Bolt-on from the blue!
The Connaught Company was founded in 2002 to produce a technology-inspired sports four-seat car. However, from the start, the founding directors were aware of the
growing importance of green issues and so it seemed only right to make it a hybrid car too, so that it would burn less fuel, and therefore reduce all exhaust emissions.
The need to keep the car light and mobile led the team to using supercapacitors (very much less weight to the equivalent number of batteries required to perform the same task) and this, in turn, led them to develop the Hybrid Plus, a versatile energy-saving bolt-on device which can be fitted to any engine as long as there’s enough space under the bonnet, which is now commercially available for Light Commercial Vehicles.
It works by using the bottom pulley of the engine which, when you decelerate or brake, activates a large electric motor, which acts as a generator, pumping electrical energy into a box of supercapacitors where it is then stored. Then, whenever you accelerate away from traffic lights (or anywhere), the excess energy comes out of the supercapacitors – the generator becomes an electric motor and assists the engine up to a certain revolution limit. The significant thing is that you don’t have to change any of the existing car parts, so it is affordable and easily adoptable – it is genuinely universally applicable. You can get a 20 to 25% (depending on the drive cycle)improvement in fuel consumption and equivalent reduction in CO2 emissions which, for one van, might equate to a sixty tonne reduction in CO2 emissions over one hundred thousand miles. Multiplied across fleets, this could add up to a huge environmental boom for the car industry.