A hybrid car is a means of transportation using two sources of power. It uses a rechargeable energy storage system found on board as well as a fuelled power source as the vehicle's driving force. The car pollutes less and uses less fuel. Victor Wouk (1919 – 2005) was an electrical engineer and entrepreneur and the inventor of the hybrid car. He was born in New York City and received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1939.
Victor Wouk’s History as the Inventor of the Hybrid Car
In 1962, Wouk was approached by a founder of Motorola cars, Russell Feldman, who identified the pollution from cars as one of the biggest problems of the environment. He wanted to find out the solutions to this problem. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Wouk thought over this problem and got involved with vehicles.
After a significant amount of work, he combined the low-emission benefits of an electric car with the power of a gasoline engine to produce a hybrid vehicle, effectively transforming a Buick Skylark vehicle with a 20 kilowatt direct-current electric motor and an RX-2 Mazda rotary engine. The vehicle was tested at the Environmental Protection Agency's emissions investigation laboratories where it acquired more than twice the fuel economy of the vehicle before it was converted. The vehicles emission rates were also only nine percent of those of a gas powered car. It appeared as if Wouk had invented a new hybrid vehicle.
At first, Wouk did not get any response to his ideas for inventing a hybrid car. He was very heavily condemned for not believing in a full electric system. Will the help of a friend, Charlie Rosen, who also believed in what hybrid cars could do and achieve, Wouk and Rosen created a new company to develop their hybrid car idea and make it viable in the market and be used as a car that people would use everyday. They wanted the hybrid to be a car that created a solution to the problems of auto-pollution.
As the inventor of hybrid cars, Wouk’s work throughout his life gave him the name of ‘the grandfather of electric and hybrid vehicles in the United States’. Despite of all his hard work in the sixties and seventies however, hybrid cars only started to appear in the vehicle market in the late 1990’s. They are now becoming exceptionally popular, both by people who see them as a way of helping the environment, and those who see it as a way to save funds.
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