compliance car

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...

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...

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...

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...

GM has pushed back the CCS fast-charging option on the Chevrolet Spark EV until the end of the year.

Ads for the RAV4 EV will target specific, tech-savvy buyers in the California cities where the car is sold.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...