Hybrids

Although flying cars aren’t looking that much closer to reality, your Uber could take to the air in just a few years and be electric. Well, mostly electric, eventually. Hybrid electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles could come into service specifically as air taxis. In...

Audi's future plans for plug-in vehicles involve more than the all-electric e-tron quattro scheduled to roll out later this year. Now, with the previous plug-in hybrid, the A3 Sportback e-tron, already in the rearview mirror, the company has announced plans to reboot its plug-in lineup with four...

Volvo announced on Friday that it is updating its lineup with two new "mild-hybrids" and more electric range for its existing T8 plug-in hybrid models. The XC60 and XC90 T8 plug-in hybrids will get up to 15 percent more range, according to Volvo's European announcement, which could boost their...

Ford opened an investigation into the way it conducts fuel economy tests. The EPA quit speaking to California in their dispute over emissions rules. Half of Consumer Reports top picks for 2019 include hybrids or plug-in cars. And Audi makes good on advertising the performance benefits of an...

Carbuyers no longer have to give up space, comfort, features, or reliability to make a difference in saving gas. That's the message of Consumer Reports' latest list of 10 top picks for 2019, published in its Autos Spotlight, and April Auto Issue Thursday. Out of CR's 10 Top Picks, three are...

Presidents' Day Weekend typically brings deals in car showrooms. And this month is no exception. As electric-car fans wait for a slew of new models to hit the market this spring, some of the same cars that have made up recent months' best deals appear again. Two, however, are recent entrants. Our...

Last week the U.S. EPA released final fuel economy numbers for the 2020 Toyota Corolla lineup. They include a confirmation of what Toyota had claimed when it introduced the lineup last fall: that the Corolla Hybrid will carry an EPA combined rating of more than 50 mpg. The 2020 Toyota Corolla...

Porsche is known as an engineering company. Its technical solutions are often complex and unusual, but often provide inspiration for others to follow. Now details have filtered out about Porsche's new hybrid-electric powertrain for its upcoming 911, which could inform what engineers are thinking...

In an era of spreading electric cars and more stringent fuel-economy and emissions standards, some muscle cars are losing their signature V-8 engines. The Ford Mustang, despite the company's announcements that it will be offered as a hybrid, may not be one of them. According to new patent filings...

American muscle may never be the same. When the iconic and popular Dodge Challenger is redesigned sometime before the mid-2020s, the new version may come with an electrified powertrain. For informed green-car readers, it's important to make clear that that doesn't mean that any new Challenger will...

Considering how much of a commitment Nissan has made to electric vehicles over nearly a decade—mass-producing them on three continents—the lack of any parallel commitment to plug-in hybrid models, or even hybrids, has been baffling. Nissan finally remedied that in 2016, with the...

Subaru’s STI performance skunkworks has helped enable some very fast, exciting versions of the Japanese automaker’s vehicles. And with its 2019 Crosstrek Hybrid, Subaru has shown it can engineer a full hybrid—a plug-in with a 17-miles range rating. However, the Forester STI...

Will the Chevrolet Volt get an immediate successor, or will any other model soon carry on with the potential of its brilliant Voltec plug-in hybrid system? Considering what General Motors announced yesterday, both of those possibilities are now looking less likely. GM said that it will cut 50 jobs...

Between the unexpectedly wild styling, the very wide model range, the Prius Prime plug-in, and now the all-wheel-drive 2019 Prius AWD-e, it seems that Toyota has opted for a mix-and-match philosophy for the current fourth generation of America’s favorite fuel-sipper. The big news for...

Ford is in the process of applying hybrid technology to a vehicle type that seems like a natural fit for it: police cars. It’s about time. Ford claims to have the industry’s first pursuit-rated hybrid police car with the Police Responder Hybrid Sedan—the police-duty version of the...

Toyota continues to stay the course with nickel-metal hydride battery cells for many of its hybrid vehicles, even though most other hybrid vehicles from other brands have moved on to using lithium-ion cells exclusively. According to Prius chief engineer Shoichi Kaneko, in an interview this past...

Toyota has released pricing for the new all-wheel-drive version of the Prius that it revealed at the LA auto show last week. The base version of the all-wheel drive model will start at $27,300, including a $920 destination charge, according to our partners at CarsDirect.com. That's a premium of...

With the introduction of a 50-mile-per-gallon Corolla Hybrid at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Toyota is keeping true to a mission it undertook a long time ago: democratizing hybrid technology, and making it mainstream. The carmaker has long aimed to deploy its hybrid system aggressively into pretty...

If you want one of the highest-mileage non-plug-in vehicles on the market—like the Toyota Prius, Hyundai Ioniq, Kia Niro, or Honda Insight, there’s been one quite significant deal-breaker for many Snow Belt families: All-wheel drive simply isn’t a possibility. That’s due to...

Yesterday, when we brought you our 2019 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid first drive review, we missed one very important point. At 39 mpg, the RAV4 Hybrid is now the highest-mileage sport-utility vehicle (as the EPA lists them) without a charge port. All the more impressive is that it’s not a low...