Gas Mileage

Never let it be said US car buyers don't know a good deal when they see one. The Toyota Prius has become the fourth-most popular car purchased under the first 80,000 Cash-for-Clunkers vouchers processed by the US Department of Transportation. In fact, Toyota sold 19,173 Priuses during July, almost...

Who knew? Turns out Americans just needed a little nudge to visit their car dealers, but the promise of an extra $3,500 or more in incentives was enough to push car buyers over the hump and get them to trade in their clunkers. And how. As we reported Friday on our sister site TheCarConnection.com...

It's the very last day of July, so it's time again for us to recap the five most popular posts of the month on AllAboutPrius.com. Compared to June's most-popular list, we're back to the basics, with our posts on the the making of the "Harmony" commercial and the followup MPG advertisement falling...

We write about a lot of advanced technologies here, including hybrids, diesels, electric cars, and even natural-gas vehicles. But the hard truth is that all of those added together will be only a small fraction of cars sold in the US, even 10 years from now. Most of the green cars of tomorrow will...

Here at GreenCarReports.com, we read a lot. And increasingly, our friends send us stuff they think we'd be interested in. Which is how we came across an abstract of a study done by one Christopher R. Knittel at the University of California-Davis. Knittel looked at the factors affecting carmakers'...

Last summer, with $4/gallon gasoline, you couldn't find a Toyota Prius on dealer lots anywhere. Early this year, in the depths of the economic doldrums, US dealers could hardly give away the high-mileage hybrids. Now, once again, the Tsutsumi factory in Japan is cranking out hybrids as fast as it...

While the 2010 Honda Insight has gotten a lot of attention lately, it's far from Honda's only hybrid. Now the company has announced that it will put two more hybrid-electric vehicles on sale in Japan next year: the 2011 Honda CR-Z and the 2011 Honda Fit Hybrid. Honda had previously announced both...

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...

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...

All that's left now is for President Barack Obama to sign the bill. Late last night, the US Senate voted 91 to 5 to pass a $106 billion supplemental spending bill for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan that includes $1 billion in "Cash for Clunkers" funding. Earlier, the Senate had barely defeated...

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...

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...

Press releases are part of every journalist's life. Most of them get scanned or ditched. Once in a while, we put them aside for future reference. Really awful ones get forwarded around with snarky comments. But occasionally there's good info in them. Here, for instance, are five very basic...

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...