2011

The Voltec powetrain used in the 2011 Chevrolet Volt has never been meant for just the one vehicle. Restricting a new technology developed at great expense to a single niche vehicle makes poor economic sense. The prediction by Car and Driver of a Volt-based Chevrolet Amp, thought to be close in...

The 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car is now officially on sale. Over the past several days—beginning with the first delivery in San Francisco we covered this past weekend—Nissan has begun making actual deliveries of the Leaf. Not just to company fleets, public utilities, or those in...

You may not realise it, but automakers often work together on shared projects, vehicles or technology improvements. But when the top two electric car makers in the world agree to work together, even we find that interesting. Enter Mitsubishi and Nissan. Both poised to start selling their own...

It's been four years coming, but today, the first retail buyer in the U.S. took delivery of his 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car. The happy event occurred on a cold winter day at Gearhart Chevrolet, in Denville, New Jersey. The buyer is Jeffrey Kaffee, a retired airline pilot who...

What will $225,000 buy you? A fancy apartment in Miami Beach, aka the ground zero of the housing market? How about a McLaren MP4-12C supercar, capable of 0-60mph in 3.4 seconds? Or perhaps a used luxury yacht from the auction site eBay? These are the kind of purchases most people would dream of if...

For next month's Detroit Auto Show, we're making our list and checking it twice. But it turns out that one notable name in green cars is giving the country's largest auto show a miss. Fisker Automotive confirmed to GreenCarReports yesterday that it won't be present at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show...

Production of the world's first range-extended electric car is now a reality. Today, the first shipment of 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric cars left the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. The cars are bound for dealers and buyers in the initial launch markets: California, Texas, New York, and...

News from next month's 2011 Detroit Auto Show is coming in almost daily now. The latest announcement: Honda will present the world debut of a concept car that shows the styling direction of its next--and crucially important--Honda Civic. In reality, this means that the Honda Civic Concept shown in...

We’re often contacted by would-be electric car owners worried that they will not be able to have the required EVSE installed at their home. But the first ever 2011 Nissan LEAF customer to take delivery of their new car isn’t a home-owner. Olivier Chalouhi rents an home in Redwood City...

The first page of a new chapter in green-car history was written yesterday, as Nissan formally handed over a 2011 Leaf electric car to Olivier Chalouhi of Redwood City, California. He was the very first person in the U.S. to order the all-electric vehicle, and the first to take delivery. Leaf...

It's finally here! Well, the trailer is anyway... We announced just under a month ago that the long awaited sequel to the film Who Killed The Electric Car?, the logically titled Revenge Of The Electric Car (ROTEC), would be previewed with a trailer released when 10,000 people became fans of the...

If it ever really needed to be said, Japanese car tastes can be... "alternative", to put it in polite terms. As well as their Kei-Jidosha class of city cars that are absolutely miniscule compared to U.S. monsters, the country has produced some fairly crazy production cars over the years. That trend...

Just as the excitement is growing over the first dealer deliveries of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt and 2011 Nissan Leaf, eagle-eyed EV enthusiasts have spotted General Motor’s previous electric car on Google’s Street View. Is it serendipity or a more carefully timed disclosure to coincide...

This year finally saw the return of the Fiesta nameplate to the Ford American model line-up—a vehicle that had a short run in the early ‘80s. The debut of the Fiesta this year was one of the most anticipated and most promoted by Ford probably in the history of the company. Between all...

Whether it's the hatchback body style or the modest stats, the 2011 Lexus CT 200h hasn't yet created much buzz in the headlines. A new video, however, showing the car moving through its different phases of production at Lexus’ plant in Kyushu, Japan, may help alleviate that problem. Unlike...

Let us run a few engines past you. A warbling flat six. A growling V8. The howl of an inline four changing cam profiles. The smooth buzz of a rotary. How about some names now? Hemi. Vortec. Powerstroke. VTEC. Renesis. Ecoboost. Noticing a pattern? The first list is clearly engine layouts, and the...

The U.S. launch of the 2011 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid has slipped a month, just enough to preclude buyers from taking advantage of a $1,300 Federal tax credit that expires December 31. According to Hyundai, the first cars will now reach dealers in January or perhaps later, rather than in early or mid...

If you’re a parent you’ll know how eager companies are to convince your kids how important their product is. Be it the latest toy, a new film release or even a holiday location, advertising companies know that pester power is one of the most effective ways to get a parent to make a...

The first of Ford’s new Transit Connect Electric commercial vans are being delivered to customers in North America and the UK, just 13 months after Ford initially announced plans to develop the zero-emissions vehicles. To help speed their development Ford joined forces with Azure Dynamics, a...

One of the main reasons buyers steered away from the old Ford Explorer sport utility vehicle, according to Ford itself, was its fuel economy. So gas mileage had to be a major selling point for the all-new 2011 Ford Explorer. Like so many new cars and crossovers, the latest model does indeed get...