Hybrid Electric Vehicles: The Next Generation Automobile Revolution

Electric vehicles have been around since the inception of the automobiles. But the internal combustion engines turned out to be the most suitable for automobiles due to availability of cheap fuel at that time, high energy density of gasoline, robust design, longer driving range, no battery charging requirements, rapid acceleration requirements of an automobile. Over a period of time, due to rising fuel costs, shortage of fuel and also due to the pressing need to reduce the air pollution, electric hybrid vehicles appear to be a clean and green alternative to IC engines. In this paper, various battery technologies such as lead-acid batteries, nickel metal hydride (Ni-MH) batteries, zinc-air fuel cells are evaluated in terms of technical and commercial viability for an electric vehicle application. Performance of electric vehicle is simulated under various speeds, gradients, etc. and it can be concluded that Zinc-air fuel cells appear to be the best possible source of energy for hybrid electric vehicles as of today.