Innovative high-performance electronics saves fuel – and wins over the ADAC

This year, the Continental E-booster scored as one of the most efficient technologies for reducing fuel consumption – and thus pollutant emissions as well. Also referred to as micro-hybrids, start-stop systems increase mileage by up to fifteen percent in city driving. Systems using a starter-generator work especially fast and comfortable. The starter-generator combines light machine and starter in one component. In this way, diesel engines in particular can be jump-started (into idle) much faster – virtually without any vibration and noise.

The additional energy accumulator from Continental ensures that the vehicle electric grid can is always capable of making electric power available at lightning-fast speed. And that is important because more and more comfort applications have an increasingly high electric power requirement. That means that even if an especially large amount of energy is needed to start the vehicle, running the navigation system, the A/C unit and the radio, for example, will still present no problem. Dr. Carsten Götte, range manager for electric grid stabilization in Continental’s Powertrain division remarks: “In this new in-vehicle technology for storing electric energy, supercapacitors come to the assistance of the conventional battery. In just a few seconds, the batteries are fully recharged. That makes it possible to take advantage of extremely short stop phases to shut off the combustion engine.”

Continental is currently the sole manufacturer of this type of system.