Hybrids

It's all about the Volt today, for better and for worse. On the "worse" side is the tempest in a teapot that erupted today, ably dismantled by more thoughtful commentators, over whether General Motors had "lied" about the drivetrain of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt. In brief, GM revealed today that the...

We missed a milestone a couple of weeks ago: Toyota built and sold its two-millionth Prius hybrid earlier this month. The first-generation Prius, the world's first production hybrid-electric vehicle, was launched in Japan late in 1997. It stayed a low-volume car for several years, and wasn't...

The all-new 2011 Lexus CT 200h is scheduled to hit showrooms early next year complete with a 134 horsepower hybrid drivetrain and a very reasonable--for a luxury car--EPA combined fuel economy rating of 42 mpg. However, this is just the initial setup that Lexus engineers have planned for the CT...

Electric car start-up Tesla successfully launched a stock IPO earlier this year and in the process managed to earn the company a handy $226 million; crucial funding that will go on to help spawn several new models for the company. Now, closest rival Fisker is thinking of doing the same, revealing...

Since launching the Ford Escape Hybrid in 2004, Ford has confined sales of its hybrid-electric vehicles to North America. But that's about to change. In European markets, where up to 50 percent of new cars are fitted with high-efficiency diesel engines, Ford has focused its efforts over the last...

The 2010 Toyota Prius had an exceptionally long model year, introduced in early spring 2009 and delivered to dealers by May or June that year. But now the 2011 Prius hybrids are arriving at dealerships, and Toyota has levied a modest price increase of $250 across each of the four trim packages it...

The 2011 Toyota Highlander Hybrid has been restyled and made more powerful as part of a comprehensive freshening of the Toyota Highlander line, last fully redesigned for the 2008 model year. Along with more prosaic gasoline-powered Highlanders, the front-end styling has been updated. The hood and...

It's been a year of press announcements but no cars from Fisker Automotive. Now the company says that the first factory-built 2011 Fisker Karma will debut at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, to be held at the end of the month. That may allow Fisker to keep its promise to deliver a handful of production...

Add Lotus to the list of luxury and sports car makers offering hybrid models to raise fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It won't be on the market until the "spring of 2014," says Lotus, but 10 days from now at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, it will introduce a concept for its...

Since Ford sold Jaguar Land Rover to Indian carmaker Tata in TK, the luxury maker has stepped out a bit. Their green efforts have taken down several interesting technology paths that seem unlikely had they stayed underneath the Blue Oval of Dearborn. The latest to surface is a demonstration vehicle...

Plug-in hybrid/electric vehicles are no strangers to the vaporware syndrome: a product is announced, promised to be the best ever, raises funds, then fails to materialize--or does so at an incredibly slow pace. But Fisker's Karma looks set to defy the odds if a new $30 million parts order for the...

Amidst a flurry of battery-electric vehicle announcements by automakers all over the globe, Toyota reiterated plans to launch six new hybrid models by 2012. But the company will push back the U.S. launch date for its first plug-in vehicle, the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid. Toyota had said this...

Whether it's the rather bland styling or the underwhelming stats, the 2011 Lexus CT 200h hasn't achieved much in creating buzz in the headlines. In fairness, hybrid power, low emissions and claims of high fuel efficiency don’t mean much without the all important EPA-rated fuel economy figures...

If you're a Twitter user, you may have noticed that carmakers are starting to tweet big-time. And it's not just regurgitated marketing propaganda either. The @Ford account just tweeted the following, which intrigued us: @Ford: In 1953, Ford produced its 40-millionth U.S.-built vehicle. We're still...

Sometimes, you'd think that hybrid-electric vehicles were the most important development in the automotive world, if not the entire geopolitical sphere, in the last 15 years. They're not. More than a decade after they launched into the U.S. market, their market share hovers just south of 3 percent...

Nissan and its Infiniti luxury division may have been late to the table when it comes to hybrids but neither brand is shying away from launching a new generation of gasoline-electric vehicles. Infiniti has fired the latest round in the battle for hybrid supremacy with the unveiling of a new hybrid...

In the green-car world, the leaf is the king of all icons. The 2010 Honda Insight fertilized the idea when it bowed in 2008; it still promotes greener driving with electronically rendered displays of plants that add leaves as the car's computers sense a light, planet-conscious foot on the gas...

Talk about up-again, down-again. It was just a year ago when a global shortages of 2010 Toyota Prius models kept supplies tight all over the world. Now, they may start to pile up on dealer lots again. Last summer, the company had just launched the all-new 2010 Prius, the third generation of the...

Lotus is proving to be a major player in the hybrid and electric vehicle segments, having been the provider of the rolling chassis for the Tesla Roadster and also the supplier of engineering expertise for a number of production and concept hybrid vehicles launched by automakers around the globe...

As the European brands chase the benefits of diesel in smaller cars--though they're sticking their toes in the hybrid/electric waters as well--the Japanese automakers continue to push forward with their established hybrid systems. The latest is Honda, which has revealed a new hybrid version of its...