered vehicles are sharing the roads with vehicles that use different forms of power or that use
a combination. Which power source will win this time? Electrical vehicles? Gasoline? Other fuel sources? Or, will it be a combination that dominates. Hiroyuki Watanabe, an engineer with Toyota said:
"I believe that the opinion that the end of the internal combustion engine will come, and that it will be replaced by the fuel cell era, is not correct. Rather,
I believe that there will be a time when various engines and power sources will exist simultaneously" (Peters, 2000, p. 10). Watanabe should know. Toyota has released a vehicle
called the Prius, an automobile that has four doors and can seat four to five people (Holstein, 2000). Honda already released their newest hybrid car, the Insight that seats two
people. Hondas Insight "uses a highly-efficient three-cylinder gasoline engine and electric motor/rechargeable battery pack in tandem" (Peters, 2000, p. 10). Toyotas Prius also "uses a small, internal combustion engine/electric motor
tandem power team" (Peters, 2000, p. 10). These are hybrids, so called because they do not use either power source exclusively, instead, they incorporate the best aspects of each power
source. By so doing, they eliminate the worst aspects of each power source. This is the cutting edge of automotive technology. Honda released its Insight in Spring 2000 and reports
it is selling 6,500 cars annually. Holstein reports that at least 25 percent of them are selling in the state of California. Toyota released its Prius in July and reports
it is selling about 1,000 of these cars per month. Dealers have reported they have back orders on the Prius that stretch into February 2001. Both these vehicles are priced