Fuel Efficiency

Chrysler's on the skids right now, no doubt about it. June sales plummeted 42 percent, and some consider its takeover by--errr, sorry, partnership with--Italy's Fiat to be the blind leading the lame. But Fiat is far from the company it was 20 years ago, when it folded its tents and snuck out of the...

Three weeks ago, when Jay Shoemaker from The Truth About Cars reviewed the 2010 Toyota Prius, he didn't hold back. He hated it. Loathed it. Despised it. He didn't like the car, its looks, the driving experience, the interior, or the instruments. We poked some fun at him, and at the cranky...

No sooner did the 'Cash for Clunkers' legislation pass the Senate and get signed by President Obama than carmakers started marketing around it. The program won't officially launch until next month, but Smart is already pointing out that its 2009 Smart ForTwo is eligible for the highest voucher...

We've just returned from driving the 2010 Lexus HS250h through the manicured suburbs of New York's Westchester County. We'll post our full impressions tomorrow, following up the first drive of the Lexus HS by our colleague Bengt Halvorson. But at the end of the day, we're left just slightly...

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced the first three loans to be granted under the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. The lucky winners, totaling $8 billion worth of low-interest loans from the US Department of Energy: Ford, Nissan, and Tesla. FORD Amount...

Imagine a special sticker that let you use those high-occupancy vehicle lanes, zipping past stop-and-go rush hour traffic, blissfully alone in your car. If you live in California and were one of 85,000 lucky hybrid owners, you know exactly what I'm talking about. In 2005, California decided to open...

Continuing our sporadic series on other writers' reviews of the 2010 Toyota Prius, today we move to the hallowed grey pages of The New York Times. Yesterday, reporter and blogger Micheline Maynard wrote a detailed post on her impressions of the new 2010 Prius compared to her current 2009 model...

If you've been comparing the new 2010 Toyota Prius to the smaller, less expensive 2010 Honda Insight, Toyota would like to have a little chat with you. They think that you think you'll save money buying the cheaper Insight. So, licking the corporate pencil and pulling out the compact calculator...

As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." (Although, sadly, he actually didn't say it.) In this case, the "my" is the General Motors mild-hybrid powertrain, sometimes known as the Belt-Alternator-Starter or BAS system. And it will return for 2011...

We were once told by an auto writer that "real car people" didn't want green cars. They wanted noise, and roaring engines, and squealing tires. Well, the triumph of diesel-powered race cars at the famed 24 Heures du Mans shows you can have both. The French carmaker Peugeot placed first and second...

Very few people in the world have months of experience behind the wheel of both a Toyota Prius and the new 2010 Honda Insight. Our 16-year-old Silicon Valley correspondent Kyle is one of those few people, and we asked him to sum up the pros and cons of the two cars. His impressions roughly map to...

Gas mileage is a fraught subject, even among hybrid drivers. Some compete to see who can 'hypermile' the hardest and return figures in the 70-plus-mpg range; others drive it like they stole it, figuring they'll still get better mileage than in a non-hybrid driven the same way. Our intreprid teenage...

We do a mix of articles here at GreenCarReports, writing both about cars--green, and occasionally not so green--and some of the broader automotive issues that affect our environment. We were struck by an article last week from The Hill, which covers DC politics as obsessively as we cover...

Late this afternoon, the US House of Representatives passed the tax-credit legislation commonly known as the "Cash for Clunkers" bill by a vote of 298 to 119. The House had reached agreement on terms for the legislation more than a month ago,  but the vote did not take place until today. The...