Today I drove a petrol-electric car for the first time. They are a new addition to the government fleet.<\/p>\n
When I borrowed it, the girl at the desk asked me if I had driven a Prius before. Her instructions were, “you put the remote where the key should go, put your foot on the brake then press the start button and to take off the hand brake you press the foot brake”. She gave me a phone number to ring because she didn’t trust that I could work it out.<\/p>\n
Turned out that I couldn’t work it out, because no matter how many times I tried I couldn’t get the handbrake to disengage. I called the number and one of the girls came down and explained that there is a pedal where the clutch is in a manual, and you press that to disengage the handbrake. After that everything was fine.<\/p>\n
The car only had 340km on the clock, and 340km on the trip counter – so I guess it was still running on its first tank of fuel.<\/p>\n
It has both an electric motor and a petrol motor. The petrol motor engages when you are accellerating, but not straight off from a standing start. When you are stopped at the lights, the petrol motor is stopped completely. Braking runs the electric motor in reverse and assists in charging the battery. Running downhill, the petrol motor stops completely and the charge is directed towards the battery. When I was coming back to the office on the freeway, travelling at 100km\/hr coasting down an easy slope the fuel consumption was zero because the engine was off.<\/p>\n
The car trip was more exiting than the meeting. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I drove a petrol-electric car for the first time. They are a new addition to the government fleet. When I borrowed it, the girl at the desk asked me<\/p>\n