2011

If you want to buy a new 2011 Toyota Prius hybrid these days, you may have to scramble. Supplies are down to 3,000 units, which is less than 10 days' worth of sales. In auto industry terms, that means "sold out," and dealers are charging higher markups on the few precious Priuses they still have...

Earlier this week we said that that Nissan needed a new, quirky way of advertising its 2011 Nissan Leaf that didn’t involve making household gadgets run on gasoline or relying on trained polar bears. Nissan can’t have heard us. Instead of a quirky new ad campaign, Nissan is attempting...

When you buy an electric car, you will most likely need a charging station. As buyers start to bring home plug-in cars, they will also expect their dealer to help them acquire and install a 240-Volt charging station (technically known as an EVSE, though few people call them that). Startup Fisker...

How do you legally have fun with a $109,000 electric sportscar that can do 0-60 in under 4 seconds, has excellent grip, and a top speed of 125 mph? That’s exactly the question facing many Tesla Roadster owners looking to test their cars - and themselves - to the limit in a safe environment...

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll know that we’ve said before that making a good electric car is hard, even for large automakers like Ford, Nissan, Toyota and Chevrolet. As for turning a production gasoline or diesel car into an electric one? It’s a whole...

Nissan may have killed off its Altima Hybrid model, but the company is moving forward with a range of new hybrid models. This time, however, they'll be home-grown, based on the company's internally developed hybrid system. Nissan's new single-motor hybrid technology is considerably simpler than the...

While you probably remember the great success and untimely demise of Toyota’s previous all-electric RAV4 EV, larger, pure electric SUV haven’t yet been attempted by major automakers. But a transatlantic firm called Liberty has been working on changing that with an electric vehicle based...

Earlier this year we took delivery of our very own 2011 Nissan Leaf. Just like the thousands of other customers worldwide, we took our place in the queue last year and had an agonizingly long wait before we were sitting behind the wheel. But just under 3 months and 5,000 miles after driving off the...

With gas-mileage standards through 2016 now in place, the EPA and NHTSA are turning their sights toward rules for 2017 through 2025. Proposals are floating around for CAFE standards of up to 62 mpg (which means the vehicles you might buy would average about 50 mpg in actual use). Ah, the hell with...

When BMW launched the new MINI back in 2001, the U.S. market wondered if anyone could actually sell a car that small. The proof has been in the pudding--the new MINI sold quite well--but the company hasn't stopped there, adding models left and right. Now, leave it to the folks over at MINI Central...

The Tesla Roadster hasn't been front-page news for electric cars in a while, now that several mass-market family electric cars have launched. So as Tesla moves its focus to the upcoming Model S electric sedan, production of its first electric model is beginning to wind down as planned, so supplies...

Google’s head offices in Mountain View, California has just got some new neighbors, but unlike most of the other companies in the fabled silicon valley it isn’t a fresh-faced venture-funded software or green tech startup firm. It’s an automaker. Moving into offices just over the...

The phrase "west side of LA" conjures images of the surf at Malibu, high-dollar real estate and, on the grittier side, the gangs from the bad old days of Venice Beach. Park those images next to the little video below from Smog and Fog Films. On the west side, apparently even mock-gangster rappers...

After several months of using a 2011 Chevy Volt and a 2011 Nissan Leaf as our sole family transport, we have a better understanding of both cars than we did in March, when I first wrote about how they compared. First to arrive at our West Sacramento home was a beautiful crystal red 2011 Volt. We...

Despite media attempts to conjure a "sales battle" between the 2011 Chevy Volt and the 2011 Nissan Leaf, both companies are selling every car they can manage to get into the showrooms. Now Chevrolet has released its first look at who is actually buying its Volt range-extended electric cars. The...

Add one more to the list of hybrid cars that have been sent off to the great gasoline-electric graveyard in the sky. Nissan will end production of its Altima Hybrid sedan after the 2011 model year. Launched in late 2007, the hybrid version of the Nissan Altima used Nissan's own four-cylinder engine...

You probably already know this, but electric cars and gasoline cars are completely different beasts. In fact, concepts we’ve become accustomed to in gasoline cars such as the creep and kick-down functions of an automatic gearbox are not natively present in a electrical drivetrain - and yet...

We've heard this script before. Some agency of the Federal Government proposes a new rule that will affect the design and performance of cars in some way, sometime in the future. Instinctively, reflexively, automatically, viscerally, the industry lashes out. Horror, catastrophe, misery, bankruptcy!...

Well-established charging station manufacturer Clipper Creek has just unveiled what it claims is the smallest electric vehicle charging station currently available on the market. Costing $995 and weighing in at 7 pounds, the Clipper Creek LCS-25 unit looks like the portable 110V level 1charging...

In the modern world of smart grids, smart phones and even smart cars, the Internet can connect two seemingly unrelated objects together. Take Nissan’s 2011 Leaf. Thanks to a built-in wireless modem, the all-electric car can both receive and send data through Nissan’s Carwings portal...