Electric Cars

While the major automakers whittle away on their electric car developments, a small German firm by the name of e-Wolf has been building and selling a range of electric vehicles including small scooters, full-size commercial vehicles and high-performance track cars, for several years now...

When is a 2011 Chevrolet Volt not a plug-in hybrid? When it covers 2,500 miles between fill-ups. That’s how far Maryland resident Jeff Parmet has driven in his 2011 Chevrolet Volt in the past six months. In fact, he’s just visited the gas pump for the first time since buying the car...

For the past week or so the famous Pikes Peak in Colorado has rung with the sound of cars and motorcycles climbing the 12.42 mile course to its 14,110 foot summit. But yesterday for a few minutes, the mountain was a little quieter as an electric car climbed the summit, completing the would-renowned...

You have to go from San Diego, CA to Tucson, AZ, a distance of around 480 miles. With a variety of options available to you, which do you choose? Most people wouldn’t hesitate to book a flight, and some would even consider the train. But one electric car fan decided to make the trip in his...

If you own an electric car you’ll also be familiar with the wide variety of charging stations on the market today. If you’ll forgive us for saying so, very few of them are design classics. There’s a good reason too - charging stations are nothing more than appliances, built...

Earlier this week we said that that Nissan needed a new, quirky way of advertising its 2011 Nissan Leaf that didn’t involve making household gadgets run on gasoline or relying on trained polar bears. Nissan can’t have heard us. Instead of a quirky new ad campaign, Nissan is attempting...

How do you legally have fun with a $109,000 electric sportscar that can do 0-60 in under 4 seconds, has excellent grip, and a top speed of 125 mph? That’s exactly the question facing many Tesla Roadster owners looking to test their cars - and themselves - to the limit in a safe environment...

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll know that we’ve said before that making a good electric car is hard, even for large automakers like Ford, Nissan, Toyota and Chevrolet. As for turning a production gasoline or diesel car into an electric one? It’s a whole...

early adopters can be the best promoters of new technology

Making an electric car is a particularly tough business, fraught with financial risk, engineering challenges and tough competition from small-scale and mainstream automakers alike. And in that world, some automakers will succeed in bringing electric cars to market, while others flounder at the...

While you probably remember the great success and untimely demise of Toyota’s previous all-electric RAV4 EV, larger, pure electric SUV haven’t yet been attempted by major automakers. But a transatlantic firm called Liberty has been working on changing that with an electric vehicle based...

Earlier this year we took delivery of our very own 2011 Nissan Leaf. Just like the thousands of other customers worldwide, we took our place in the queue last year and had an agonizingly long wait before we were sitting behind the wheel. But just under 3 months and 5,000 miles after driving off the...

While Nissan killed the Altima Hybrid, its sole U.S. hybrid vehicle, for 2012, the company has made a number of important upgrades to its Leaf battery electric car. For 2012, the Nissan Leaf will include as standard heated front and rear seats, plus heated steering wheel and outside mirrors...

If you’re in the market for an Electric car you’ll know that besides the obvious financial burden of paying for the car itself you probably want to budget a few thousand dollars extra to account for the installation of a dedicated electric car charging station in your home. At the...

By far the most ambitious plan to build and assemble electric cars in the U.S. comes not from General Motors or Ford, but from Nissan. Now, it may happen a little later than expected, due to the March 11 earthquake and resulting tsunami that severely damaged large portions of Japan's industrial...

Californian electric auto maker Tesla Motors might be in the final stages of bringing its 2012 Model S luxury sedan to market, but if you want to own one of its iconic two-seat roadsters you’ll need to order one soon. According to vivacious Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the firm is just a few months...

For decades, old electric cars--those built from the 1890s to 1930 or so, when the last remnants of the industry died out--were nothing more than oddities. Tall, imposing, mostly resembling closed horse carriages, they were stately but sidelined reminders of an entirely vanished way of propulsion...

Last December we told you that the His Holiness The Pope was keen on swapping his large gas-guzzling Mercedes SUV ‘popemobile’ for a suitable electric car. Now Vatican officials have confirmed the details of Pope Benedict XVI’s latest ride: a custom-made M-Class plug-in hybrid...

Google’s head offices in Mountain View, California has just got some new neighbors, but unlike most of the other companies in the fabled silicon valley it isn’t a fresh-faced venture-funded software or green tech startup firm. It’s an automaker. Moving into offices just over the...

After several months of using a 2011 Chevy Volt and a 2011 Nissan Leaf as our sole family transport, we have a better understanding of both cars than we did in March, when I first wrote about how they compared. First to arrive at our West Sacramento home was a beautiful crystal red 2011 Volt. We...