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Hybrid Vehicles Vs. Electric Vehicles

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In this day and age, our world is being consumed by the rapid growth of the world’s population. From the beginnings of time with cave men thousands of years ago up until the Industrial Revolution, the number of people living on this planet never passed a billion, and was always growing at a slow pace. When the Industrial Revolution hit the population skyrocketed to over 7 billion people. The growth of population has not slowed down since then, and more technological advances are popping up everyday to help balance the rapid growth. The amount of people in the world is literally growing each and every day. As the population grows we put more demands on our planet to provide for the billions and billions of people inhabiting it. The world …show more content…

In 1990, the decision by the California Air Resources Board to limit air pollution by enforcing the rule that 2% of each automaker’s sales must have zero emissions in the 1998 model year. This decision opened the door completely for electric vehicles and essentially mandated the automobile industry to make developments in hybrid/electric vehicles (Anglin 1). Functional hybrids have additionally been around for over a century. By 1900, a Belgian carmaker introduced a hybrid that had a small gasoline engine along with an electric motor. Like the history of electric cars, the production of hybrid vehicles was at a standstill between the 1930’s and 1960’s due to the development of the piston combustion engine, and the fact that oil consumption and air quality were not pressing issues. After this period of time, hybrid vehicles once again attracted interest and by the 1990’s more time and energy were going into the development of hybrid vehicles (Berman 1). Most manufacturers developed EV’s on an experimental basis in the 1990’s, often with research subsidies from the government. But since these initial breakthroughs, the manufacture of EV’s driven solely by an electric motor has been discontinued due to practical considerations. The key problem was their limited range, often less than 100 miles, and the recharging process took upwards of several

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