Electric Cars

The popular U.K. motoring entertainment show Top Gear just can’t stay out of the spotlight at the moment. Just six days after Californian electric car automaker Tesla filed a legal case against the primetime Sunday night show for libel and malicious falsehood a broadcasting watchdog in the...

If you’re in the market for an electric car there are currently very few highway capable vehicles available. But for those in the U.K. another option will soon be on the market courtesy of an Indian firm which aims to make its electric cars the market leaders. Tata Motors, unfortunately...

No sooner do I discuss University of Illinois researchers who have created 3D antennas for mobile phones using nanotechnology than another group of researchers at the University of Illinois (this time at Urbana-Champaign) have developed 3D material for batteries that combines the qualities of...

The 2011 Chevy Volt continues to outsell the 2011 Nissan Leaf, but during March, the Japanese battery electric car at last started to move noticeable numbers of cars--almost five times as many as it sold in February. The two major-manufacturer plug-ins currently on the market sold a total of 906...

There is nothing a company CEO hates more than not making a profit on a product, but as Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne knows, it is sometimes a necessary evil in the evolution of a new technology. Speaking at Fiat S.p.A’s general meeting on Wednesday, Marchionne spoke frankly about his...

Level 3 fast charging is blisteringly fast. In fact, we got to try it out in the real world this week, recharging a 2011 Nissan Leaf from 30% full to 98% full in a little under 25 minutes. But while your electric car gets a quick refresh, here’s our list of five top things to keep you...

The largest problem facing electric cars today is the amount of time it takes to recharge the battery pack. Unlike filling a gas tank which can take a few minutes, even fast charging direct current charging stations can take up to 30 minutes to replace lost charge. Which raises the question of what...

Some of the loudest of the skepticism over Tesla's plans to design and build an all-electric luxury sports sedan have died down after the company showed an all-aluminum body-in-white at the Detroit Auto Show in January. Even Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda checked it out. Tesla is continuing its campaign to...

The problem with shooting video is that there's always one thing you forget to say until the camera's gone. Especially if it's low-budget and done on the fly. That's when the onscreen talent tends to forget to qualify some of the things they say. Like, for instance, this discussion of the unlikely...

Believe it or not, most of what you watch on television is scripted. What you may not know is that some shows which appear unscripted, like the BBC’s infamous Top Gear, are also scripted word for word. Everything from the banter between its three middle-aged hosts to its madcap challenges and...

At the start of the month, we examined just how much of the 2012 Tesla Model S sticker price was made up by battery pack costs. In order to make electric cars more accessible to the mainstream car buying public, Renault plans to sell consumers their electric car but lease them the battery pack. But...

If you’re a regular reader of AllCarsElectric then you’ll know that electric cars are much cheaper to run than gasoline cars once you’ve actually purchased them, but electric cars in Washington state are just about to get a little more expensive to run thanks to a proposed law...

About two years ago BBC’s Top Gear aired a test drive of the then relatively new Tesla Roadster. While this was seen as a major boon for Tesla, the light shone on its all-electric sports car by the popular show was somewhat less than flattering. In fact, it was rather downbeat. What makes the...

The 2011 Nissan Leaf has a waiting list. So does the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, and as for the Tesla Roadster, well, it's probably too expensive. So what do you do if you want to drive around in a plug-in vehicle right now? You could always build one, but that seems like too much hard work. Instead, you...

Electric cars are much on the minds of green buyers these days, despite limited supplies of the 2011 Nissan Leaf and 2011 Chevrolet Volt. But there's also a second tier of suppliers, beyond the major carmakers, that also offers or plans to offer buyers their own plug-in electric vehicles. One such...

The formal name for what many of us more casually call “Level 3” charging is CHAdeMo, which is the only currently installed standard to reduce electric-car charging time for an 80-percent charge to less than an hour. The CHAdeMo interface is an option on the 2011 Nissan Leaf; on that...

The U.S. rollout of the 2011 Nissan Leaf has been a bit of a disaster with some would-be Leaf owners still waiting to find out when their local dealer will stock the all-electric car nearly a year after pre-reservations started. So how much would you pay to jump the queue completely and get an...

The 2011 Geneva Motor Show has come and gone and was a real treat for electric car fans. Not only could you get close to cars like the 2011 Nissan Leaf and smart fortwo electric drive, but some were even available to test. One of the cars attracting a lot of attention was the 2011 Chevrolet Volt...

When looked at in pure dollars and cents, there are many cases in which electric cars don't yet provide a payback. But other forces will boost their chances of adoption beyond pure payback. And government regulations are one of those forces. On Monday, the European Commission will issue a road map...

Better Place, the ambitious program that's launching its electric-car service in Israel, opened its first battery-swap station there on Wednesday. At an event marking the opening, CEO Shai Agassi said the company would be profitable within two years of starting to provide mobility services to its...