ELECTRIC AND HYBRID CARS

Today, the topic that I chose to talk about is electric and hybrid cars. On Thursday one of our classmates talked briefly about hybrid cars in the two minutes presentation (although the time did not allow that person to go deep in the topic, he still did a good job of explaining what a hybrid car is all about). Anyhow, I would like to start off by introducing the terms electric cars, or electric vehicles are vehicles that use the chemical energy stored in a rechargeable battery to be converted to electrical energy in order to power its electric engine. Many electric cars are capable to accelrate quicker comparing to conventional vehicles, they are quiet, and do not produce exhust fumes such as carbon dioxide. Electric cars have a great potential to reduce people’s dependency on petroleum, which ultimately could reduce global warming. Unlike electric cars, hybrid cars are vehicles that uses more than one source of power to run their engines such as, internal combustion engines (ICE), on-board rechargeable energy storage system (RESS), and human powered bicycle. Hybrid cars, also uses electric engines run on batteries, which is the same mechanism electric cars use. Both, electric and hybrid cars are associated with major disadvantages, which includes expensive replacement of batteries, limited speed, and very limited range. There is another big disadvantges of the usage and the manufacting of hybrid cars that average people do not even have a cule about. And that is the special type of battery hybrid cars need in order to run. Recent studies shown that manufacturing that type of special batteries produce more pollution rather than keep buring oil by usind conventional cars. The reason for that is because of the harmful elements that go in the production of such a type of batteries, also the disposal of this kind of batteries is very harmful to the enviroment. This defeats the whole purpose of developing and producing hybrid cars.