Looks like he did commercialise it: https://www.jauntmotors.com/series
I recognise some of the photos from back then.
Some vehicles have this as a “battery starter generator” where the “hybrid” functionality is entirely on the accessory belt.
https://www.bosch.com/stories/48v-hybrid-battery/
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/24/bosch-starter-motor-freed-fr...
The best time to run your a/c or turn the seat warmers: when you’re trying to expel energy.
Would give you some extra braking without heating up the engine and take a small load off your brakes.
That or turn any vehicle into a mild plug-in hybrid for all electrical loads and flywheel the alternator until that time. Gasoline-powered generators are not very efficient.
Might get a few percent extra efficiency without having to touch anything mechanical.
That would effectively add 4wd to old cars and allow the onboard engine to work normally with an option for eboost/edrive with the only extreme modification being adding the battery and control modules.
I've considered it as a modification for FWD track performance cars. It is much easier to add a hub into a stiff rear axle. Turns out, that adding an electric motor, which is not part of the main engine assembly, ads way too much complexity in controlling the whole thing and weight to power ratio, that it stops quickly stops making sense.
1) New cars are too cheap to make at scale.
2) Old cars are quite unsafe to drive, comparatively (airbags, backup cameras, lane departure alerts, blind angle alerts, etc)
But yea, as for the rest of the "safety mechanisms" the only modern change that I can think of that's not easy to retrofit but is a huge safety boost is blind spot detection. As someone that drives older (and smaller) cars, being able to see the blind spot detection light on other cars' mirrors is always a bit of a relief that their car will notify them if they try to change lanes.
I think there are important dimensions of safety that go unmeasured. You have much less road awareness in new cars.
Survivability is great and all, but not at the expense of children and pets becoming invisible.
All the focus on survivability provided another incentive for makers to put ever larger pieces of steel on the road. I disagree that new cars are safer.
I have experienced driver aids glitching, and i want none of it. Anything that can take control of the car needs to be bulletproof, and it isn't.
It should be possible to just replace the flywheel altogether with a generator/motor that both brakes and powers during each cycle, cancelling vibrations. Then more generation during deceleration, and more power during acceleration.