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Comment by jmj42 | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen has been doing interesting things with diesel for a while now. Back in 2005, they introduced the turbo diesel powered Audi R10, which won the 2006 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Le Mans. It was replaced in 2011 by another turbo diesel, the R18.

Of course, neither of these are diesel/electric hybrids, but it's not a surprise that, given their history of inovation with diesel, Volkswagen Group put something like this together.

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Actually, the R18 is available as a diesel/electric hybrid! It's know as the R18 e-tron quattro and the electric motor separately powers the front wheels, converting the R18 to a quattro (4-wheel drive system). Because of the race rules and regs though, the electric is only allowed to kick in past 120km/h.

>Because of the race rules and regs though, the electric is only allowed to kick in past 120km/h.

Why make that rule?

Presumably because of the torque an electric motor can make off the starting line, versus an ICE.

IMO that rule was made to prevent the cars from going through slow corners too fast, The speed restriction only applies to cars that have the motors connected to the front wheels. The Toyota cars have their hybrid motors attached to the rear and they can use their hybrid system from 0 kmph.

The R18 e-tron sends the extra power to the front wheels (effectively making it a four wheel drive). I guess the rule was put in place to negate any advantage the R18 e-tron will have when cornering.

The other LMP hybrid is the Toyota TS030, their system applies the extra power at the rear only, and therefore Toyota can use the electric power at any speed (race reports of the 2012 24 hr of Le Mans said that the Toyota TS030 was eerily silent going down the pit road as it was running on pure electric power on pit stops).

Of course the R18 Etron is a Flywheel based system, which has little relevance to road cars. it's Also caped at 500Kj of energy that can be stored and released per braking.

huh! I didn't know that. I'm haven't been keeping up LMP development (since about 2007/08). Cool to know, though

Yeah I was happy to see a nicely priced Jetta Hybrid; but for some reason it's a gas/electric.

I would have thought they'd do diesel/electric since they already do a a Jetta TDI.

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