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It's a subcompact. It's all-wheel drive. It's sort of a crossover, sort of a small wagon. It's also a Buick. Huh? We recently spent four days and covered 373 miles in a 2013 Buick Encore, the newest and smallest entry in the five-car lineup from GM's near-luxury brand. Despite its subcompact size, the Encore isn't quite the least-expensive Buick. Its base price of $24,200 is more than $1,100 higher than that of the Buick Verano compact sedan. But our top-of-the-line Encore all-wheel drive with the Premium package came in almost $9,000 higher, at a breathtaking $32,975 (including a mandatory...
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2011 Nissan Leaf At Two Years: 32,000 Miles, No Signs Of AgeAlmost two years ago, I took delivery of one of the very first 2011 Nissan Leafs to be imported into the United Kingdom. With its two-year anniversary approaching, and more than 32,000 miles on the clock, has our family's opinion of the Nissan Leaf changed? What has life with the car been like? And...
Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield -
My 2013 Tesla Model S Electric Sport Sedan: Delivery at Last!After 1,386 days of waiting, I first glimpsed my new 2013 Tesla Model S electric sport sedan at a local discount tire store. The Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] delivery rep who was bringing the car up from the New Jersey distribution center to my house in New York's Hudson Valley had called me from the...
David Noland -
2014 Jeep Cherokee: New, Greener 4x4 With Old Name (Photos)Here you are: These are the first photos of the new 2014 Jeep Cherokee. Yep, that's right: Cherokee. No, not Grand Cherokee. Plain old Cherokee, the revival of a name that vanished (in the U.S.) a decade ago, although it's lived on in Europe. The new 2014 Cherokee is Jeep's replacement for the old...
John Voelcker -
Tesla Motors To Be Profitable Selling Electric Cars By April, It SaysTesla Motors announced its fourth-quarter and full-year results late yesterday, and offered some good news to the company's shareholders. That would be the projection that Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] will operate at a profit in the current quarter, which ends March 31. "We expect to be slightly...
John Voelcker -
2013 Nissan Leaf: 75-Mile Range 'Anticipated' In New Test By EPAIt's the last piece of information on the new and updated 2013 Nissan Leaf electric car that everyone's been waiting for: its range. The projected number, Nissan says, is 75 miles--but that shouldn't be compared to the 73-mile range of the 2011 and 2012 Leaf models. That's because the EPA changed...
John Voelcker -
German automaker Volkswagen has been teasing electric versions of its Golf for a while now (several decades, in fact) but images of a production model have now been leaked. Czech website AutoForum.cz shows images of the latest e-Golf, based on the brand new Mk7-generation car. The car will be revealed in full at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show in the next few weeks, but preliminary details suggest it won't be dissimilar to major competitors like the Nissan Leaf or Ford Focus Electric. A 26.5 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack should give a range of around 108 miles, presumably on the European...
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Is Tomorrow The Most Important Day Ever For Tesla Motors?It's never dull over at Tesla Motors, but tomorrow is a particularly important day. It may, in fact, be the most important day in the electric-car maker's history. That's because after the stock market closes, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] will give the first hints about whether it could genuinely...
John Voelcker -
Tesla Model S Owners Crowdsource Trip To Counter NY Times ReportIt's been a week of Tesla Model S hullabaloo, centered around last Sunday's critical New York Times road test, Stalled Out on Tesla's Electric Highway. Now a set of defiant Tesla Model S owners are setting out to prove Times reporter John Broder wrong. They will replicate his trip from Maryland to...
John Voelcker -
Tesla's Elon Musk & NY Times: Disturbing Discrepancies On Model S Range ReportingGolly. Turns out nothing ignites the Internet quite like a rapid-fire online spat between Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and The New York Times, the Grey Lady of establishment journalism. Like many such controversies, common ground turns out to be easier to find than you might think: It's a fact that...
John Voelcker -
Will Jeep Wrangler Diesel Be Chrysler's Next EcoDiesel?Chevy's Cruze Diesel is getting all the headlines, but there's another U.S.-built diesel due out this year--the 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel. The V-6, 240-horsepower EcoDiesel is expected to achieve 28 mpg highway, and a combined figure in the mid-20s. For its type, that's not bad at all. It...
Antony Ingram -
2014 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel: More Details From Chicago ShowThree years after the Chevrolet Cruze compact sedan was launched as a 2011 model, it gains a new model with a diesel engine for 2014--although there appears to be some confusion over just what that variant is called. The turbodiesel sedan was launched at the Chicago Auto Show last Thursday. Absent...
John Voelcker -
It's been a long time coming, but the wraps are now off Chevy's first diesel-powered passenger car since 1986. The 2014 Chevrolet Clean Turbo Diesel model is being unveiled today at the Chicago Auto Show, and will go on sale the summer in the U.S. and Canada. The 2.0-liter direct-injected and turbocharged diesel engine is rated at 148 horsepower and puts out 248 lb-ft of torque at 2000 rpm. It's paired with GM's six-speed automatic transmission. The company quotes 0-to-60-mph acceleration of 8.6 seconds, which is says is quicker than the automatic version of the Volkswagen Jetta TDI--the...
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Forbidden Fruit: Mercedes-Benz A Class Quick DriveSelling luxury vehicles is a delicate balancing act. Concentrate on your most wealthy clientele and the market is lucrative, but limited. But go too far the other way, catering for the mass market, and you risk damaging your reputation. This is the barrier Mercedes-Benz has had to cross in...
Antony Ingram -
Will 2013 Nissan Leaf Price Cut Cause Sales To Soar?It happens every so often: a spate of media reports with gloom-and-doom headlines about what a dismal failure electric cars are. Take, for instance, this morning's in Reuters--"Electric Cars Head Toward Another Dead End"--or a weekend report in The Detroit News entitled "Electric Vehicle Sales...
John Voelcker -
Tesla Model S Performance: Fastest Electric Car (Video)The Tesla Model S Performance looks great on paper. Not only does the 85 kWh Model S have an impressive 265-mile EPA-rated range, but it'll do the benchmark 0-60 mph sprint in only 4.4 seconds. That means the all-electric luxury sport sedan from Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] is at least as fast as V-8...
Antony Ingram -
Jan Plug-In Electric Car Sales: Volt Falls, Leaf Supply WoesSales of plug-in electric cars tripled last year, so how's the New Year looking? Based on January sales, being reported throughout the day by automakers, the year is starting slowly. General Motors said it delivered 1,140 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric cars last month. That's more than the...
John Voelcker -
Best Gas Mileage You Can Get: Top 10 HybridsAre you in the market for a hybrid car? You probably want great gas mileage, without switching to diesel fuel, or taking the next step into plug-in vehicles. The good news is, plug-ins aside, virtually all the most fuel-efficient cars on sale right now are hybrids. Whether you're after a spacious...
Antony Ingram -
We get asked a lot whether winter weather makes electric cars impractical. Short answer: No. We even rounded up some of the best electric-cars-in-winter stories last month. But it's a fact of physics that a plug-in electric car will have a longer range in temperate Southern California than in the icy steppes of the Northeast, upper Midwest, and much of Canada. We've done our own cold-weather test of the 2012 Nissan Leaf, for instance. We found that without using the heater, 80 miles of range was still possible--if not very pleasant. But switch on those accessories, especially seat heaters or...
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2013 Chevrolet Spark: Gas Mileage TestWe tend to like small cars, as a personal preference. But the very smallest of cars often don't get the best gas mileage, and they can feel subjectively unsafe in some driving conditions. So how did our 2013 Chevrolet Spark minicar do on gas mileage? We've concluded that--depending how you use...
John Voelcker -
Tesla Model S: Glitches, Quirks, and Peccadilloes RoundupTo put it mildly, the Tesla Model S has been a resounding success. The New York Times has called the all-electric luxury sport sedan a game-changer, comparable to the Model T Ford. It's won virtually every 2012 "Car of the Year" honor, including the only unanimous Motor Trend award in the...
David Noland -
Right Electric Range For A Plug-In Hybrid: Is Lower Better?How much electric range is the "right" amount in a plug-in hybrid or range-extended electric car? If you're a fan of battery electric vehicles, the answer is "all of it." But if you want to drive most of your miles on electricity, and still have the security of a combustion engine as a backup for...
John Voelcker -
Tesla Model S Production Line Now Running At Full CapacityFor fans of the Tesla Model S all-electric sport sedan, the past few weeks have been full of good news. Deliveries of top-of-the-line 85-kilowatt-hour models now number in the thousands, the 60-kWh model will go into production this month--and has been rated at 208 miles of range--and no major...
John Voelcker -
2014 Cadillac ELR Video PreviewBased on the Volt, but dressed in a very sharp new suit, the 2014 Cadillac ELR promises to bring the joys of greener driving to the executive sector. Not that the luxury segment hasn't already been a hotbed of hybrid development in recent years, though initially slow on the uptake. That makes...
Nelson Ireson