There are two ways to look at the history of the hybrid electric vehicle. The first way would be to consider the entire technical history of such vehicles and the second would be to focus on the last decade as that is really where all of the important points of this particular vehicle have taken place.
However, since hybrids have been around for about 110 years now, it would not be a complete history without taking at least a basic look at the history of the hybrid electric vehicle.
One advantage of this approach is that it very much mirrors the history of most of the other hybrid vehicle types. When you look at flex fuel vehicles that have been engineered to run partially on gasoline and partially on some other substance, the end conclusion to reach about such vehicles is that they have come on as serious contenders within the marketplace only recently, but technology and interest in such vehicles has been around for a very long time. Although their histories are not the same exactly as the hybrid electric vehicle, the same basic premise exists.
The history of the hybrid electric vehicle began in 1899 with a Porsche vehicle that was built with both an electric engine and an internal combustion engine. Somewhat ironically, the internal combustion engine element to the car was the value-added portion that was put there in order to see if the experimental new technology of gasoline was actually a viable way to go. At this point the electric vehicle was still the king of the marketplace and the history of hybrid cars was looking at ways to introduce gasoline into the mix without trying to take the entire market by storm.
The reasons for introducing gasoline-electric hybrids into the market were many and in some ways mirrored the reasons that are used for the reversal that is going on in today’s world. Electric cars were starting to get expensive and while internal combustion engines were still highly unproven technologies at the time, they were cheap.
They would become even cheaper later with the invention of the modern assembly line by Henry Ford, but they were already a lot cheaper pound-for-pound than their fully electric counterparts. It was also worth it because of the higher performance that combustion brought to the automobile, allowing it to perform a lot better and interestingly enough more efficiently than the fully electric vehicles that were considered the industry’s standard at the time.
Although these advances did allow many external hybrids (i.e. hybrids that were charged from some sort of external non-plug in source before the car was used) to be manufactured between 1899 and 1910, these hybrid vehicles were not pursued that much beyond the early part of the 20th century. Fully gasoline vehicles became so popular so fast that people started switching en masse to the combustion engine from the electric one, defeating the purpose of creating the gasoline-electric hybrids in the first place. With everyone getting in on the great bonanza that was the great market switch of the early 20th century in automobiles, this type of hybrid technology fell by the wayside for many decades.
Narrating the next part of this history requires fast forwarding to the year 1969. Although there was no popular automobile that was released into the marketplace, General Motors did receive quite a bit of attention when they released a concept plus some prototypes of the XP-883, a car that was labelled a plug-in hybrid at the time. This car was powered by six lead-acid batteries that were each capable of generating up to twelve volts of electrical potential difference which when combined with the conventional combustion engine allowed the car to not only travel a long ways, but also allowed it to retain a high amount of fuel efficiency in the process. Although General Motors does deserve a lot of credit for coming up with this idea well before any of the companies we now think of as greener were working on hybrid designs, the fact of the matter is that the late 60s oil market was such that this idea never really got off the drawing board.
The irony with the XP-883 is that it was really just a few years too early for its own good. If this car had been produced and headlined in the media a few years later when the oil shocks were taking place, it is quite possible that at the very least the government would have taken a bigger interest in it and hybrid technology may have started developing a full twenty-five years before it developed in our current world. However, the reality is that the XP-883 was unveiled to the world before the oil shocks and in that economy it was heavily overpriced and didn’t go anywhere as a result.
Between then and the turn of the 21st century, the history of hybrid cars is one of continual interest from various companies and continual rejection by the marketplace. One figure of note in this history is a man named Andy Frank, the man that was responsible practically for the invention of the modern plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, started putting forth various academic designs. He started his work in the early 70s with a 1971 car release while at the same time using his position on staff at the University of California to create additional prototypes throughout the 90s.
Although none of his designs were anything more than academic at the time, a lot of the proposed technology that he developed including improved battery designs, electrical flow conduits and general hybrid chassis design have been incorporated into many of the modern plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that have been built. His work has had enough influence in the last decade for him to be referred to albeit infrequently as the father of the modern plug-in hybrid electric vehicle or PHEV for short.