SORTING through the choices among electric and hybrid drive systems to pick the type best matched to one’s driving needs can be a formidable task for new-car buyers  and by all indications, it’s only going to get more complicated.

A number of alternatives to the parallel hybrid layout used by cars like the Toyota Prius  something of a de facto standard for blending the power of a gasoline engine with the boost from electric motors  have popped up from competing carmakers in recent weeks.

General Motors peeled back the cloak over the Chevrolet Volt to reveal a multilayered arrangement of planetary gears and clutch packs. Hyundai unwrapped the workings of its Sonata Hybrid, disclosing an electric motor that nestles in the slim space between the gas engine and automatic transmission.

But it is Porsche, a company whose core strengths would seem to lie anywhere but in the realm of tree-huggers, trumping all with the unveiling of three specialized hybrid systems engineered for very different applications: a sport utility, a racecar and a supercar.