Subaru has an unbelievable gasoline engine hybrid system that can get 47+ mpg and still make 247 hp. The place that the flywheel would normaly be houses a linear power/starter/charger/braking motor. But we won't see it for a long time because Toyota temporarily purchased the rights to our battery technology (NEC). The battery tech is unbelievable. You can charge a discharged battery (-30%) to 90+ percent in 15 minutes and 100+% in 20 minutes. Nobody else can do that yet. And now some Toyotas are being built in the (SIA) Subaru Indiana plant.
On the CVT side, Subaru had an (ECVT) Electronically Controlled Variable Transmission back in 1987 in the Justy and we used it until 1994 until we sold that technology to Nissan. Back in the day, the Justy ECVT was getting 36 to 43 actual mpg and the 4WD ECVT version about 3 mpg less. The trans was really neat in that the belt was not conventional; it was made up of 256 segments held together by 8 flat bands. What is really ingenious about it is it pushed the drive pulley instead of pulling it. Think about the technology that it took to keep the belt tight enough to not slip but loose enough to ratio up and down the pulley. Slick as snot on a doorknob!
The simple Japanese b--tards even put a high performance mode on it for what they called sport driving. Yeh, sport driving from a three cylinder three valve per cylinder fuel injected 77hp engine. NOT!
In 1989, we did take one Justy and lowered it, de-stroked it to 966cc, took the balance shaft out, machined a cam that made power at 10,000 rpm and up, put three Makuuni carbs on it, and a coffee can for a fuel cooler along with a Pampers diaper box for an air intake box in the cowl and a piece of hardware store flexible dryer hose and then set the Bonneville I-production record at 124.23 mph. On the first day we set the record at 117.86, but that was before the Pampers box and dryer hose and coffee can fuel cooler. With the second day came the big numbers. On the first out and back pass, it went 124.23 mph with the engine twisting 11,930 rpm. Then it all went south and the engine lost a cylinder or so we thought. So with a record some twelve mph faster than ever before, they went home.
Come to find out 5 years ago that the engine didn’t go away. I had to get it running for a news article and so I had to put it all back together. What we thought was a cylinder failure turned out to be that a screw had fallen out of one of the carb bell cranks. So when the engine was idling, it ran on all three cylinders but off of idle it would lose a cylinder, because that set of throttle plates wasn’t opening.
Just a note, the record is still held today by the Justy and it was all done by a bunch of DIY guys on thier own time and money after work at our R&D center. Fun stuff if that’s your cup of tea.I know it is mine
Bluecometk