Car insurance – Hybrid cars

Part 1

The Hybrid car was for a long time seen as belonging to the science fiction genre.
These days it is in actual fact a reality with many manufacturers releasing their own version of this environmentally friendly car.

The hybrid car has now largely overtaken the electrical car due to the shortcomings of the latter. The solely electric car tends to be sluggish and suffer from a lack of range between charges which can themselves be extremely slow. Obviously the electrical car is much better for the environment as it has no emissions whatsoever. Of course by charging from your mains supply you are increasing your carbon footprint but charging by solar energy will negate this issue, although unfortunately this is again a very slow method of charging.

The question is; how much more economical and emission friendly are hybrid cars, how is this achieved and how does this impact on your running costs such as car insurance?

Before we can look into this we need to understand how the hybrid car works.
Power is, in most cases provided by a standard petrol engine (which drives the front wheels) combined with one or two electric motors (which power the rear wheels). This is known as a parallel hybrid system and is the most commonly used system and the one that we will focus on for the purpose of this article. The less common hybrid is called the series system and in this case the petrol motor powers a generator which can either charge the batteries or directly power the electrical propulsion system. In this example the petrol motor never directly powers the vehicle.

Getting back to the parallel system, selection of propulsion type depends on the speed you are driving, for example; Many hybrid cars will use the electric motors for city and urban driving and at higher speeds utilise the traditional petrol engine. In some vehicles the system will automatically shut of the petrol engine when waiting at a red light or in a traffic queue. In general if a short burst of rapid acceleration is required the propulsion systems will act in synergy giving maximum power.

Usually the Power supply for the electric motors is charged directly from deceleration or braking of the car, meaning you should have a pretty constant supply of electrical energy for most journeys. This is done by capturing the kinetic energy that is normally released by the brake pads in the form of heat. The battery is charged by harnessing regenerative braking, whereby the electric motor is engaged to slow the wheels of the car down, forcing the wheels to effectively drive the motor and create energy much in the same way as a dynamo on a pedal bike draws its power to light the lamps.

In the majority of parallel hybrid systems the petrol engine is a smaller and lighter than standard version built to return higher efficiency and performance.

If you imagine 2 identical cars, one with a 1 litre engine and one with a 2 litre engine the reason the smaller engine uses less fuel when driven at the same speed as the larger engine is actually quite simple. Both cars have to output the same amount of power to drive the car at that speed, but the smaller engine uses less power to drive itself meaning that in total it uses less power and returns a higher fuel economy. This usually impacts on your motor insurance policy as a car with a much bigger engine will usually be much more expensive to ensure.

Continued in part 2; the other way’s in which a hybrid car improves its fuel efficiency, an example of a hybrid car and running costs.