Electric Cars

Unless you're a Tesla owner with access to free Supercharger fast charging stations, there's no better place to charge your electric car than at home. Pick the right electricity tariff, and charging can cost pennies on the dollar next to even the most efficient combustion-engined vehicle. BMW hopes...

Electric-car maker Tesla Motors, and more specifically its CEO Elon Musk, has been dropping hints for a while now that it proposes to open up the specifications of its Supercharger DC fast-charging standard for use by other manufacturers. An article yesterday in Engadget claimed Tesla was planning...

The record for most electric vehicles in one place was broken again, this time in Germany.

The 2014 BMW i3 is proving to be very effective at luring new buyers to BMW--buyers who haven't before owned one of its cars. Such buyers, known as conquests, are highly valued by carmakers, who have a much better chance of retaining a customer if they're already driving one of its vehicles. The...

Tesla Motors has some busy years ahead of it. There's the continued roll-out of the Model S in global markets, such as China and Europe. There are two new models on the horizon. And there's the enormous battery gigafactory. To that long list, Tesla has added U.K. sales--as the first cars made their...

TT Zero is a relatively new addition to the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy road race meeting that takes place each June. Despite its novelty, it's also raising more than a few eyebrows. None more so than this year, when experienced racer John McGuinness rode the lap you see above. That's because over...

Many entrepreneurs have tried to start car companies in the U.S. over the past century, but the last person to do so from the ground up with a brand that survives to this day was Walter P. Chrysler. He started his company in December 1924--which indicates the magnitude of the challenge faced by...

As demand for electric cars grows, supply of batteries must grow to meet it. That much is obvious. But just how much is battery demand expected to grow by over the coming years? According to an Electric Vehicle Batteries report by Navigant Research, existing capacity for lithium-ion battery...

May was a great month for Canadian plug-in electric vehicle sales, as it was in the United States--where sales of 3,117 Nissan Leafs represented the second-highest monthly sales ever for any car that plugs in. On the Canadian side of the border, our tracking showed the nation's electric-car fleet...

Tesla Motors held its annual shareholder meeting yesterday afternoon, and as always, a few nuggets of news emerged from CEO Elon Musk. You can read a complete transcript here, but here are some quick bullet points on items that struck us as newsworthy: Tesla electric cars have now covered 344...

Plug-in hybrids will clearly be all the rage among carmakers for the next couple of years. While the number of high-volume battery-electric vehicles today can be counted on one hand--BMW i3, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S--virtually every global automaker now has plug-in hybrids planned for launch...

The guerilla warfare between auto dealers and Tesla Motors continues, with the latest skirmish happening tomorrow in New Jersey. Perhaps war analogies are overstating the case, but certainly Tesla has had to fight in numerous states for the right to sell its cars directly to buyers through the...

Parking is one of those maneuvers that we all screw up now and then, no matter how experienced we are at driving. And there's nothing worse than having an audience just as you're trying to squeeze into a space. Even professional athletes can't experience that much pressure, surely? But what if your...

This summer, buyers will have the option of two electric cars that on the surface, offer very similar attributes. Both are from Germany, for a start. Each has a very similar price tag. Each offers four doors and a liftback-style luggage area. Those cars are the 2014 BMW i3 and the 2014...

Studies show the U.S. electric-car fleet is growing, and maturing.

Eight states plan to put 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles on their roads by 2025.

Sometimes we read things that just make us scratch our heads. Often, statements about the electric-car industry by (presumably) highly-paid analysts in the finance industry are among those things. Take, for example, a statement by one such analyst, contained an article published two weeks ago in...

One challenge to more widespread adoption of electric cars is public charging--or rather, the scattered multiple networks of irregularly spaced public charging stations. In Japan, the four major electric-car makers have now joined together to form a new company whose goal is to build a single...

The first wave of electric cars and plug-in hybrids has been largely centered on smaller vehicles, mostly from mass-market brands (Tesla excepted). Four years later, German luxury makers are entering the fray--and the plug-in cars and utility vehicles they sell will markedly expand the offerings on...

BMW has become the latest in a growing list of automakers to put its faith in the Chinese electric car market. The Chinese automobile market is huge: 18 million passenger cars alone were sold in 2013. That's ten times that of similarly-populated India, and around 2.4 million more than were sold in...