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Nowadays, fuel economy and pollutant emissions are keenly felt topics and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) represent the best opportunity to respond to this problem in the short term. Hybrid electric vehicles meet the high-efficiency of electric motors, with the high reliability of the internal combustion engines, granting optimal results both in terms of emissions and fuel economy. The vehicle and path features highly affect the architecture choice. A parallel architecture, having a more flexible layout and providing a higher drive power, is more suitable for long paths and higher speeds, while the series one better adapts to urban cycles, as can be switched to a pure electric mode. At the same time, a parallel-series architecture is in general a good choice.

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are worldwide recognized as one of the best and most immediate opportunities to solve the problems of fuel consumption, pollutant emissions and fossil fuels depletion, thanks to the high reliability of engines and the high efficiencies of motors. Moreover, as transport policy is becoming day by day stricter all over the world, moving people or goods efficiently and cheaply is the goal that all the main automobile manufacturers are trying to reach. In this context, the municipalities are performing their own action plans for public transport and the efforts in realizing high efficiency hybrid electric buses, could be supported by the local policies. For these reasons, the authors intend to propose an efficient control strategy for a hybrid electric bus, with a series architecture for the power-train.

The last years have seen an increasing need to reduce vehicle polluting emissions which has lead car producers to improve their efforts to comply with the new legislation. At the moment, hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) seems to be the most suitable solution as they match good performances in terms of both consumption and reliability. In a such dynamic market, an interest for small and light city-car is rising, especially in Europe, where urban circulation is getting worst due to huge number of vehicles. Such special characteristics, like smallness and lightness, allow these hybrid vehicles to run 40 km with a litre of fuel only. In this scenario, the Hybrid and Electric Research Group of ENEA planned the realization of an hybrid power train suitable for small city car.