Back in 2008,
the United Parcel Service (UPS) decided to deploy a few hydraulic hybrids for their delivery fleet.
A few cities also bought several HHV garbage trucks. Then there started to be a small trickle of news claiming that hydraulic hybrids could have a future in everything from very large commercial vehicles to passenger vehicles to bicycles.
A few companies even started offering HHV conversions for existing vehicles. But a quick search on google seems to indicate that they've all stopped offering such services.
The idea seems to have fizzled with no new news on further developments.
But what happened to HHV technology?
The technology looked very promising, and still does to an extent.
With regenerative braking efficiencies claims of up to 80% and potentially double the fuel savings, hydraulic hybrid technology had been lauded as being even more efficient than electric hybrid technology and potentially cheaper. The concept was proven to work even in very large commercial vehicles.
But none of that has seemed to help HHV news from disappearing. What happened to the HHV?
Was it that it was too expensive to make? I noticed that Orlando's HHV garbage trucks cost them over $150,000 more a piece, or about 165% what a non-hybrid truck would have cost.
Was it that other technologies eclipsed the interest in them? If you look at Orlando's latest purchases in trash trucks
they've now switched to apparently non-hybrid CNG trucks.
EV's also may have caused a loss of interest in HHV's kind of the same way EV's have caused some to lose interest in plug-in hybrids.
Is there some other reason? Did they not get the efficiency that they were expected to get? Did they have reliability problems? Or is this a highly efficient fuel saving technology with untapped potential that everyone has aparently forgotten about?