Japan

All is not well with Japan's electric taxi drivers. Two years ago, in February 2011, the city of Osaka introduced a fleet of fifty Nissan Leaf taxis. The deal was a cooperative arrangement between Nissan, 30 taxi firms, and the government--each was being subsidized to the tune of 1,780,000...

2011's earthquake and tsunami in Japan brought energy use into sharp focus. Such events frequently cause grids to fail, but it was the inundation and subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear facility that garnered the most attention, and the disaster has turned the public strongly against...

The Tesla Model S electric sedan is set to get a CHAdeMO quick-charge adaptor when it arrives on the market in Japan. CHAdeMO is the leading quick-charge standard in Japan, and drivers have access to almost 1,900 charging stations across the country. It's standard equipment on Nissan Leafs and...

Kei-jidosha, or 'Kei cars' are one of our favorite "forbidden fruits" here at Green Car Reports. Strict tax, insurance and parking regulations in Japan result in vehicles designed to set dimensions and engine sizes. So specific are they to Japanese roads and market conditions, they're rarely sold...

Generally, we'd advise that hitting a pedestrian with your car is something to best avoid. However, if worst came to worst, it'd be nice to know their chances of survival are as high as possible. That's the idea behind the latest unique creation from Japan, a soft, air-filled cusion car, hitting...

The retro-styled Honda N One, which goes on sale in Japan this month, is super-cute—nodding to the original 1967 Honda N360—and looks perfect for space-confined urban duty. It's possible at first glance, from a distance, to liken the N One to the Mini Cooper or Fiat 500 and see it...

The easiest way to make a car is to get someone else to make it for you. That's the ethos Mitsubishi is subscribing to anyway, as it announces the Dignity, a luxury hybrid sedan for its home Japanese market. Rather than designing a luxury hybrid sedan from scratch, the Dignity is actually based on...

Electric cars can be split into three basic groups. There are the few models carmakers intend to sell in volume (e.g. Nissan Leaf), those that are only "compliance cars"--built solely to satisfy regulatory requirements--and, lastly, the "test fleet" cars, with which manufacturers gather real-world...

Talk to any electric car owner, and it’s likely they’ll tell you how little money they spend on running their plug-in car. For them, the switch to electric pays dividends in saved gas bills, but in Japan, a new scheme by Nissan takes it one step further, allowing electric car drivers to...

Both Toyota and Honda are hybrid pioneers. Both companies sell subcompact gasoline models (the Toyota Yaris and the Honda Fit) and separate subcompact hybrid models (the Toyota Prius C and Honda Insight). What most U.S. buyers don't know is that those companies also sell hybrid versions of the...

Hybrids are set to go head-to-head on Japan's race tracks this year, as Honda has finally confirmed it's set to enter a CR-Z in the GT300 class of Japan's SuperGT series. Toyota announced its Prius GT300 challenger several months ago, before it was revealed at the 2012 Tokyo Auto Salon last month...

Toyota might be the world’s largest hybrid automaker, but that isn’t stopping rival Japanese automaker Nissan from trying to become the world leader in hybrid electric car transporter ships. Its latest ship, announced on Tuesday this week, puts it ahead in the race to have the greenest...

For decades, Asian small cars have been considered the best of the bunch in the U.S. market. Toyota Corollas, Honda Civics, and various models from Nissan--and more recently, Hyundai--sell hundreds of thousands each year against what was until quite recently anemic competition from U.S. makers...

Fuel efficiency is on every automaker's mind, and will be through at least 2025. Toyota sells the most fuel-efficient gasoline vehicle on the U.S. market, the 2012 Prius hybrid. It's rated at 51 mpg city, 48 mpg highway, and a combined 50 mpg by the EPA. Tougher competitors But the competition is...

With agreement among the White House, the EPA and NHTSA, and most major automakers (though not all), the U.S. looks to be well on its way to a corporate average fuel-economy requirement of 54.5 mpg by model year 2025. That translates to 40 to 45 mpg in real-world gas mileage, but it's still a...

Nissan took the next step in its aim to become the world leader in electric vehicle technology yesterday with the announcement that it was starting a global test program for an all-electric minivan. Based on the versatile NV200 minivan platform currently popular in Europe and Japan with delivery...

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...

By far the most ambitious plan to build and assemble electric cars in the U.S. comes not from General Motors or Ford, but from Nissan. Now, it may happen a little later than expected, due to the March 11 earthquake and resulting tsunami that severely damaged large portions of Japan's industrial...

In this day and age, when it comes to being green, looking at the end result is never enough. You have to take a life cycle approach to assessing how green something is, which in the case of cars, means looking at how they are manufactured and delivered to your driveway. Unfortunately, most cars...

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) isn’t a new concept, and is the name given to technology which gives plug-in vehicles the ability to feed power stored in their battery packs back to the utility company at points of peak electrical demand. But we’ve yet to see the technology being implemented in...