Emissions from Hybrid Cars Vs. Conventional Cars

Abstract

In the few years that hybrid cars have been around, they have been heralded as fuel efficient, ecologically friendly cars. With enormous savings on gas, it’s no wonder why their popularity has skyrocketed in their short lifetime. Fuel savings are not the only aspect of hybrid vehicles that people are flocking to. Hybrids are advertised as being more environmentally friendly than cars which traditionally run on gasoline or diesel fuel alone. This opens up the target audience to not only people who are looking to save some money, but it also appeals to people who take it upon themselves to be more environmentally conscious. People will simply purchase it because they think that over the course of its useful life it will pollute less than a standard car. Many of these people are oblivious to the notion that it takes emissions to produce a vehicle in the first place. Since the materials required to make a hybrid are completely different from those of a traditional car, the emissions given off during the production process are completely different from traditional cars. This paper will look at the brief history of hybrid cars, their production, and their emissions throughout the production process and on through its useful life and determine whether or not hybrid vehicles are actually as environmentally friendly as they are portrayed as being.

History of Hybrid Cars

When one thinks of a hybrid car, usually the images of a Toyota Prius or the Honda Insight come to mind. In reality though, hybrid cars have been around for over one hundred years. The concept of a gas/electric vehicle was built out of practicality rather than threats of rising gas prices and climate change. Jacob Lohner was the first person to recognize the potential benefits of a hybrid vehicle. Lohner built buses for a living in Vienna Austria. His buses were loud, smelled of fumes, and rough on the roads. Looking for improvements to this, Lohner hired a young engineer Ferdinand Porsche in 1898. Porsche’s task was to build a gasoline/electric hybrid that would run silently. Two years later at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Lohner and Porsche debuted the Lohner-Porsche Elektromobile. It featured an internal combustion engine which charged onboard batteries. The batteries would then transfer the power to electric motors that were mounted in the front wheels. The Elektromobile only had a range of thirty-five miles on a single charge , but with this the hybrid vehicle we know today was born.

For a few years after the Paris Exposition, hybrid cars were introduced into the markets of the world. They were a good alternative at the time to the gasoline powered cars of the day. They produced little noxious emissions, little noise and were very easy to start compared to their hand-cranked gasoline counterparts. Hybrid and electric cars enjoyed a good bit of the market for cars up until