The earliest electrical cars had one particularly inconvenient feature: every night, they needed to be plugged in to restore their batteries. Besides being inconvenient, this also made them somewhat pointless: how much energy was really being conserved if the batteries had to be charged on a nightly basis?

Eventually, car makers came up with an innovative solution. “Hybrid” cars use gas to accelerate, but electricity to run the car at a steady speed. Most importantly, this electricity is not pumped into the car with a large plug or generator. It is produced by the car every time that it brakes. How? Friction. When the brakes are applied to a moving car, this causes friction. Depending on how hard the brakes are pushed, this is enough to slow down or stop the car. Until recently, that’s been all there was to say. But car makers soon decided to reuse the energy generated by that friction. So, every time you brake your hybrid, the heat produced by the brakes is used to charge the battery, allowing it to go for years and decades without ever being plugged in. This is about as true to the environmentalist motto – “reduce, reuse, recycle” – as you can get.

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