Peugeot Bets on a Different Kind of Hybrid - NYTimes.com

Peugeot Bets on a Different Kind of Hybrid - NYTimes.com

Peugeot Bets on a Different Kind of Hybrid - NYTimes.com (via):

Hybrid Air ? an experimental vehicle that the French automaker PSA Peugeot Citro?n has been trumpeting lately as an exemplar of energy efficiency. While some skeptics doubt whether it is truly breakthrough technology, the Peugeot and Citro?n concept cars containing it may prove to be some of the more intriguing models on display next week at the Geneva Motor Show.

Peugeot says a compact car like a Citro?n C3 equipped with the technology will get about 100 kilometers per 2.9 liters, or 81 miles per gallon, in city driving. If so, that would be significantly more than existing hybrid electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius can achieve in stop-and-go traffic.

Peugeot, the second-biggest carmaker in Europe after Volkswagen, plans to begin rolling out Hybrid Air cars by 2015 or 2016.

Like a Toyota Prius, the Hybrid Air recovers energy each time the driver brakes or decelerates. But instead of using that braking energy to charge a battery, which then runs an electric motor ? as in the Prius ? the Hybrid Air has a reversible hydraulic pump that uses the braking energy to compress nitrogen gas in what looks like an oversized scuba tank. When the Hybrid Air driver next presses the accelerator, the compressed gas pushes hydraulic fluid, syringe fashion, through a gearbox to turn the wheels.

The energy stored in the nitrogen tank is small ? equivalent to only about five teaspoons, or a couple dozen cubic centimeters, of gasoline ? and enough to power the car only a few hundred meters before the standard gasoline motor takes over again. But repeated over the course of a day of city driving, Peugeot says, those extra teaspoons of energy add up to big improvement in gas mileage.

Source: http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2013/Mar/02/Peugeot.Hybrid-Air

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