Electric Cars

Nobody particularly likes taxes, but as they go, gas tax is at least generally fair in how it's applied. The more gas you use, the more you pay. Use less, or none at all, and you pay less--or nothing. Virginia residents will soon be paying nothing even if they drive gas guzzlers, as Governor Bob...

Based on the Volt, but dressed in a very sharp new suit, the 2014 Cadillac ELR promises to bring the joys of greener driving to the executive sector. Not that the luxury segment hasn't already been a hotbed of hybrid development in recent years, though initially slow on the uptake. That makes...

We've covered U.S. sales of plug-in electric cars--which tripled last year. Now, as the puck drops on a new hockey season, readers' thoughts might turn to our northern neighbor--and wonder whether Canadians lead or lag their American cousins when it comes to buying plug-in cars. Canada: One-third...

There's good news and bad news for green car fans in the latest J.D. Power and Associates Avoider Study. For a decade, that study has interviewed recent car buyers, asking detailed questions about their purchase decisions. As you might guess from the title of the survey, Power focuses not only on...

Well, duh. The day after it unveiled the 2014 Cadillac ELR range-extended electric luxury coupe, GM's North America chief Mark Reuss told attendees at a trade event that "the electric car is not dead." “That’s despite what you might hear, and despite what you might read about Americans...

Gosh, those crazy electric cars. They're so different and confusing, eh? We've now come across a new and thus-far unparalleled example of just how far people will go to avoid dealing with the realities of electric cars. Which are, of course, smooth, quiet, and torquey, meaning they're fast off the...

Plug-in electric cars get a lot of press, perhaps more than their current sales might warrant. It's clear to industry analysts that the proportion of plug-ins among new cars produced will grow, slowly, over the coming years and decades. But don't count the gasoline engine out just yet. The rate of...

Gird yourself: It's possible we're about to see a new wave of attacks on electric cars that ignore battery science. This time the culprit is the troubled Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. The FAA has grounded all 787s after a string of fires in their lithium-ion battery packs; other countries have...

Better Place, the battery-swapping network operating in Israel and Denmark, didn't have an easy 2012, and 2013 is looking little better. Indeed, Reuters now confirms the departure of their current CEO, Evan Thornley. Better Place founder Shai Agassi was ousted last October, following losses of $490...

Ex-GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz played an instrumental part in getting Chevrolet's range-extended electric car, the Volt, to market. So important was his role that he's often considered the "father of the Volt"--but at the Detroit Auto Show, Lutz has said that he'd not have launched the car's...

What does an 800 horsepower electric truck look like? Just that little bit meaner than any other production truck, as it turns out--if Via Motors' XTRUX electric truck is anything to go by. The wildly powerful range-extended truck was unveiled at this week's Detroit Auto Show. Loosely based on the...

Volkswagen Group of America and Eaton have together unveiled a new single-port Combined Charging System (CCS). The CCS meets the approved standard for charging from the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), and combines one-phase AC charging, three-phase AC charging, DC home charging and DC fast...

Based on the Converj concept first shown in 2009, the Cadillac ELR is set to become the very first Extended Range Electric Vehicle launched by a full-line luxury automaker when it hits Cadillac dealers in early 2014. Like the Chevrolet Volt, the Cadillac ELR will be primarily powered by a 16.5 kWh...

Last summer wasn't easy for Nissan or its electric car, the Leaf. A spate of owners in Arizona discovered they were quickly losing battery capacity, far earlier than Nissan suggested it might happen--the hot climate was playing havoc with battery life. Luckily for worried Leaf owners, those...

We know the specifications and details of the 2013 Nissan Leaf, which has now gone into production in Smyrna, Tennessee. But the missing piece of information has always been: What will the battery electric car cost now that it's built in North America? During an electric vehicle roundtable today at...

One hurdle down: Tesla is now delivering production Model S electric cars to paying customers from its reservations list of 18,000 or so. Next hurdle: Can Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] bring in enough cash from those sales, and ramp up production fast enough, to keep the company solvent? It would appear...

Next week is the annual Detroit Auto Show, one of the most important events on the automotive calendar and increasingly a place for car companies to show off new green technology. Given consumer tastes and the trends in the market, it should come as no surprise that the list of green cars, whether...

Technology developed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University has set a new record for energy storage in a lithium-ion battery. Using ingenious egg-like sulfur nanoparticles in the cathode, the battery can store five times more energy than is possible with today's...

The Tesla Model S electric sedan is set to get a CHAdeMO quick-charge adaptor when it arrives on the market in Japan. CHAdeMO is the leading quick-charge standard in Japan, and drivers have access to almost 1,900 charging stations across the country. It's standard equipment on Nissan Leafs and...

If 2011 was the year of overoptimism for electric-car sales, and 2012 was Sophomore Slump after the inevitable shortfall, will 2013 be the year of realism? That really depends on what the world's leading electric-car maker, Nissan, sells this year. Let's recap. Several years ago, Nissan said that...