Electric Cars

U.S. Historic Route 66 is one of the most famous highways in the world, but it's a mere shadow of the journey it was in its 1930s to 1950s heyday. Eisenhower's Interstate Highway Act of 1956 effectively signed the route's death warrant--and indeed, the towns along it, as flat, smooth, effortless...

If you've ever seen a child zipping along on a bicycle at breakneck speed the concept of putting them behind the wheel of a car is truly terrifying. Toyota still wants to give it a go though, and following on from last year's Camatte concepts, Toyota has once again displayed a brace of electric...

General Motors and BMW announced on Tuesday that they had jointly completed testing new quick-charging equipment for plug-in electric cars. The charging stations, cables, and plugs were built to the new Combined Charging Standard (CCS) specification adopted by the Society of Automotive Engineers...

Information is power, right? More precisely, based on an interview last week with Mike Tinskey, Ford’s Director of Global Vehicle Electrification and Infrastructure, information is both what buyers of the brand’s Energi plug-in hybrids want to feel empowered, and what they need to get...

Rarely has any carmaker launched a car as obviously unloved as the Ford Focus Electric, the battery-electric conversion of a five-door Focus compact hatchback. As a company, Ford does not believe battery-electric cars will have much of a future for many years to come. Unusually for a new car, it...

About a month ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a bill that banned electric bikes from the city's streets. (Like all bikes, they're also banned from sidewalks--not that every rider seems to know that.) And as a Navigant Research blog post points out, e-bikes were already illegal...

It isn't easy to compare gasoline and electric vehicles. Sure, you can look at EPA stickers, sit in them and appreciate the way they drive, but comparing like-for-like on an economic basis is requires some thought. The U.S. Department of Energy has simplified the process with its new eGallon...

A great many people were disappointed--though perhaps not surprised--when green automaker Aptera closed its doors in late 2011. Its project, the Aptera 2e, promised to be one of the most efficient vehicles on the road, but the company suffered the usual startup automaker pitfalls and disappeared...

Tesla's announcement last month of its new service program sounded almost too good to be true. If anything went wrong with my 2013 Tesla Model S, promised CEO Elon Musk, instead of schlepping to the nearest service center, I would simply await the arrival in my driveway of the Tesla service tech...

European buyers waiting for an electric Toyota may have quite some time to wait--until the electric grid cleans up, basically. That's the word from Toyota Europe, which says it wants to see cleaner electricity generation before it commits to electric vehicles. According to Responding to Climate...

Visit French capital Paris, and it won't be long before you see a Bollore Bluecar running about. The small, quirky electric car is part of the city's Autolib' car sharing service. Bluecars dotted around Parisian streets wait for anyone wishing to borrow them, for anything from a few minutes to...

Well, chalk one up for basic economic theory: If you lower the price of a good, more people will want to own it. In the case of the 2013 Honda Fit EV, the low-volume battery-electric version of the Honda Fit subcompact hatchback, a cut in the monthly lease price did the trick. Through the end of...

Reporters interview CEOs all the time, but it's rare for those CEOs to end interviews abruptly. Which is what makes an article in Barron's about Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] and its current high stock price so entertaining. In "Recharge Now!", author Bill Alpert opens with a comparison between Tesla...

The timing was nothing if not amusing. No sooner had Audi let us drive its R8 e-tron electric supercar and proudly boasted of its lap record at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, then arch-rival Mercedes-Benz stole it from under Audi's nose with its SLS AMG Electric Drive. The striking yellow...

We'll start with the bad news: No, Audi definitely won't be producing any more examples of its R8 e-tron electric supercar. And even if it did, it'd be well beyond the reach of mere mortals--rumor has it that each of the ten e-trons currently in existence have set Audi back around $1.3 million. All...

The Canadian plug-in electric vehicle market in May was a good news/bad news sandwich: Sales held roughly steady from April, but dropped 40 percenton a year-over-year basis. Rounding out the month with some good news, May almost certainly marked the sale of the country's 3,000th electric car from a...

Plug-In Hybrids like the Ford Fusion Energi and Ford C-Max Energi—or the Toyota Prius Plug-In, among others—encourage those with regular commutes to plug in daily and do some (or all) of their commute in electric-only mode, without the gasoline engine ever firing up. But it appears that...

The word "hyper", when used as a prefix, is generally considered to be bigger and better than anything prefixed with "super". Hypermarkets and superstores, for example. Or hypercars like the thousand-horsepower Bugatti Veyron, compared to supercars like the 560-horsepower Ferrari 458. Thus, Silex...

You see it all over: the meme that "electric cars are a sales failure." Yet California is experiencing shortages of electric cars, with many dealers saying they've entirely sold out of plug-in electric cars. Some Nissan dealers in Portland, Oregon, even say the Leaf electric car is now their...

The Audi A1 e-tron was almost a sideshow to our day at the company's future lab tron-experience at Berlin's spectacular and disused Tempelhof Airport. Drives squeezed in over lunch or at the end of the day reflect the A1 e-tron's unfortunate status: Stillborn prototype, rather than fully-fledged...