Re: Why the series hybrid is far superior to the parallel hybrid.
Bwilson4web and Double-Trinity you are both totally right.
The millstone around the neck of ICE development is the need to connect it to the wheels via a gearbox. This means the ICE has severe design constraints, such that it must have good torque at most rpms, idle well, start quickly, be smooth at all rpms and most restrictive of all have good throttle response.
An ICE connected to a generator has none of these concerns, so you can design it purely for outright thermal efficiency. A 50% engine would be no problem, such engines already exist for electricity production in ships. All you need to do is get rid of the gearbox and free up the remaining potential of the internal combusion engine.
It's interesting to note that the engineers behind the Prius installed the hybrid system NOT mainly to collect regenerative energy (which contributes only a little in Prius), but so they could run the more efficient Atkinson (well, Miller-esque) engine cycle they wanted. It had too little low rpm torque so wouldn't have worked without the help of the electric motor. The next logical step is to move up to series-hybrid.
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