Electric Cars

The world of EVs is a strange business. The jump from gasoline and diesel cars to EVs is akin to the jump at the end of the 19th Century from horse and carriage to motor vehicles, in the change in mindset and widespread adoption of infrastructure required. Charging in particular is an area that...

The 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car is clearly one of the most revolutionary vehicles to be sold in the U.S. in many years. It's a first battery electric car that relies solely on plugging into grid electricity for its the energy that powers it. Unlike the 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric...

Yesterday, with just one week to go before the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, Toyota released a few teaser pictures of the much-anticipated love-child of Toyota and Tesla - and told us when it will be unveiled. The Toyota 2013 RAV4 Electric Vehicle is based upon Toyota’s popular compact...

GM is set to deliver its 2011 Chevrolet Volt to its first batch of owners, but it's just booked a big order sure to keep the extended-range electric car in short supply for the near future. As its CEO Jeffrey Immelt promised two weeks ago, corporate giant General Electric said today it would...

Electric vehicle development is quickly proving to be a worldwide effort, with companies and research institutes from across the globe and in varying industries and fields forming partnerships and alliances in order to accelerate the roll out of zero-emission electric vehicles. Audi is one of the...

If the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, 2011 Nissan Leaf, 2011 Coda Sedan or 2011 Tesla Roadster are a little too modern for your tastes, an eBay auction ending this weekend could offer just what you’re looking for. But is it and other converted or one-off cars worth buying when commercially made cars...

Thanks to the limited availability of electric cars on the market thus far and lack of parity between EV models and their gasoline or diesel counterparts, comparing the relative costs of the three isn't the easiest of tasks. The human race wouldn't have got very far if we'd only ever done what was...

It's one of the most radical cars ever to be built in this country, the first all-electric vehicle to go on sale in many decades. So you'd expect that when the Nissan Leaf enters production in Smyrna, Tennessee, late in 2012, it would have its very own production line, right? Nope. Not at all. Far...

Tesla has announced its third quarter results. They show that revenues are down 31 percent from a year ago and that the car maker is losing nearly eight times as much money compared to the previous year. This quarter, Tesla lost $34.9 million, up 7.6 times from the $4.6 million from a year earlier...

Starting a venture-funded company is hard. Starting a venture-funded car company is probably a lot harder, as Tesla, Fisker, and Coda have likely found out. But one area that may make sense for venture funding is the electric-vehicle charging station business. A number of companies, including...

In a continuing run of managerial musical chairs and corporate re-structuring at CODA Automotive, CEO Kevin Czinger has resigned. CODA automotive’s first car, the 2011 Coda Sedan is due to launch before the end of 2010. Priced at $44,900, it costs $12,000 more than its closest rival, the 2011...

Tesla knew what they were doing when they selected the chassis from the British Lotus Elise sports car as the basis for their Roadster. The bonded aluminum chassis is spectacularly light by modern standards and also incredibly strong and rigid despite being a roofless design. It also has a large...

Earlier this year we were all excited to hear about Volvo’s offering to the world of electric vehicles - the Volvo C30 EV. Debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in January, the S40-based car offered a eight hour recharging time using a 240V, 16A supply, a 24-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery and a...

For the next few years, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car will be the sole focus of GM's advanced powertrain efforts for U.S. car buyers. But that hasn't stopped it from putting battery electric cars into production elsewhere in the world. Electric minicars in China Last week, in...

A single zero-emissions 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car served as pace car for the world renowned New York City Marathon, held this morning in crisp, sunny autumn weather. Its presence slightly reduced the exhaust that surrounded the lead racers as they covered the 26.2-mile, five-borough course amid...

Parting is never easy. In a shock move a few days ago, Michael A Jackson, the Senior Vice President of Global Sales, Marketing and Distribution at CODA Automotive, has resigned - long before the first all-electric 2011 Coda Sedans hit the roads of the U.S. On Tuesday, CODA made a short press...

BMW is moving full steam ahead with its plans to offer new, radically more fuel efficient vehicles in the next decade. Today, the company said it would put its striking Vision EfficientDynamics concept car into production, to be offered for sale starting in October 2013. And, it signed off on an...

Deliveries of the 2012 Nissan Leaf is about to start in just over a month but attention is already turning to what Nissan has in store for us next in the area of electric vehicles. The automaker recently showed off a new concept vehicle dubbed the New Mobility Concept, essentially a rebadged...

Car assembly will never be the cleanest of processes, despite the efforts of people like Gordon Murray whose i-Stream production method for his T25 and T27 microcars is said to reduce the energy of car production by as much as 80 percent. Still, some companies do make the effort to bring down the...

We’ve said it before, but Nissan makes unmistakably Japanese-looking cars. From the eye-like large headlamps, smiling grille and bulbous nose of the Nissan Townpod concept to the soft curves of the 2011 Nissan Leaf, Nissan’s cars look as if they belong in the pages of a manga. Someone...