
A new patent shows that Stellantis is trying to get ahead of what it thinks you won’t like about range-extended hybrids. It knows that customers hate the drone of cars with a CVT, and a range-extender gas engine working like a generator could turn that up to 11 with its steady RPM. So its engineers have borrowed some ideas from the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N along with the fake “shifts” that nearly every new CVT-equipped model uses. The result is called Series Hybrid Control With Gear Emulation, and it’s going to be weird.
Â