Home
Hybrid Car Blog
Website Search
Site Map
Hybrid Car History
Compare Hybrid Cars
Honda Hybrid Cars
Toyota Hybrid Cars
Ford Hybrid Cars
GM Hybrid Cars
US Hybrid Car History
Glossary of Terms
Concept Hybrid Cars
Used Cars

XML RSS
What is this?
Add to My Yahoo!
Add to My MSN
Add to Google
 

Turbine Electric Car


No commercially viable turbine electric car types have been available so far.

There are principally three types of mechanical engines: Piston, rotary and turbine, and these are used in mechanical hybrids, where hybrids where the primary source of on-board electrical power is a generator mated to a mechanical engine.

While piston engines are used almost exclusively in hybrid cars, there are no hybrid cars with turbine engine. There are several reasons for this.

Both rotary and turbine engines employ rotating rather than reciprocating action, which results in a smoother operation, especially at higher speeds, with fewer moving parts and greater reliability.

However, the trouble with turbine engines is that they are very, very expensive to produce and tend to run at temperatures too hot to use in and around people and property.

This is why no car manufacturer has yet produced a commercially viable turbine or rotary engine for use in a hybrid electric vehicles.

The viable uses of turbine engines so far have included power plants, as almost all electrical power on earth is produced with a turbine of some type. Very high efficiency turbines harness about 40% of the thermal energy, with the rest exhausted as waste heat.


From Turbine Electric Car page to Hybrid Cars Guide index