A small indicator shows when the 2.4-liter, 164-horsepower engine is sleeping, and a gauge shows whether the batteries are charging or assisting the engine.
Finally, however, the anchor took hold and assisted the engines in swinging the ship around.
Is it more like the Prius plug-in hybrid that Toyota is developing? A. The Volt is engineered to drive primarily on power from its battery; a conventional hybrid like the Prius, which has a much smaller battery, is powered mostly by its gasoline engine, relying on its electric motor mainly to assist the gas engine at lower speeds as well as for small amounts of electric-only driving.
I love it when I climb a hill, or have to pass another car, and the electric motor kicks in to assist the gas engine, a bonus of power without any additional fuel demand.
Based on a chosen cost function we finally compute a control law to assist the combustion engine during acceleration phase while battery charge conditions and thermal constraints can be taken into account via a cost function parameter.
At this point, the technology seems less miraculous and more like a no-brainer: you save fuel by using an electric motor to assist the gasoline engine, which shuts off entirely at low speeds or when the car is at a standstill.
They just employ a battery-powered electric motor to assist the gasoline engine under certain loads.
This allows the cars, which typically rely on the electric power only for short bursts or to assist the onboard gasoline engine, to run on electricity alone for short trips.
The Prius has a planetary gear, a specially developed device that means that at any given moment, the electric motor can be working alone, or assisting the gasoline engine, or draining energy from the gasoline engine to recharge the battery.
There is a meter for the battery charge level and a display that shows when the battery is being charged and when it is providing an assist to the engine.
