Energy and the Environment, Segment 10: Efficiency and Cars - a podcast by PSD Channel 10 and Little Shop of Physics

So, why is a hybrid car more efficient than a traditional gasoline car? Efficiency is all about making the same things happen while using less energy — and a hybrid car does exactly that, by using less gasoline.
A traditional car needs a lot of gasoline to accelerate, and it continues to burn large amounts of fuel even when it has reached a constant speed — but it doesn’t need to burn all of that extra fuel! This is where the hybrid comes in. A hybrid car stores the otherwise wasted energy into a battery, and uses the battery to help with acceleration. The result is that less fuel is used in order to do the same work.

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