Photo: screenshot from Youtube/edited by autoevolution
Driving through today busy city traffic can be a real pain in the back... Too many cars on the streets, inattentive drivers, many stoplights, intersections where you need to give way to an endless row of other vehicles, pedestrians using the crosswalks just after you picked up some speed and a lot more.
And all of these are combined with two other stress factors - needing to arrive at your destination in time and even worrying than that, fuel consumption. With fuel prices having doubled since, lets say ten years ago, in many of the world’s regions, sitting in the traffic with you engine running will put a heavy load on your mind.
That’s why in many drivers’ subconscious everyone surrounding them in traffic are just morons for waisting both their time and gas. That’s why you start cursing and honking in the first nanosecond the light goes green, or go berserk when an old lady moving kinda slow decides to step on the crosswalk just as you managed to cross the last intersection.
But all these, or part of them, can be solved by having a hybrid vehicle. And Toyota did a short experiment to demonstrate how a hybrid changes your drive style. The automaker put some angry Italian drivers to navigate the busy streets of Rome in a Yaris Hybrid. As with other hybrids out there, the Yaris shuts down the gasoline engine when you come to a stop or crawl in heavy traffic, switching to electric mode.
And unlike the gasoline engine, the electric motor doesn’t need to constantly rotate in order to stay on, so basically, in electric mode you stay put for free. How the test subjects reacted spending a lot of time in traffic using a Toyota hybrid? You’ll find out in the video bellow.
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