Electric Cars

If you're a couple of years late launching your car, and it gets only tepid reviews, and then its frontal crash safety is rated at just two stars out of five, it might be safe to say your company has a few challenges. That's the situation for Coda Automotive, which yesterday confirmed that it had...

You might not know it from general media coverage, but plug-in electric-car sales are actually doing pretty well. Still, people get impatient, and electric-car and environmental advocates want more, faster. So what are the best ways to boost adoption of plug-in cars? Education and awareness are the...

There's lots of interest in the award-winning Tesla Model S electric luxury sport sedan about now. With production slowly ramping up, even the wealthiest electric-car fans have to wait as Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] works through its 14,000 reservations. So, perhaps the impatient among them may turn...

Electric cars, as you might have gathered, are quite different from their gasoline or diesel-fueled counterparts. Sure, they might look similar on the outside--for the most part--but under the skin that alternative source of propulsion brings with it a host of new challenges. That continues to...

After more than an hour of discussion last night, the town selectmen of Natick, Massachusetts, voted 4-1 to grant a license to sell cars to Tesla Motors Massachusetts. The local company, which the Selectmen concluded was legally separate from Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA], will operate out of a property...

Every year at the Geneva Motor Show, Swiss carmaker Rinspeed shows off its latest confusing concept to the assembled crowds. In 2012, it displayed the Dock+Go--a lightly disguised Smart Electric Drive with a docking system to accept a larger battery pack. In 2011, it was the Bamboo, a beach-buggy...

As part of standard procedure, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) crash-tests an example of each vehicle on sale, and assigns a rating based on how it performs. Most are expected to get four or five stars out of five these days--while all cars meet basic minimum safety...

Two years ago, our first-ever Green Car Reports Best Car To Buy award went to the first modern battery-electric car sold in the U.S. How far we've come. This year, our third annual winner is the 2013 Tesla Model S, a car that takes the all-electric vehicle to a new and far more elevated level. But...

Back in May, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] released range estimates for the 2012 Model S. While the company predicted that 250-300 miles would be typical for the largest, 85 kilowatt-hour battery, and the EPA confirmed this with an official 265 miles, insiders at Tesla had a sneaky feeling that 400...

Do you build electric cars first, and worry about the chargers later? Or do you build a network up-front, and hope the buyers follow? Public charging networks are necessary to give buyers confidence that they can charge their cars anywhere. But often, they're not used that much, owners typically...

Amsterdam in the Netherlands is known for many things--canals, beautiful architecture, and a relaxed attitude to drugs and carnal pleasures. It's also, as it happens, an excellent city to explore on two wheels. Not only are there few hills to contend with, but Amsterdam is very much geared towards...

U.K. Tesla fans jealous of their counterparts in the U.S. are finally able to reserve their own 2013 Tesla Model S. Buyers will be able to choose between Model S and Model S Signature, and will get to enjoy the same specifications as buyers in the U.S. That means the same color and trim options...

Without any fanfare, the EPA has released its range rating for the second version of the Tesla Model S to come to market. The 2013 Tesla Model S fitted with a 60-kilowatt-hour battery pack has a rated range of 208 miles. That compares to 265 miles for the Model S version with the largest 85-kWh...

Concept cars used to be flights of fancy, vehicles designed solely to grab attention when a carmaker's regular products were lacking visual verve. In more recent times, they've been so much more than that. They still look extreme and showcase blue-sky technology, but concepts now give us a much...

For Fisker Automotive these days, no news is probably good news. Its latest CEO, Tony Posawatz, has been at the helm for four months now. And Fisker is putting all its efforts toward developing and producing its next model, the Atlantic mid-size sport sedan, by late 2014. In a recent Fox News...

A few months back, after riding the Smart eBike, we concluded that it might actually be the best vehicle the company makes. That makes the upcoming Smart electric scooter something worth waiting for--and to build it, the company is getting assistance from electric motorcycle experts Vectrix...

If you've always wanted to see two large car companies having a good, old-fashioned hair-pulling, nails-out, purse-swinging fight, then you're in luck. Following comments from Fiat at the Los Angeles auto show, hinting that the Nissan Leaf was a form of "visual pollution", Nissan has hit back...

For our final piece on last week's Los Angeles Auto Show, we put together a video on the five new plug-in electric cars officially unveiled there. Three of them are plug-in hybrids, a pair from Ford and one from Honda, and the other two are small battery-electric conversions by the makers of the...

Some of the biggest news of the year has been broken on social networking site, Twitter. For Tesla CEO Elon Musk, that includes regular tweets about the company. Yesterday, he tweeted that Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] was in the black. "Am happy to report that Tesla was narrowly cash flow positive last...

Well, it looks like there won't be a Tesla Model S under my Christmas tree after all. Even more annoying, that means I'll have to wait until April 15, 2014, to take advantage of my $7,500 electric-car tax credit. As Model S reservation holder P717, I'd hoped to take delivery of my car this month...