Now that electrification has begun to take hold, the roles will be reversed from present day hybrids. Instead of a small electric motor assisting the main gas engine, the gas engine will take a backseat. This is well illustrated in the Volt where the gas engine simply waits until its services are needed only if the battery gets low, a time that in many cases will rarely if ever happen.Because of this limited functional requirement, gas engines will become increasingly simpler and smaller. Eventually all of the advanced technology cooked into today's combustion engines to make them adequately powerful and efficient will no longer be needed.For the Chevy Volt according to John Bereisa, director of advanced engineering at GM, “All we need is 67 horsepower, enough to maintain the batteries’ charge when the car is cruising at highway speed.”He explains how the choice for the Volt's combustion engine was arrived to: “Since there wasn’t time to design an engine from scratch, we looked for the smallest existing engine capable of supplying 67 horsepower, which turned out to be G.M.’s Family Zero design used in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”He also tells us the Volt's engine when in use will run in a target range of 2000 to 3000 RPM. He notes “When you map an engine’s power versus r.p.m. versus fuel consumption, the resulting chart looks like the Rocky Mountains. In conventional cars, you’re driving all over that map. But in the Volt, we’re able to keep the engine operating in what I call its happy valley, where it delivers the power that’s required while consuming minimal fuel.”Bereisa hints at what GM is planning for the Generation II Volt engine. He says “We’d select a smaller displacement engine for the future, probably less than 1 liter,” and “We’d position the catalytic converter and route the coolant lines to minimize heat losses.” He adds not surprisingly “the engine for the next Volt will definitely be as simple and as light as possible.”And so the gas-powered combustion engine shall ride off quietly into the sunset.Source ( New York Times