Electric Cars

Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne isn't known for his love of electric vehicles. We really rate the company's first offering, the 2014 Fiat 500e electric car, but Sergio himself doesn't--speaking at the Society of Automotive Engineers 2013 World Congress, he reiterated that the company is losing...

From the ashes of an old gas station flies the phoenix of electric charging for all. If you excuse the confused metaphor, that's essentially the idea behind an electric car charging plaza proposal in Encinitas, California. San Diego-based Evoasis wants to build the new plaza on the corner of Vulcan...

It's Earth Day today, and if you're intending to roll it out a little, Earth Week all this week. To coincide with a week where we're all encouraged to do just a little more to consider the environment, charging station network ChargePoint is giving away free charging cards for simply filling in a...

Today, electric cars and other vehicles that run on alternative fuels simply cost more. That's a fact. Now a new bill introduced in the California Assembly aims to trim a bit more off the costs of buying and registering these cars by reducing their assessed value. The brainchild of Assemblyman Al...

Speeding is big business. There's no money to be made from it as an individual of course, unless you subscribe to the theory "time is money". But the U.S. Census Bureau estimates 100,000 Americans are ticketed for speeding every day, at an average cost of $150 per ticket--$5.5 billion a year in...

With the delay of its Model X crossover until "late in 2014," it may look as if Tesla's product pipeline is running dry. But we suspect the Silicon Valley startup electric-car company will offer a few new variants on its sole product, the Model S luxury sport sedan. And an obvious next step for...

Got some money to burn and in need of a hobby? Perhaps some sort of adventure sport, but nothing too crazy--off-road bikes, perhaps? Not just any off-road bike though. It has to be electric, for a start. What about one of Outrider's electric recumbent bikes? Yes indeed--there is now such a thing as...

California is the largest single market for new vehicles in the United States: more than 1.5 million vehicles are sold each year. So when state officials speak, the auto industry has to listen. On Tuesday, Mary Nichols spoke. She heads the powerful California Air Resources Board, which has legal...

We've heard it all before--new battery technologies appear, set to revolutionize the way we use electric products. The story is the same for new microbatteries developed at the University of Illinois, but the researchers there are making even bigger claims than most. Imagine a battery so small it...

In January 2005, legendary car designer Henrik Fisker founded a company to bring innovative new thinking to the automobile industry. Between that date and today, Fisker Automotive would create perhaps the most beautiful car ever made, raise almost $1.4 billion dollars from investors as diverse as...

Although its arrival is still months away, we already know a lot about the all-electric BMW i3. We have a good idea of its range (with and without the optional range-extender), we've hypothesized about its sticker price, and a few lucky journalists have even gotten to drive around in it. But...

Europe has been the source of some excitement over electric cars in recent months, as several new models have all hit the market in quick succession. The third-generation Smart Electric Drive arrived at the end of last year, and the last few months have seen the new Renault Zoe and 2013 Nissan Leaf...

The established German luxury brands--Mercedes-Benz and BMW--have sold cars in the U.S. for decades. So how could Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] possibly be beating them at their own game? The answer lies in how you define sales: It appears that the Tesla Model S electric sport sedan is outselling both...

The benefits for dedicating an electric motor to each wheel of a vehicle were clear to see in Drive's recent video of the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Electric Drive. Make those motors in-wheel units, and in theory you get even more benefits. It's a design that in-wheel motor company Protean has been...

Eighteen months ago, GM announced that it would build the electric motor for its upcoming Chevrolet Spark EV electric car in the U.S. Now, that motor is officially in production at the company's Baltimore Operations plant in White Marsh, Maryland--along with the associated final-drive...

If early ownership experiences are to believed, there's not a lot wrong with driving a Tesla Model S. The performance is great, it's luxurious, quiet, has a great electric range... but there's still one thing that bugs owners. One thing they wish wasn't part of the Model S ownership experience...

They call it being ICEd--the practice of Internal Combustion Engine vehicles parking in spaces set aside for electric cars. It's the bane of many an electric vehicle owner's existance, pulling into their local parking lot to find the only charging spot occupied by some klutz in a regular car. And...

Paddle shifters on an electric vehicle might seem like a bit of an engineering oversight. After all, what use is manual control over gears if there are no gears to control? Think laterally though, and the appearance of paddle shifters in the 2014 Cadillac ELR makes a lot of sense--variable...

It seems automakers in Europe have found the key to increasing electric car sales: battery leasing. With 97 percent of European Smart Fortwo Electric Drive customers choosing to lease the battery, rather than buy it outright, Smart USA will now offer buyers the same option, when the car debuts this...

The 2013 Fiat 500e may be a compliance car, but its engineers created an electric car that's so much fun to drive that seemingly they want it to be more. And with remarkably aggressive pricing--the same $199 monthly lease payment as on a top-of-the-line gasoline 500--Fiat's marketers are trying...