Hybrids in general use the fuel-based engine to regenerate the battery and that engine is not mechanically connected to the wheels.
All of the fancy stuff sounds really great until you realize that the it's very expensive and complex for the gas mileage. Conversion kits can take an old clunker and deliver about the same gas mileage for a few thousand dollars and your local mechanic can still understand what's under the hood, plus there are no dangerous high voltages under the hood that require a licensed electrician to handle. It may be true that in spite of Edison's experiments in the humane killing of humans that AC is just as deadly as DC, but there isn't any good reason in my book why a person should find his hand frozen to a terminal with smoke pouring out of his ears because he needed to tighten a loose nut somewhere. These voltages tend to leak through old insulators. The car will have to be either overhauled or recycled just to prevent it from becoming a grave danger to its users and mechanics in a rather short time.
It's a lot like the space station. There was no reason on or off of Earth for them to wire the solar panels in series outside the station, which made the station tend to charge itself to potentially lethal voltages that could discharge between an astronaut and the space surrounding the station, producing a sort of lightning that could kill the astronaut.
Anyway, the only thing worse than a cheap disposable car is an expensive disposable car. It would be progress if people could own safe fuel-efficient hybrids that cost a modest amount of money, as retrofits to older gasoline vehicles, having them repainted and worn parts replaced as needed, and anyone with a moderate amount of technical knowledge could replace the batteries without dying. And those batteries would cost less than a hundred US dollars each and last five years or more.
Don't get me wrong. High technology has its well-deserved places in the marketplace, although the high voltages under the hood should be banned. They will kill more people than dogs do each year when they are popular. Lithium battery technology needs the funding and people who can afford the higher-powered fancier electrics deserve to be able to buy them, but we still need the workhorse cars. We also still need to be able to repair our cars.