For Hybrid Cars, a Hybrid Invention - Green Blog - NYTimes.com

This is an interesting new tech story about a way to make hybrid vehicles with a combination of batteries and capacitors. Read on for a description of the latter and how it could be an improvement over a battery-only hybrid.

NYTimes.com: "Capacitors store only small amounts of electricity, but they can accept it or deliver it very quickly without damaging themselves. By contrast, lithium ion batteries, the kind now favored for cars, can store large amounts but have trouble delivering it fast enough to allow good acceleration. What is more, they don’t capture energy very well, a problem in electric cars. Electric cars are designed so that when a driver hits the brake pedal, the electric motors switch functions and become generators, converting momentum back into current. But the current flows very fast.

Engineers refer to these two qualities – the ability to store energy, and the ability to deliver it quickly, as energy and power. Lithium ion has good energy storage but poor power; capacitors are the opposite.

So AFS Trinity marries lithium ion and capacitors."