Green Car News

Did your parents ever tell you, "Slow and steady wins the race"? It can be annoying to hear as a child, but often it's true--and in the case of electric car batteries, it's how they'll get less expensive. As a new posting from the Washington Post's Wonkblog points out, there is no Moore's Law for...

There's a far more effective way of reducing pollution and dependency on oil than buying more efficient cars or going electric: Driving less. It's not an option available to everyone of course, but it certainly helps reduce fuel use. And it's something Americans have been doing in a steady trend...

The Ferrari 458 Spider is not a slow car. That sounds like a statement of the obvious, but when you see it left for dust by another vehicle, as in the video above, you might have wondered. The 4.5-liter, V-8-engined Ferrari has no answer for the Concept_One, the thousand-plus horsepower supercar...

You couldn't accuse Porsche of being predictable. After years of making endless rear-engined sports cars, the last decade or so has seen SUVs, diesels and hybrids all join the Porsche lineup. With the 918 Spyder supercar, plug-in hybrid will also appear. But plug-in technology will reach further...

If you're used to driving around in a Prius then average miles per gallon of 24.6 will sound a little poor in comparison. But that's the average economy of all cars, light trucks, minivans and SUVs purchased in the U.S. in March--and it's an all-time high. 24.6 mpg is 0.2 mpg higher than January...

Lexus recently sold the last example of its LFA supercar to a lucky buyer--leaving the Japanese luxury automaker without a high-performance flagship. That could change with the news Lexus intends to produce the LF-LC sports car, first seen as a concept vehicle at the 2012 Detroit Auto Show...

The Detroit Electric SP:01 you see above was teased last month, but readers will note its similarity to the British Lotus Elise sports car--albeit one with electric power. This is not, it has to be said, an original idea. The Tesla Roadster of a few years past also used a Lotus Elise chassis...

Range Anxiety. Two very familiar words, but their coming together is more recent. It's the fear of running out of electricity in an electric car, compounded by typically short ranges and long recharging times. And it's contagious: A potential customer could drive under 30 miles per day and use a...

The big news in plug-in car sales for March was Tesla's statement that it delivered "more than 4,750" Model S electric cars from January through March. That news early Monday not only sent stock in Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] soaring, it also cued up an interesting three-way horse race. Those sales...

We didn't expect the fluorescent green, that's for sure. But it probably helped us on our half-hour drive around crowded midtown Manhattan in the new 2013 Smart ForTwo Electric Drive, the latest all-electric version of the little two-seat Smart car. With the lithium-ion battery pack in the sandwich...

Let's assume for a moment that you're interested in electric cars. (Not a far-fetched idea, since you're reading a blog called "Green Car Reports".) You're intrigued by the growing number of options in extended-range vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt, but most of all, you're interested in fully...

As fuel efficiency standards tighten continuously between now and 2025, buyers will have more powertrain options to chose from. And many have suggested there's a battle coming among smaller gasoline engines, diesels, and hybrids. If so, we hope that buyers will do the research to look at the...

Well, that didn't take long. Yesterday, just before 5 pm Eastern time, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] released details of its new "lease-like" financing product. The general consensus in the media (we read a lot of Tesla coverage here, folks) has been that it's smart for Tesla to offer financing for its...

Greyhound Lines Inc.'s buses are one of America's icons, serving over 3,700 destinations in the U.S, Canada and Mexico. The once-famous bare-metal livery may have disappeared in the last few decades, but over 25 million passengers still use the services every year--making improvements to the...

And now we know: Tesla's Big Mystery Story, teased via more than one tweet from CEO Elon Musk, is this: You will soon be able to "lease" a brand-new 2013 Tesla Model S. That's a good thing (though not nearly as much fun as some of the ideas proposed under the Twitter hashtag #TeslaPredictions). But...

You might think high gasoline prices are a problem now, but at least it's relatively easy to get hold of. The same couldn't be said in Japan after the end of World War II, when the country's gasoline supplies were limited under Allied occupation. Transport was still vital, which led Nissan and...

Given millions of years of adaptation to conditions, it's no surprise that nature is pretty good at doing what it does. Each leaf on a tree, and indeed the shape of a tree's canopy, is the work of refinements over millenia to capture the most sunlight possible to ensure the tree's growth. Why not...

"But what if I want to drive across the country?" ask people who never drive across the country, when discussing the subject of an electric car's range. In a way, they do have a point. Unless you have time on your side, or a Tesla Model S and a string of Superchargers between yourself and your...

There was a point, when Toyota Prius and Honda Insights were rolling off dealer lots in their mere hundreds nationwide, that hybrids were easy to dismiss. Now, as sales leap 32 percent in the first two months of this year and market share sits around 4 percent, the humble hybrid has become a real...

Later today, we'll find out how many 2013 Nissan Leafs the company delivered last month. March was the first month that Nissan's electric car reached dealerships in volume from the Tennessee production line where all U.S. Leafs are now assembled, using lithium-ion cells from a plant right next...