A car with both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine (running on petrol, diesel or LPG).

The best-known hybrid is the Toyota Prius, which is mainly powered by a regular petrol engine but employs supplementary electric power to improve fuel economy.

Other Toyotas (and Lexus) use a similar system.

Future hybrid systems will include the plug-in hybrid (like GM’s Volt), which is designed to mainly run on electric power, with the batteries charged from a socket, while an on-board engine is only used when needed as an on-board generator to charge the batteries on the move.