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Hybrid Vehicles

          Hybrid energy is a wide range of alternative energy in the world. It has been used widely in transportation, both vehicles and rail cabins. The term hybrid vehicle is usually referring to hybrid electric vehicles, and more academically, it is called Hybrid electric-petroleum vehicle. These type of vehicles is equipped with an internal combustion engines powered by fossil fuels like gasoline or diesel and one or several electric motors to power the vehicle. When the vehicle is running at low speed, usually it is lower than 15 miles per hour, the combustion engine will stop working automatically and the vehicle will be driven by the electric motors powered by electricity stored in batteries. And during high speed time and hard accelerating process, the combustion engine will be the main drive of the vehicle and the electric motors will hide to produce very little power for the vehicle.

          The working transition of the combustion engine and the electric motors is varying in different types of vehicles and even different in different brand of cars.
For hybrid electric cars, such as Toyota Camry, Prius, Avalon, KIA Optima, VW e-Golf, Jetta, and other hybrid sedans. Because they have equipped with a electric generator so the electric module will charge the batteries when the motors or engine are running. So, that’s why Prius become the best-sell car in the world. It makes the gas more efficient than gasoline car, and customers won’t need to plug it in an outlet or a charging station. This is actually a huge convenient for customers. Imagine if you need to charge your car every day when you come back home, and if you are on the way from San Francisco, California to Miami, Florida, you need to charge your car when you stopped at hotels during the night. That’s a big improvement.

          Also, hybrid electric car is able to save so much money for you if you are going to somewhere far away. For example, one of my interviewees, Stella Chien has driven her Prius from Texas to San Francisco with only $40 on gas (S. Chien, personal communication, March 22, 2017). Personally, I have driven a gasoline car from Muncie, Indiana to San Francisco during a winter break, and I spent $170 on gas on that trip. Even Texas is about 200 miles closer than me, it saved more than a hundred dollars on a trip, which is very financial friendly. 
          Except sedans, compact cars, and other small cars, hybrid technology has been used for buses as well. New Flyer, which is one of the biggest bus manufactures in the United States, uses hybrid electric bus as internal city transportation. Mits buses in Muncie, Indiana is one of the symbols of hybrid electric buses in cities of the United States. Also, some modern cities such as New York City, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong have Big Buses which are two-floor tourism buses as a tour transportation within the cities. The buses are using a more efficient technology called Hybrid Air Electric. As well as the big buses, some two-cabin buses in Chicago and Washington D.C. are equipped with the same technology. 
          However, while hybrid electric vehicles are popular in the automobile markets, the sales of them are still not good. From the chart provided by Alternative Fuels Data Center, the highest number of hybrid electric vehicles sold between 1999 and 2015 is less than 500,000 (2016, AFDC), which is a very small percent in the sales of automobile industry. HEVs are able to save gas, and they are environmental friendly, why don’t people buy HEVs instead of gasoline and diesel fuel vehicles? The biggest reason is the price. The price of hybrid electric edition is usually thousands of dollars more than the gasoline edition. 2017 Toyota Camry is sold with MSRP $23,070, while its hybrid edition is starting at $26,790 (2017, Toyota Official Website). The extra $3,000 could be used for getting a navigation system associated with parking assistant sensors and back up camera, or it could buy a sun roof, or even more than a thousand gallons of gas which might be able to drive more than 25,000 miles. How many people drive 25,000 miles a year? Not many, of course. So why don’t they save that $3,000 and spend them in the first two or three years of the car? 

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