Usuddenly your partner changes as you get older. How to react when the marriage was so beautiful for many years? Those who remain true to themselves risk being discarded. So adaptation seems the order of the day, ideally by starting a whole new chapter in your life. Just like the bond between engine and transmission, made right at the beginning of automotive development. Apart from remote regions of the world, the internal combustion engine will only survive with electrical assistance. In Germany, this drive is only seen as a transitional phenomenon, which has fared well so far. In 2021, more than 750,000 hybrid vehicles were newly registered in Germany. Of these, 325,000 fell into the plug-in hybrid category, just fewer than battery-only cars, which accounted for 356,000 new registrations.
Most manufacturers have a simple transmission solution for hybrids: the parallel hybrid, so called because both the electric motor and the combustion engine can be used as sole drives. As a rule, there is an electric motor between the engine and transmission, which can be separated from the combustion engine by an additional clutch. But there are also other designs in which the combustion engine acts on one axis and the electric drive acts on a second axis.