Electric Cars

A Kickstarter project promising faster, cheaper Level 2 240V, 15 kW charging has reached its goal, with the first units expected to deliver this month. Electric Motor Werks (EMW) from Palo Alto, California, used the fund-raising website to raise capital for its 'JuiceBox' charging system, offering...

Nissan has announced its full list of changes for the 2014 Nissan Leaf--and as you'd expect, less than a year after the revised 2013 model debuted, it's fairly small. The updates are largely detail changes to equipment levels, everything else continuing pretty much as the 2013 model left it...

Tesla Motors has surprised a lot of skeptics in its decade of existence. But last month's announcement of battery swapping for Model S cars traveling long distances deserves some additional context. It adds a new and quicker way for some Model S drivers to cover distances beyond the battery range...

Battery life is the subject of lingering doubt for many electric vehicle owners, but doom and gloom degradation projections don't always come true. Not for the Tesla Roadster at any rate, which is confounding Tesla's own battery life expectations for the car. According to data recorded by Plug In...

Solar panels are great, but they can be a bit... well, bland sometimes. We can't argue with their benefits, but unless you've a keen eye for photography, they aren't really works of art. Apart from Synthesis Design + Architecture's (SDA) solar pavilion of course, because that's most definitely a...

With relatively few electric vehicles on the market, drawing direct comparisons with regular gasoline and diesel vehicles is surprisingly difficult--not many vehicles are sold with all three drivetrains. The Ford Focus is one, and Renault's Fluence sedan is another. Now, reports Autoblog Green, the...

If you've been considering an electric car but have been deterred by pricing, it might be worth another try—or at least another look at the numbers. This past week, Ford dropped the price of the 2014 Focus Electric to $35,995; that's about a 10-percent cut from the 2013 sticker price of...

Want to know where the next generation of race car engineers are going to come from? Chances are they'll have taken part in one of the many Formula Student at some point, open to student engineers all over the world with the aim of building and racing a single-seater racing car. This year--for the...

We'll finally see an undisguised 2014 BMW i3 electric car in about two weeks. But, this week, BMW released not only a few technical specifications for the powertrain but also some details of the car's advanced connectivity and navigation systems. First, the car has its own cellular connection--as...

It shouldn't come as a surprise to discover that there are more bicycles around than there are cars. They're vastly cheaper for a start, and require no pesky tax, parking fees or indeed, fuel. As far as methods of transport go, they're second only to walking for inexpense. More newsworthy is that...

Poring over monthly sales figures for plug-in electric cars--and our six-month summary--the data points out an unexpected fact. Did you know that pure battery-electric cars actually outsold plug-in cars that also have engines? From January through June of this year, the combination of 9,839 Nissan...

A race track isn't necessarily the place you'd expect to find the latest in zero-emissions transit, but that's exactly what you'll find at Circuit of the Americas in Texas. Called Navia and built by French firm Induct, the small electric shuttle bus carries visitors around the circuit, with no need...

All is still well at Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA], it seems, with CEO Elon Musk announcing the company is beating its self-imposed production targets. As Bloomberg reports, Tesla is ahead of its 400-per-week production goal, by a margin Musk describes as "not trivial". Meeting such a target is all the...

Remember all that stuff we said recently about The Netherlands being a haven for electric vehicles? Maybe knock a few degrees of conviction off that statement, as it seems not everyone in the European country is as keen on electric vehicles as some. Companies operating regular gasoline and diesel...

The latest United States entry into October's World Solar Challenge in Australia has been unveiled by a team at Stanford University. First held in 1987, the World Solar Challenge is a biennial event covering more than 1,800 miles through Australia's barren Outback, teams mixing speed with...

This past June marked the 20th year since a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup, a dry spell even longer than the country's last World Series title. June also marked the Chevy Volt's 16th consecutive month atop the Canuck plug-in sales charts. Thanks to a June sales surge, the car GM designed to...

Ford might have ignored the 2014 Focus Electric when it updated its range for the 2014 model year, but one aspect has finally changed: The price. That has now dropped by $4,000, to a starting MSRP of $35,200, down from $39,200. The change hasn't yet been reflected on Ford's website--which shows the...

If you think about it, the Tesla Model S comes close to being the ideal tow vehicle for lighter loads. It's large, weighty and stable at speed. It's rear-drive, for good traction. And it has plenty of torque. If those aren't good tow car characteristics, we don't know what are. Now, one company has...

With the rate at which automakers are releasing new plug-in vehicles, the "chicken and egg" issue of whether cars or public charging points or the cars should debut first is much less of an issue than it was just two or three years ago. Even so, abundant public charging can't hurt--and any country...

With the global unveiling of the 2014 BMW i3 less than three weeks away, BMW has revealed a few more details on its radical new electric car. The i3 battery-electric five-door hatchback's 125-kilowatt (170-horsepower) electric motor can generate peak torque of 184 lb-ft. The motor will accelerate...