this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago

The author of that article did a shit job.

“consists of a small gasoline motor and an electric-motor generator combined in one unit under the hood forward of the dash, and a storage battery beneath the rear seats.” Woods named the car the Dual Power, referring to its twin power sources. Today, we call it a hybrid."

That's not a hybrid. That's a dual power system. A hybrid harvests kinetic energy to be stored and used as electricity. It was patented by Detroit in 1965, but since America had no interest in efficiency, it was not actually developed and sold until 1997, by Toyota.

Ford did not make electrics, despite his wife preferring them, because he wanted to sell to rural America, very little of which was electrified at the time. His original plan was to have his cars run on ethanol, which could be made on any farm, but Standard Oil put an end to that by lobbying Washington to make ethanol home production illegal and even funding prohibition.