Electric Cars

Possibly the most exciting electric cars to appear over the next few years are from BMW. The German maker's electric i3 subcompact and i8 plug-in hybrid supercar have whetted our appetites and now BMW has announced a further addition to the range, in the shape of the i8 Spyder. Autocar reveals that...

Men's Health magazine will drive a 2012 Ford Focus Electric from New York to Los Angeles, recharging 40 to 55 times along the way.

With Fisker's Karma already on the market and in the hands of customers, all eyes have turned to Fisker's 'Project Nina', a car to slot below the Karma in Fisker's range. And it was bound to happen: Pictures of the next Fisker range-extended electric car have leaked onto the internet, ahead of its...

Major evolutionary change takes a long time. That's as true for electric cars as for opposable thumbs--though it will be measured in decades, not millennia. We frequently have to say that declaring plug-in cars a sales failure after 14 months (as certain commentators have done) is wildly premature...

UPDATES, April 11, 2012: Since this article was published on March 30, we've received the following updates: This morning, Mission Valley Ford received a truckload of 10 Think City vehicles from the Indiana factory, though most are already spoken for; Sales and service are only available in the San...

We breathed a sigh of relief when Coda announced it had started production of its electric Sedan earlier this month. Then, we positively jumped for joy when little over a week later, the first customers started taking delivery of their new 2012 Coda Sedans. It had certainly been a long time coming...

If you've not heard of Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima then you probably don't follow the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb event, held each year at Pikes Peak in Colorado. Fans of the sport, which involves over 12 miles of twists and turns and a climb of over 4,700 feet, will recognise Monster as a...

Well, that's not particularly good news: Azure Dynamics, the company that converted a handful of Ford Transit Connect small commercial vans to electric power, filed for bankruptcy on Monday. It laid off about 120 employees at a variety of locations in MIchigan, Massachusetts, Canada, and the United...

March 11, 2011 changed Japan forever. Just before 3pm local time, a magnitude 9 earthquake created a Tsunami that devastated a large region of the Eastern coast of Japan, killing thousands. It also triggered meltdowns in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing explosions in three...

This much is clear: as long as there are cars, there will be people who want to race them. While the bulk of today’s racing takes place in fossil-fuel-powered automobiles, racing of the future will very likely be based around electric cars. Electric drag racing is already an established...

So you got yer gasoline cars, and yer electric cars. And yer extended-range electrics, and yer plug-in hybrids. Sure, old news, been there, done that. How about an electric car with a gasoline engine you can swap in and out as you need it? Think of it as a range-extended electric car (like the...

Lithium-ion battery cells are expensive, challenging, and time-consuming to develop. And they can be hard to get right, as the current woes of A123 Systems show. Even the large car companies that develop their own cells--Toyota is the largest among a small number--want to spread their costs. Today...

The Monte Carlo Rally is one of the most famous events on the motorsport calendar. While the World Rally Championship visited the event back in January and the Monte Carlo Historic rally ended in February, an equivalent, the Rallye Monte-Carlo Des Énergies Nouvelles is also held for electric...

London is making big claims that its Olympic games held this summer will be the greenest yet. To that end, it was announced last year that BMW would be supplying 4,000 of its low-emissions cars to the event, including 200 electric cars. The company has revealed that the first cars in its huge fleet...

On March 28, 2011, I took delivery of a European-specification 2011 Nissan Leaf. Yesterday, a few days short of our 1-year anniversary with the car, its odometer passed the 15,000 mile mark. But what have we learned about Nissan’s first electric car after living with it daily for a year?...

Last week, we confidently predicted that we’d be hearing more about BMW’s first all-electric and plug-in hybrid production cars -- the i3 electric minicar and i8 plug-in supercar -- as we neared the BMW-sponsored 2012 Olympics. For the past few weeks, most of the news we’ve heard...

Unless you live in one of the more northern states -- or spend a lot of time in snow-covered mountains -- the idea of driving on ice might fill you with a sense of foreboding doom. Especially if that ice happens to be covering a very large expanse of water. Enter former Automotive X-Prize entrants...

General Motors announced yesterday that it would replace the 120-Volt charging unit provided with every Chevrolet Volt, to provide what GM spokesman Randy Fox called a "more consistent charging experience." Back in July, we reported that some of the charging units provided in Volts were...

BMW might be more than a year away from bring its first production electric car -- the 2014 BMW i3 -- to production, but the German automaker wants you to know that it isn’t new to electric cars. You may not know it, but BMW’s electric car history spans 40 years. As part of its...

The last U.S. volume carmaker started from scratch by entrepreneurs whose brand is still with us was Chrysler, and that was in 1924. But Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive are both looking to change that. Tesla started a few years ago with its electric Roadster sports car, and is about to introduce...