4.1 Early Hybrid Cars

• Pieper (Belgian) produced a 3.5 hp hybrid car in 1900: an electric motor providing additional power when the car was going uphill.

• In 1903 the Krieger Company in the United States used a petrol powered engine to supplement a battery pack.

• The car it produced had front-wheel drive and power steering. A gasoline engine supplemented the battery pack.

• In the United States H. Piper submitted a patent in 1905 for a petrol-electric hybrid vehicle, which used an electric motor to assist an internal-combustion engine to make the car go faster.

• The Galt Motor Company in Canada produced a hybrid car 1914.

• It had a 2 cylinder, two-cycle, 10 hp engine, fuelled by a petrol/kerosene mixture. The battery was charged by a 40 volt, 90-amp generator.

• The batteries provided extra power at times of peak load or operated the car with the gasoline engine turned off. The car was said to be capable of achieving 70 miles per gallon.

• In the United States in 1916, Baker of Cleveland and Woods of Chicago, produced hybrid cars.

• The Wood’s hybrid boasted a top speed of 35 mph and a fuel efficiency of 48 mpg.

• In 1921 an Owen hybrid car (American) employed a gasoline engine to run a generator, which supplied the electric power to motors mounted in each of the rear wheels.

• By the early 1920s the reducing price of petrol powered cars, the increasing availability of petrol and the introduction of the self-starting petrol powered engines, brought about a rapid decline in the interest in hybrid cars.

4.2 Post World War 2 Hybrid Cars

• In 1969 General Motors produced an experimental hybrid car (GM 512).

• It ran on electric power up to 10 miles per hour, on a combination of batteries and its two-cylinder gas engine from 10 to 13 miles per hour, and above thirteen miles per hour it ran entirely on petrol.

• A year later, in 1970, Volkswagen in Germany produced a hybrid vehicle called the “VW Taxi”, which allowed flexible switching between the gasoline engine and electric motor.

• For information on hybrid cars produced from 1980 to present date see Green Cars, Section 9 (Hybrid Cars).