Luxury Cars

Not so many years ago, a 1.2-liter engine would only have been found in the U.S. in the smallest and least impressive of subcompact cars. It might have been a 3-cylinder, and certainly wouldn't have had even 100 horsepower. But times change, and engines of that size will soon be found even in the...

The Tesla Model S has retaken its spot as the luxury sedan that gets the highest ratings from Consumer Reports after the electric car gained back automatic emergency braking that works at all legal road speeds. Some may remember Tesla restored the automatic braking during an update to vehicles...

Fisker's promise to bring advanced, solid-state graphene cells to the battery pack of its upcoming Emotion electric car is officially dead. Automotive-grade graphene batteries have yet to be perfected, but Fisker was poised to become the first company to utilize the technology. The batteries...

As numerous political probes over the years have famously shown, once investigators dig into the circumstances around an alleged crime, anything can happen. The September 2015 announcement by the EPA that VW Group engineers had admitted to deliberate cheating on U.S. emission tests of the company's...

The image of the electric car as the future of passenger vehicles has led to a wealth of start-up companies hoping to cash in on the newest type of automotive propulsion. Starting a company—an automobile company at that—is not an easy task, however. Now Lucid Motors (nee Atieva) may be...

It’s a cool spring morning in Menlo Park, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. In a two-story concrete-and-glass building on Constitution Avenue, just down the block from Facebook’s vast fortress, a group of automotive engineers and designers is working to create the...

Audi may have taken an evolutionary approach to the design of the newest, largest luxury sedan, but it is positioning the car as a technical force to be reckoned with. The 2019 Audi A8 ushers in a new era for the German luxury brand—starting now, every single model will soon feature a...

Often there seems to be no middle ground in discussing electric-car maker Tesla Motors. The challenge of reading large volumes of Tesla coverage is that it tends to be either sharply negative or rabidly positive. And the California company's stock is so obsessively analyzed both by supporters and...

It was time to let her go. She is my 2013 Tesla Model S, serial number 003662, in dark green, now with 76,000 memorable miles. The best car I’ve ever owned, by far. She had taken me to 33 states and roughly 100 Superchargers, through deserts, mountains, and tropics, with total reliability...

Faraday Future has seen its share of setbacks following January's reveal of its FF 91 electric luxury car, but it walked away with a victory at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The troubled company not only took home a victory, but it also claimed a new record in the process. The FF 91...

Tesla delivered slightly more than 22,000 electric cars during the second quarter of the year, split between roughly 12,000 Model S hatchback sedans and about 10,000 Model X crossover utility vehicles. That total is more than 50 percent higher than the comparable April-June number for 2016, but...

Tesla slams IIHS after 'Acceptable' Model S test, cites older NHTSA ratings in response

As he had promised he would late one evening last week, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has tweeted out some updates on the upcoming Model 3. He expects first production Model 3 electric car, with serial number 001 ("SN1"), to be completed this Friday, July 7. The first 30 customers to buy Model 3s...

Among electric-car owners and advocates, tiny British sports-car maker Aston Martin has become a company to watch. That's largely due to its CEO for the last few years, Andy Palmer, who had previously led product development at Nissan while it launched the Leaf electric car. Palmer had ambitious...

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute has once again confirmed the Tesla Model S electric car is an outlier. While the Model S gets high ratings for its crash safety, it also seems to incur higher insurance losses than competing conventional cars. Higher...

The expanded collection of sensors known as Hardware 2 continues to bring new and revamped features to the Tesla Model S and Model X electric cars. But how do the latest features offered by Autopilot stack up against those offered until last fall by the superseded Hardware 1 setup? One owner has...

Over the last two years, Audi and Mercedes-Benz have released several all-electric concept cars that are thinly disguised production models to arrive in 2018 and beyond. But electric-car pioneer BMW's plans are less clear. Its sole recent electric concept car was the iNext luxury sedan shown more...

Tesla has bestowed upon its current owners a sought-after perk previously reserved for early adopters: free Supercharging. Last year, Tesla announced it would begin charging for Supercharger station use for buyers of its electric cars after a certain date—but now it appears to have walked...

German luxury carmakers often follow each other's product plans in something close to lockstep. Let one maker—BMW, say—introduce a new category of vehicle—sport utility "coupes," say—and soon Mercedes-Benz and Audi will have their own too. And the premium brands appear to be...

Tesla's most recent Autopilot software head has left the company after just five months on the job. Chris Lattner, who had previously worked at Apple for more than a decade, joined Tesla in January as head software engineer overseeing development of the electric cars' Autopilot active-safety...