Electric Cars

A new California law would require landlords to let tenants install charging stations.

Analysts criticize the competition for Tesla's battery Gigafactory.

Imagine a smooth, quiet, comfortable largish sedan that emits nothing, with a range of 250 miles or more--one that pegs its driver as a person in the vanguard of advanced technology vehicles. The Tesla Model S electric car, you say? No, no, no: That would be Toyota's upcoming hydrogen fuel-cell...

Chinese automaker BYD was the first car company in the world to put a plug-in hybrid passenger car into production, a couple of years before the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car hit the road. Despite several hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery-electric product lines, however, the vast...

Many within the electric car industry believe that $100 per kilowatt-hour will be the tipping point for electric-car batteries. It is the point at which electric vehicles will be able to compete directly with internal combustion vehicles on price, and therefore a major step in boosting sales...

Toyota has been quite upfront about its belief that plug-in electric cars are not the technology of the future. (It says hydrogen fuel-cell cars are.) And now this belief has appeared in the advertising for its Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid. That car is the third or fourth best-selling car with a...

A Michigan-based startup called Sakti3 claims it has battery chemistry that doubles the energy density of today's best lithium-ion batteries. Speaking to Scientific American, Sakti3's co-founder and CEO Ann Marie Sastry says the firm's prototype solid-state lithium cells have reached 1,143...

Owners of the 2012 Fisker Karma range-extended electric luxury car got some good news last week: The company that now owns the carmaker has promised that supplies of spare parts will soon become available. Fisker stopped producing its striking sedan in July 2012 after it had built roughly 3,000 of...

The 2015 Tesla Model X could be a bigger success than the Model S, according to Morgan Stanley.

Well, it's about time: An electric-car maker is using straight-out sex appeal to market a new electric car. Even if it is, errrmmmm, rodent sex appeal. A new video posted last Wednesday uses Kia's now-familiar supersized hamsters to market the new 2015 Kia Soul EV. DON'T MISS: 2015 Kia Soul EV...

Sales numbers aside, are BMW and Tesla winning the electric-car brand battle?

How does a car-company CEO get to be a rock star? It helps, of course, if your company makes a five-passenger luxury sedan that outdrags a Porsche 911, uses half the energy of a Prius, and has the highest crash-safety rating ever recorded. But Elon Musk has done something else to separate himself...

The arrival of a moderately-priced battery electric car with a rated range of 200 miles will change the entire market for plug-in vehicles. When that will happen, and from which maker, remains open--though the likely suspects are Nissan, Tesla, and General Motors, with BMW as a long-shot outsider...

New license plates will mark plug-in cars for first responders.

Until recently, the Chevy Volt was the only range-extended electric car available in the U.S. I've driven a Volt for almost three years now, and it's been a splendid car--quiet, smooth, peppy, and amazingly economical. New REx on the block But now the Volt has a formidable new competitor: the new...

Let's say your company builds a crucial, high-volume component for advanced-technology vehicles. Suppose it emerged this week that you've now got contracts to supply two of the world's three biggest automakers. That would put you in a good spot, wouldn't it? First GM, now VW Group Yesterday, LG...

States are competing for Tesla's massive lithium-ion cell factory, but there isn't a definite leader yet.

After Saab Automobiles vanished from the U.S. market three years ago, the bankrupt remains of the Swedish brand and its factory in Trollhattan were bought by a Chinese company. Its goal was to recast Saab as a maker of electric vehicles, and this week Swedish engineers presented a prototype of a...

Last month, 41 Mercedes-Benz B-Class Electric Drive hatchbacks were delivered to their owners, marking the first month of sales for the first battery-electric vehicle from the German luxury maker. The official first buyer, Kim Price, lives south of Los Angeles in Mission Viego; she's been a...

The Silicon Valley electric-car maker Tesla Motors seems to be in the news almost every day. Over the last two weeks, the company faced fallout over glitches in early Model S cars, and upgraded its powertrain warranty. It also turned the screws on states competing for its multibillion-dollar...