compliance car
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Walking through the Volkswagen stand at the Los Angeles Auto Show, you would have seen quite a few 2015 Volkswagen Golf models. But a blue one over in the corner was more special than it may have looked: It was the 2015 Volkswagen e-Golf, the battery-electric version of the all-new seventh generation of VW's five-door hatchback, now entering its 40th year of production. The new Golf line will arrive in U.S. dealers toward the middle of next year, once the company has set up and tested a new production line for gasoline and diesel models in Mexico. But the electric Golf will be supplied to the...
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Green Car Reports' Best Car To Buy Nominee: 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV
What do you call an all-electric minicar that has elements of the Chevy Volt, can spin its drive wheels if you have a heavy foot--and still ranks as the most efficient plug-in car sold in the U.S. this year? We'd call it the 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV. And it's one of our five nominees for Green Car...
John Voelcker -
FINAL UPDATE: Plug-In Electric Car Sales For Oct: Volt, Leaf Hold Steady
In October sales of plug-in electric cars, both Chevy and Nissan improved on their September results, but didn't come close to beating their record August sales numbers. The month as a whole rebounded toward August's record-breaking level, improving on September's slump--but the Tesla sales may...
John Voelcker -
Chevy Spark EV Electric Car: No Retail Sales In Canada, Europe
It's a frequently asked question: Will the 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV be sold where I live? (Assuming you don't already live in California or Oregon, where the subcompact electric car has been on sale since June--or South Korea, where it's made.) General Motors had earlier announced that sales of the...
John Voelcker -
2015 Kia Soul EV To Be Sold In U.S.: First Korean Electric Car
We saw the Kia Soul EV spy shots almost three months ago, and now Kia has officially announced that its first battery-electric car will go on sale in the U.S. next year. It's an electric conversion of the new-for-2014 second generation of its "funky and iconic" Soul tall wagon, which Kia calls an...
John Voelcker -
First Car Sold With CCS Fast Charging Now Delayed To December
GM has pushed back the CCS fast-charging option on the Chevrolet Spark EV until the end of the year.
Stephen Edelstein -
After a record-setting month in August, plug-in electric car sales moderated in September while the overall U.S. vehicle market surged. The Chevrolet Volt, the best-selling plug-in car after almost three years, registered 1,766 deliveries--little more than half the record-setting number of 3,351 sold in August. That brings its year-to-date sales total to 17,760. The Nissan Leaf battery-electric car logged sales of 1,953, for a nine-month total of 16,076--less than 700 units behind the Volt. DON'T MISS: U.S.-Made 2013 Nissan Leaf Has Only 15 Percent Local Content; Here's Why That number is...
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2013 Toyota RAV4 EV Ads: Narrow Focus To Reach Electric-Car Buyers
Ads for the RAV4 EV will target specific, tech-savvy buyers in the California cities where the car is sold.
Stephen Edelstein -
Rare Surviving GM EV1 Waits For Savior At Missouri University
The late and much lamented GM EV1 electric car is by now a mythical creature. It's been the subject of a much-discussed documentary, and is still cause for blind loathing of General Motors in some quarters. Designed, engineered, and offered for lease in California and a few other locations from...
John Voelcker -
Why 'Compliance Cars' Turned Out To Be Good For Electric-Car Buyers
Electric-car advocates spend a lot of time grumbling about compliance cars. But it turns out that even in low volumes, limited mostly to sales in one state, they've unexpectedly produced a benefit for all electric-car buyers: lower prices. Recent price reductions to "move the metal," as Detroit...
John Voelcker -
More Chrysler Electric Cars Coming, Lots Of Catching Up Needed
Now that Chrysler-Fiat reluctantly has the surprising good 2013 Fiat 500e--its first electric car--on the market, what's next for the smallest of the Detroit Three? There will be more plug-in vehicles, according to an interview in the Detroit Free Press with Mike Duhaime, the company's global...
John Voelcker -
2015 Kia Soul EV: Electric Car Spy Shots, But Compliance Car Only?
Ten days ago, spy shots of a new battery-electric car--from a maker that hasn't yet offered one yet--burst onto the scene. Electric-car fan Lee Colleton shot the 2015 Kia Soul EV prototype test cars connected to CHAdeMO quick-charging stations at a Residence Inn in the California coastal town of...
John Voelcker -
With a little price war on electric cars taking place in California, there are waiting lists for the Honda Fit EV, and this year's production of Fiat 500e may be sold out. That means that Fiat and Honda will boost production to meet demand, right? Wrong. We've now talked to both carmakers, and neither has any intention of upping production beyond their originally planned numbers. Compliance cars only Remember, each of these cars is a compliance car--a vehicle built and sold only in California (and a handful of other states) in just enough volume to meet its zero-emission vehicle requirements...
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June Plug-In Electric Car Sales: Year Won't Quite Double 2012
With half the year now gone, are plug-in electric cars on track to double their sales last year? Not quite. As of the end of June, roughly 41,000 plug-in cars had been sold in the U.S. That number would need to be closer to last year's total of 53,000 to keep sales on pace to double the 2012 total...
John Voelcker -
Is Buying A Fiat 500e Electric Car 'Environmentally Sexy'?
We liked the 2013 Fiat 500e electric car, a lot. It may be the best of the low-volume compliance cars, in fact--though the 2014 Chevy Spark EV and 2013 Honda Fit EV are pretty great too. We're less sure how we feel about the ad campaign Fiat is using to pitch the car, under the tagline...
John Voelcker -
First 2014 Chevy Spark EV Sold: Why We Chose This Electric Car
So how did Rick and Christine Prell and their two teenage sons become the first family in the U.S. to buy a 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV? Turns out it was at least partly luck. The family needed a third car for Alex, their 16-year-old son who is about to turn 17, to drive to school. Alex, a car...
John Voelcker -
First 2014 Chevrolet Spark EVs Now At CA, Oregon Dealers
Add one more battery-electric vehicle to the list of electric cars for sale in California (if not the rest of the U.S.). The 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV is now available for purchase or lease at several dealerships in northern and southern California, as well as a few in Oregon. About a hundred of the...
John Voelcker -
2014 Ford Focus Electric: No Updates, No Love For Ford's Electric Orphan
Rarely has any carmaker launched a car as obviously unloved as the Ford Focus Electric, the battery-electric conversion of a five-door Focus compact hatchback. As a company, Ford does not believe battery-electric cars will have much of a future for many years to come. Unusually for a new car, it...
John Voelcker -
Well, chalk one up for basic economic theory: If you lower the price of a good, more people will want to own it. In the case of the 2013 Honda Fit EV, the low-volume battery-electric version of the Honda Fit subcompact hatchback, a cut in the monthly lease price did the trick. Through the end of May, Honda had sold only 83 Fit EVs this year, far from the rate required to meet its zero-emission vehicle requirements under California zero-emission vehicle laws. At the end of last month, Honda cut the Fit EV lease price to $259 a month from $389, and removed the cap on annual miles driven. That...
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May Plug-In Electric Car Sales: Nissan Leaf Passes Chevy Volt
Plug-in car sales continued at a steady pace in May, with early estimates of perhaps 6,500 to 7,000 sold overall. As always, precise figures are impossible because Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] does not report monthly sales as every other carmaker does. We'll refine our totals as more reports come in...
John Voelcker -
2014 Chevrolet Spark EV Rated At 82 Miles Of Range, 119 MPGe
The 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV has been a long time coming, but it's almost here. This morning, Chevy announced that its only battery-electric car will have a range of 82 miles and be rated at a combined 119 MPGe efficiency. MPGe, or miles-per-gallon-equivalent, is a measure of the distance a car can...
John Voelcker -
GM Now Building Chevy Spark EV Electric-Car Motors In Maryland
Eighteen months ago, GM announced that it would build the electric motor for its upcoming Chevrolet Spark EV electric car in the U.S. Now, that motor is officially in production at the company's Baltimore Operations plant in White Marsh, Maryland--along with the associated final-drive...
John Voelcker -
2013 Fiat 500e Electric Car: First Drive
The 2013 Fiat 500e may be a compliance car, but its engineers created an electric car that's so much fun to drive that seemingly they want it to be more. And with remarkably aggressive pricing--the same $199 monthly lease payment as on a top-of-the-line gasoline 500--Fiat's marketers are trying...
John Voelcker -
2014 Chevrolet Spark EV On Time, Unaffected By A123 Failure
As Fisker Automotive seemingly enters very public death throes, and its battery supplier A123 Systems works to get back to business after a bankruptcy sale, another electric car might have been caught in the crossfire. The 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV is to launch this summer, after its announcement in...
John Voelcker