Electric Cars

Hybrids still sell in fairly small proportions compared to regular internal combustion vehicles. Their introduction can be judged a fair success though. The Toyota Prius is California's top selling car, and Toyota has sold over 4 million hybrids since the first Prius rolled off the line little more...

Earlier this month, we covered January's plug-in electric car sales in the U.S., noting that sales fell by about half from the last few months of the prior year. As a percentage, plug-in cars were 0.3 percent of the American market in January 2013--down from 0.5 percent in December, but still twice...

New battery technology is five years away, and always will be. Well, that's the impression you might get whenever new technology is announced. Some of it is very, very clever indeed, but much of it is only theoretical, and the rest has rarely been tested on suitably large scales. Silicon...

It's never dull over at Tesla Motors, but tomorrow is a particularly important day. It may, in fact, be the most important day in the electric-car maker's history. That's because after the stock market closes, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] will give the first hints about whether it could genuinely...

Chinese companies Geely and Dongfeng are said to be among bidders from "different continents" looking for a controlling stake in troubled automaker Fisker Automotive. Fisker, which has suffered setback after setback over the last few years of its Karma range-extended sedan being on sale, is...

It's been a week of Tesla Model S hullabaloo, centered around last Sunday's critical New York Times road test, Stalled Out on Tesla's Electric Highway. Now a set of defiant Tesla Model S owners are setting out to prove Times reporter John Broder wrong. They will replicate his trip from Maryland to...

New York City could be about to make a major step towards increasing electric car adoption in the city. NTC Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants a fifth of all new parking spaces to be wired up for, and set aside for electric vehicles. According to Transportation Nation, Bloomberg's prepared notes for...

Nissan's Leaf electric car has become the highest-selling electric car of all time. The company has now sold more than 50,000 examples of the Leaf, sold across Japan, Europe and the U.S. Since the car went on sale in 2010, those 50,000 Leaf owners have racked up over 161 million miles. In reality...

Electric-car drivers know the problem all too well. It's called "getting ICEd"--when a gasoline car parks in the spot for reserved for electric cars to use a public charging station. Now a new Target store, sited in a conventional suburban mall in Fremont, California, offers an example of how to...

It doesn't get much attention as a green vehicle, but the 2014 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck line is the best-selling vehicle line at General Motors. Now there's a zero-emission version, and it's available today. That means that you can acquire one even before this spring's launch of the all-new...

Golly. Turns out nothing ignites the Internet quite like a rapid-fire online spat between Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and The New York Times, the Grey Lady of establishment journalism. Like many such controversies, common ground turns out to be easier to find than you might think: It's a fact that...

You have to admire the Chevrolet Spark EV. It may have the same gawky upright stance as the gasoline model, and certainly costs a lot more, but its specification suggests GM has put a lot of efford into its electric offering. Europe will get to enjoy the fruits of its labor too, when the Spark EV...

How long do you think Mitsubishi has been working on electric vehicles? Since a few years before the i-MiEV electric car hit Japanese roads, perhaps? Nope--1966. It surprised us too, but illustrates that the company actually has considerable experience in developing electric powertrains, even if a...

Honda has confirmed the five East Coast locations in which its 2013 Honda Fit EV will be leased, joining the West Coast markets of California and Oregon. The electric Fit will be available at selected locations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey later this month. The...

Some electric cars aren't as good as we hoped--Coda Sedan, cough--while others are better than we expected. That latter group includes the 2013 Honda Fit EV and, now, according to Consumer Reports, the 2014 Fiat 500e. The battery electric conversion of Fiat's perky little 500 hatchback is powerful...

Winter testing is a vital part of developing a new car. Just as cars are expected to perform in the hottest conditions and face testing in arid places like Death Valley, cold-weather capability means owners in colder climates won't face any shocks either. That's particularly relevant for...

California is a largely temperate state with a longstanding history of working to curb vehicle emissions. That makes it a perfect place for plug-in electric cars. The Northeastern states, on the other hand, are in the Snow Belt, meaning electric cars can lose as much as one third of their battery...

2011's earthquake and tsunami in Japan brought energy use into sharp focus. Such events frequently cause grids to fail, but it was the inundation and subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear facility that garnered the most attention, and the disaster has turned the public strongly against...

Last week's Chicago Auto Show had relatively few debuts; the Chevrolet Cruze diesel and a redesigned Toyota Tundra pickup truck were the most noteworthy. But the featured speaker at a luncheon thrown by the Economic Club of Chicago drew a full room: Henrik Fisker, cofounder of struggling startup...

The Nissan Leaf Nismo RC race car may have only turned a wheel in anger once outside of demo runs, but that doesn't make it any less exciting. At a glance, you might think it shares very little with the electric car that shares its name. You may even expect there to be a gasoline engine screaming...