Thursday, November 22, 2012

Diesel Vs Electric Vs Hybrid Cars

When the glossy marketing techniques of the automobile companies make it so difficult to choose just one of the "perfect", highly developed cars of the future, as they are presented to you in all those commercials, it's more and more difficult to weigh your choice. Let's see beyond the shiny coachwork, the comfy leather seats and the multi-tech car stereo and focus on the element that makes all the difference: the car's engine! Diesel, electric or hybrid motor, now that is the big question?

The major advantages (and since during crisis the one that tends to outshine all the other advantages) of Diesel cars is fuel economy and therefore money saving. If we were to compare it with a vehicle with gasoline engine, we would see that the Diesel car needs far less fuel helping you, on a long term to recover the costs implied by its purchase. Another big pro, sustained by all Diesel cars owners, is driving performance, given by the fact that they deliver much more of their rated power than a petrol engine, givine you the chance to drive quicker from a stop sign, giving you a sensation similar to the one you have when driving a sports car.


Still, there's still a long road to take till technology and mechanics, working together, reach perfection. There are some big minuses, too, that Diesel cars have. The first major inconvenient about Diesel motors is given by its costs. They are more expensive than the gasoline engines, even though, as I have mentioned, those costs can be recovered by the money savings you will make in fuel buying. Another "handicap" would be their weight, since they have much higher compression ratios .Now, for the nature friendly drivers, Diesel's emission of smelly smoke can be a real problem, not to mention that they are a lot noisier the gasoline engines.

Now, let's continue climbing this pyramid of the car engine's technology and make an inventory of the pros and cos of the electric cars. This type of car seems to be any environment concerned driver's dream. Using one or two motors for propulsion, therefore converting fuel into electricity, they are the less polluting type of vehicles at the moment. That's not all. If you're a speed addicted, you will surely appreciate its second major advantage: it can launch from standstill with maximum force, where do you add that, from a mechanically point of view, is much easier to get it repaired.

To lower down your enthusiasm, I will have to remind you, though, that you should schedule your driving sessions way in advance, for it will take a while till you get its batteries charged. Also, another issue is represented by the recharging stations' infrastructure, their high costs, to be more specific, which instantly increases the costs of electricity for the electric cars driven there to recharge their batteries.

We have finally retied the highest position in the hierarchy of car technology, where we can find, nicely displayed, the car of the future: the hybrid car, the one that brings together the energy of the electrical motor with the power of the gas-powered engine. Immediately a thought crosses our minds: it's the environmental friendly car we have all been expecting, with lower pollution emissions. There's more! We might be concerned about pollution and CO emission, but we cannot stop thinking about the effect a new car's purchase might have on
our wallet.

Luckily, its batteries do not need to be charged by an external source and hybrid cars determine a reducing of the dependency on fossil fuels. You might be thinking: since this is the closer to perfection car of our-days, what disadvantages might it present? Well, the first one would be that they are not accessible to everyone, being expensive even from the car lot. The second problem, that we've tackled when we focused our attention on Diesel cars, would have to be the engine's heavy weight. Now, one embarrassing problem and concern for manufacturers would be the high voltage accumulated in its batteries, which diminishes its safety in case of car accident.




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