Electric

As electric vehicles become more widely available, we’ve heard some pretty large horror stories detailing that the world’s supply of lithium - used in most modern electric car battery packs - is running out almost as quickly as the world’s oil supply. But a recent research project...

Ford has teamed up with SunPower on a program called "Drive Green For Life." It offers buyers of the Ford Focus Electric a discount on a rooftop solar system that provides up to 1,000 miles worth of charging per month.

You might feel a little "green around the gills" the following morning, but a night of drinking Bruichladdich whisky from the UK helps to do your bit for green transportation. Mark Reynier is managing director of the whisky distillery in Scotland, and every day drives to work in his recently...

Yesterday we brought you news of a highly camouflaged all-electric minicar spotted in the center of Berlin and wearing the unmistakable linked ring Audi badge. At the time, we postulated that the tiny electric runabout was probably Audi’s e-tron city concept car. Now Audi has confirmed that...

A little over a week ago, the BBC aired an episode of its popular motoring entertainment program Top Gear in which presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May searched in vain for an electric-car charging station. They needed to recharge their fully-drained 2011 Nissan Leaf in the rural English county...

So far, the Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car has been sold only in North America. That's about to change, as the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant restarts after a month of retooling that raised Volt production capacity to 5,000 cars per month. While the Volt will go to China (despite...

It’s almost a year since the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize came to a conclusion, but we’ve heard relatively little from its various winners. Until Now. Enter the Finnish team which came runners up in the Alternative (Side by Side) category with the conventionally-styled...

Call it the battle of the clean-car cargo ships. First Toyota retrofitted its Auriga Leader car transporter ship with a diesel hybrid powertrain, allowing some energy to be recaptured in a bank of nickel-metal-hydride batteries just like those used in its Prius and other hybrid cars. That ship got...

It may have just appeared on The Late Show last week, but Ford’s all-electric 2012 Focus won’t be hitting the streets en masse until spring 2012. At least, that’s what David Finnegan, Electrified Vehicles Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company has told forum members at...

Sometimes news comes out of adding up little pieces of information. Doing that with a few items from the past week, we're beginning to wonder if General Motors might launch an all-electric car in the U.S. in the next couple of years. Based on recent spy photos from renowned photographer Brenda...

F1 television rights boss Bernie Ecclestone has never been one to mince his words, and now his ire has turned towards the 2014 Formula One rules that will require pitlane travel to be entirely electric. Adding to comments made about the lack of sound produced by regular electric vehicles, Mr...

A few months after BMW and MINI's electric car study ended in the United States, a similar scheme run in the U.K. has also come to a close, and the results are in... ...and if you've read the results of the American tests, the figures coming from the U.K. will all look very familiar. Basically, all...

This much we know already: Tesla Motors will build battery packs and electric drive systems for the upcoming 2012 Toyota RAV4 EV electric crossover. What we didn't know was where that car would be assembled. Would it be the Canadian factory that builds standard gasoline RAV4s for North America, or...

We’ve known about Chinese firm BYD for some time now. In fact, its all-electric e6 was unveiled before the word Leaf became the name of an electric car. But despite unveiling a car long before many of its rivals, BYD won’t be bringing the e6 to the U.S. until the middle of next year. If...

Electric vehicles of various sorts are just now showing up in dealer showrooms. But that leaves a quarter of a billion gasoline vehicles running around U.S. roads. What to do to clean them up? Various entities have proposed to retrofit existing vehicles with various types of electric powertrains...

Fisker Automotive still hasn't seen fit to let more than a small handful of journalists drive its extended-range electric 2012 Fisker Karma luxury sports sedan, and not yet on public roads. But founder Henrik Fisker continues to wax eloquent about the company's future plans. At the launch of the...

In the past year, we’ve put the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid through an extensive set of test-drives, resulting in our first drive report, winter test-drive, financial analysis and even a family vacation. With so many miles behind the wheel, our editorial team has already shared our five...

We’ve now had four chances to put the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid through its paces, covering everything from fast-moving freeways and inner city streets through to mountain passes and trips to the local Costco. In the end we concluded that for some drivers, Toyota’s 13...

Diversity among electric cars is rapidly expanding, from the all-electric Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi 'i' to the upcoming Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid, which provides just 9 to 13 miles of electric range. Now, it turns out, the 2014 BMW i3--the all-electric urban four-door subcompact that BMW showed...

We all know that one of the biggest challenges facing electric cars is the fact that recharging a battery pack is orders of magnitude slower than filling a gasoline car’s fuel tank. As battery packs have become more advanced, we’ve seen an increased use of rapid charging technologies...