Nissan News

There are now more than 4,000 Nissan Leaf electric cars on the road in the United States, and the 2012 Mitsubishi “i” is poised to arrive at dealers late this year. Each car offers a DC quick-charge port using the Japanese CHAdeMO standard, for which most 2011 Nissan Leaf owners paid...

A little more than three weeks ago, Norwegian electric-car maker Think Global declared bankruptcy--for the fourth time, actually. In a pithy piece published a week later, Pike Research analyst Dave Hurst suggested a few lessons that can be learned from Think's latest collapse. The entire article...

If you’re an electric car owner who finds that the range you can get from a full charge isn’t anywhere near the distance the dealer claimed, you’re not alone. Rushing to work, carrying excess weight, poor maintenance, inadequate planning and even drive distractions while driving...

If you like the idea of hybrid or electric cars that whir silently down the road without the noise of an engine exploding gasoline thousands of times each minute, you'd better act fast. The U.S. government is moving inexorably toward a rule requiring all hybrid and electric cars to make noise...

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, said the philosopher Santayana. And there seems to be a very real chance that Europe is heading toward a variety of multiple and incompatible electric-car charging standards. That's a path the U.S. rejected a decade ago. And it's one that...

Electric car charging stations might be coming down in price, but a team of enthusiasts have now successfully completed the first tentative charging cycles of a 2011 Nissan Leaf using a completely home-built charging station. Started as a weekend project in response to the high prices charged by...

Last week we told you about Nissan’s plans to break some novel world records at the world-famous 2011 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Unlike some of the other competitors there who sought the fastest time driving forwards up the twisty 1.16 mile course, Nissan had planned to have British stunt...

Sales of plug-in electric cars continued their slow climb in June. The 2011 Nissan Leaf racked up its best U.S. sales number ever while the 2011 Chevrolet Volt sales held steady, as the company had warned they would. Following a May total of 1,142 sales--the first time more than 1,000 Leafs had...

The Leaf generates massively more and constant high frequency sound feedback

Spare a thought, if you will, a momentary tear, for 85,000 doomed drivers of three models of hybrid car in California. They are the unlucky losers of a privilege that saved them time, raised the value of their vehicle, and undoubtedly increased their karmic contentment, all because of a set of tiny...

You have to go from San Diego, CA to Tucson, AZ, a distance of around 480 miles. With a variety of options available to you, which do you choose? Most people wouldn’t hesitate to book a flight, and some would even consider the train. But one electric car fan decided to make the trip in his...

Earlier this week we said that that Nissan needed a new, quirky way of advertising its 2011 Nissan Leaf that didn’t involve making household gadgets run on gasoline or relying on trained polar bears. Nissan can’t have heard us. Instead of a quirky new ad campaign, Nissan is attempting...

Nissan may have killed off its Altima Hybrid model, but the company is moving forward with a range of new hybrid models. This time, however, they'll be home-grown, based on the company's internally developed hybrid system. Nissan's new single-motor hybrid technology is considerably simpler than the...

Remember Nissan’s latest 2011 Leaf commercial? Asking the viewer to imagine a world where everything from your cellphone to your microwave oven was powered by gasoline, the 60-second advert played essentially questioned why many people would choose electricity over gasoline to power their...

Earlier this year we took delivery of our very own 2011 Nissan Leaf. Just like the thousands of other customers worldwide, we took our place in the queue last year and had an agonizingly long wait before we were sitting behind the wheel. But just under 3 months and 5,000 miles after driving off the...

By far the most ambitious plan to build and assemble electric cars in the U.S. comes not from General Motors or Ford, but from Nissan. Now, it may happen a little later than expected, due to the March 11 earthquake and resulting tsunami that severely damaged large portions of Japan's industrial...

Google’s head offices in Mountain View, California has just got some new neighbors, but unlike most of the other companies in the fabled silicon valley it isn’t a fresh-faced venture-funded software or green tech startup firm. It’s an automaker. Moving into offices just over the...

After several months of using a 2011 Chevy Volt and a 2011 Nissan Leaf as our sole family transport, we have a better understanding of both cars than we did in March, when I first wrote about how they compared. First to arrive at our West Sacramento home was a beautiful crystal red 2011 Volt. We...

Add one more to the list of hybrid cars that have been sent off to the great gasoline-electric graveyard in the sky. Nissan will end production of its Altima Hybrid sedan after the 2011 model year. Launched in late 2007, the hybrid version of the Nissan Altima used Nissan's own four-cylinder engine...

You probably already know this, but electric cars and gasoline cars are completely different beasts. In fact, concepts we’ve become accustomed to in gasoline cars such as the creep and kick-down functions of an automatic gearbox are not natively present in a electrical drivetrain - and yet...