Electric Cars

There's a popular rumor going around that Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark, the man behind the mask in Iron Man, is based on Tesla founder Elon Musk. In fact, Musk himself made a cameo in an early scene in Iron Man 2, and a Tesla Roadster appeared in Stark's garage in the first film...

Cars of the future--especially those from the past--always exert a powerful pull on our imaginations. They range from the outlandish (no wheels) to the bizarre (extreme styling exercises) to the jaw-dropping (powered by tiny nuclear powerplants). While the Fifties and Sixties may have been the...

What a difference a few years makes. Startup electric-car maker Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] said it will repay its $465 million in low-interest loans from the U.S. Department of Energy five years earlier than originally scheduled. The news came yesterday in the company's annual report. Sourcing Tesla...

Rightly or wrongly, many potential electric car owners are a little put off by the fear of occasionally running out of electricity before their destination--a condition termed "range anxiety". In reality, it's something that existing electric car owners grow out of, once they're used to their...

Electric-car charging stations are being added to more and more public parking lots, curbsides, corporate garages, and a host of other locations. But as any electric-car driver can tell you, many of them are operated by specific networks. They often require drivers to have set up an account...

Last summer he dropped a hint that it might be possible. Now Dan Akerson has confirmed it: GM is working on an electric car with a 200-mile range, according to its CEO. The chief executive officer of General Motors made the comment yesterday at an energy conference, as reported in Reuters. He...

Modern cars feel so substantial and safe they can often feel impregnable--you're just rolling along in your little bubble, protected from the world outside. The Model S, the luxurious electric car from Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] with its large body, incredible refinement and luxurious interior is...

Two days ago, we ran down all the rated ranges of every plug-in electric car offered for sale in the U.S. market this year. We did not include ratings for efficiency. In part, that's because the unit the EPA uses doesn't actually have much to do with the electricity owners use to recharge the...

Own a Nissan Leaf? Nissan wants to thank you for it. 2011 and 2012 Nissan Leaf owners, for their loyalty, will be eligible for $1,000 off any model in Nissan's lineup. The offer runs through December 31, 2014, so you've plenty of time to decide. Nissan's research shows most Leaf owners are new to...

News Flash: The next Chevy Volt will have less electric range than the current one, perhaps no more than 18 to 30 miles. Or perhaps not. We suspect that a comment by Thomas Sedran, GM's vice president of strategy and operations, is going to be one of those off-hand remarks that creates far more...

The annual Geneva Motor Show is a haven for weird and wonderful concept vehicles, and one of the strangest this year is the Toyota i-Road concept. The i-Road is described by Toyota as "a new form of transport", designed as an easy-to-maneuver, zero-emissions form of inner-city transport. We've...

Suppose you went to the gas station, filled up your car or SUV, and then the pump said you had to go inside to pay. And suppose that even though your total was $40 or $50 (maybe more), the cashier smiled and charged you ... $2.50. What would the expression on your face be? That's the premise of a...

While state leaders have occasionally been known to appear at a photo call in some modest method of transport, official duties usually see them in something a little more substantial. President Obama, for example, rides around in a heavy-duty Cadillac nicknamed "The Beast". It's built on a truck...

England has been at war with many dozens of countries over the last few millenia, but its neighbor to the north has to be one of its most frequent rivals. Things are altogether calmer these days and aside from occasional differences (and jibes) over food, accents or formal dress, Scots and Brits...

It's really the defining feature of any plug-in electric car: How much electric range does it have? The ever-helpful EPA, which has rated the gas mileage of all new cars, publishes its estimates of electric range for every plug-in car on the market. So here's our list of all 2013 plug-in cars, with...

It was a Mercedes-Benz icon before it became a performance flagship. Now it's a messenger for the future: the gullwing's going electric. The SLS AMG Electric Drive electric car is closing in on series production, converting the octane-addicted supercar to fit a greener vision of the future. We've...

In utopian visions of the future, we won't have to burn anything to get anywhere. No fossil fuels, no coal, no burning of any sort. For some, that future is already here--plenty of electric car owners run their cars using solar electricity generated from panels at their home or place of work. It's...

U.S. sales of plug-in electric cars continued at a reduced level, as seems to happen every winter. The best-selling electric car, the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car, logged deliveries of 1,626 units, compared to 1,140 last month. That's a better number than the 1,023 Volts sold in...

As any entrepreneur will tell you, starting a business isn't easy. Few know this more than Shai Agassi, founder of battery-swapping outfit Better Place. The company is making huge losses, has closed operations in some countries and even booted out Agassi himself as CEO. Still, Agassi is one of few...

It's a standard fitting on most plug-in electric cars: a visible light to show when it's recharging, often with a different indicator for when it's done. Those lights, often on top of the dashboard and visible through the windshield, aren't yet standardized. They come in red, orange, and green;...