History Hybrid Car

Around the late 1800's battery technology improved significately with the modern lead-acid battery by H. Tudor and nickel-iron battery by Edison and Junger.

In the early years of the twentieth century, thousands of electric and hybrid cars were produced. Unfortunately with the advent of cheap gasoline the decline of electric vehicles was only a matter of time. Also Henry Ford’s assembly line producing cheap cars and the advent of the self-starting gas engine signaled a rapid decline in hybrid cars by 1920.

One of the next major inovations didn't happen until the 1970's when David Arthurs invented regenerative braking, this allowed him to convert his Opel GT to hybrid and was reported to return as much as 75MPG, hybrid car plans are still sold to this original design.

With the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the price of gasoline soared, creating new interest in electric vehicles. The U.S. Department of Energy ran tests on many electric and hybrid vehicles produced by various manufacturers, including a hybrid known as the “VW Taxi” produced by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, West Germany. The Taxi, which used a parallel hybrid configuration allowing flexible switching between the gasoline engine and electric motor, logged over 8,000 miles on the road, and was shown at auto shows throughout Europe and the United States.

In the late 1970's Toyota built its first hybrid car — a small sports car with a gas-turbine generator supplying current to an electric motor.

The Clinton Administration announced a government initiative called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) in 1993. In the program, the government worked with the American auto industry to develop a clean car that could operate at up to 80 miles per gallon. Several years and a billion dollars later, the PNGV emerged with three prototypes for their 80 mpg car, they were all hybrids.

Toyota had been excluded from the PNGV development which prompted Chairman Eiji Toyoda to create a secret project called G21, Global Car for the 21st Century. The following year, Toyota doubled its original goal of improving fuel efficiency by 50 percent.

In 1997 history hybrid car evolved to what we know it today with the Toyota Prius hybrid was introduced to the Japanese market, two years before its original launch date, and prior to the Kyoto global warming conference held in December, sales in the 1st year were nearly 18,000.

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