On a recent trip to Seattle, bastion of American environmentalism, I was thoughtfully provided with a Toyota Prius as a rental car. To be honest, apart from the fact that it looks like you're driving around in Julius Caesar's nose, it wasn't a bad piece of kit. It's true that the only real excitement to be derived from driving a Prius lies in needlessly accelerating in order to brake heavily and see the little green regenerative energy symbols appear on the electronic screen. However, as an appliance it works quite well.
Despite it’s growing popularity I’ve decided that the Toyota is doing the hybrid concept some injustice. Whilst mating batteries and internal combustion engine is a polite dinner party way to approach the subject, there’s a long history of more exciting examples. The possibilities arising from a mix-and-match approach have seduced many manufacturers and my list of the greatest mixed up love-children from the automotive world is as follows.
The AC Cobra is an obvious, but hard to ignore contender on such a list. Sometimes you're getting what you need from one aspect of a car, but are left disappointed in another area. For the AC Ace, the problem was essentially, Pretty But Slow - what you might unkindly call the Paris Hilton dilemma. Solving it created a brutal combination of enormous American V8 and slightly bewildered British sportscar. Inserting a 4.7 litre and then a 7.0 litre V8 into a car the size of the Ace was rather like building a hydro-electric power station inside a crofter's cottage. Some will point out that the Cobra wasn't a particularly great handling car but anyone who's seen a picture of Dan Gurney bullying one around the Targa Florio or stood next to one at idle will find such criticism hard to hold on to.
Others had a more ambitious vision, deciding that merely combining the DNA from two countries wouldn't be quite enough to get the job done. The Menage a Trois approach was vindicated by the Gordon Keeble GK1, the result of the English persuading the Americans and Italians to take a room together, before turning out the lights and jumping in too. Remarkably, despite the room in question being on an industrial estate in Slough, the super coupe that was produced was rather wonderful. Just under 5 and a half litres of Chevy V8, sitting in a very pretty Bertone styled body meant that you and 3 friends could hit 60 in 7.5 seconds and go onto 140 mph. Not bad for 1963. Sadly, as well as providing the vision and the understatement (in the form of the tortoise bonnet badge) the Brits also supplied the manufacturing crisis that helped to kill the GK1 with less than 100 made.
Good though they were, the use of American V8s was sometimes motivated by economic considerations as much as design purity. They provided an inexpensive route to off-the-shelf power. Gordon Murray though did not adopt a "that'll do" approach to building the world's fastest and most expensive production car. He wanted 550 hp or so for his McLaren F1. With BMW's custom 6.1 litre V12 he found 627 of them and an engine that would spit 3 foot-long flames from the back of the car. You couldn't show off about switching to battery power in the McLaren but you could stick a long tail on the back and take it to Le Mans. The F1 represented barely contained motorsport-derived fury, combined with bespoke luggage and as such stands as a high water mark of hybrid lunacy.
In the corporate world, few phrases highlight the wonder of the hybrid world quite so well as "Lamborghini V10-powered, German executive saloon." Presumably someone at Ingolstadt went out for Friday drinks one week, had rather too many Jagermeisters, fell asleep in his clothes and had a dream involving Chancellor Helmut Kohl singing Nessun Dorma. Whatever the inspiration, the Audi S8 took a concept that was rather poorly attempted by the Lancia Thema 8.32 and made it actually work.
And then there’s Morgan. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Malvern went mildly and politely bonkers with the Aero 8. As if a bonded-aluminium, laser cut chassis wasn’t revolutionary enough, the retro-anachronism suddenly had a BMW V8. A great engine, marking time in the boring looking M3 met with the wild looking Morgan, was allowed to make quite a bit more noise, wear odd clothes and suddenly everything made sense. At least it did once the AeroMax changed the front end from boss-eyed to Hugo Boss.
Yes the Prius allows its owners a moment of new-technology smugness. But by bringing together two unremarkable engines in an unremarkable body it consigns itself to mediocrity. It’s cars like the Morgan and the Cobra, combining pieces of disparate, sometimes fractured, brilliance that represent the Evo-Hybrid - a car that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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