Green Car News

If you've not heard of Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima then you probably don't follow the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb event, held each year at Pikes Peak in Colorado. Fans of the sport, which involves over 12 miles of twists and turns and a climb of over 4,700 feet, will recognise Monster as a...

We're coming down to the wire here, and our small but plucky group of supporters may be overwhelmed by the thundering hordes voting in favor of ... well, you know, those people. We're talking about voting for the TreeHugger Best of Green Reader's Choice Award--and once more we turn to you, our...

If you want to cover all of the potential new car sales bases, having a compact crossover vehicle is essential. Mazda sank serious development money into its CX-5, as did Ford with its new Escape. Radical changes were necessary for those makers to compete against the new Honda CR-V, and even MINI...

As carmakers work to satiate consumers' desire to downsize, it's becoming easier than ever to buy a quality car in the subcompact and compact classes. The 2012 Lexus CT 200h illustrates this perfectly. Lexus hit the big time with the LS400 luxury sedan over two decades ago now, but its biggest...

Well, that's not particularly good news: Azure Dynamics, the company that converted a handful of Ford Transit Connect small commercial vans to electric power, filed for bankruptcy on Monday. It laid off about 120 employees at a variety of locations in MIchigan, Massachusetts, Canada, and the United...

March 11, 2011 changed Japan forever. Just before 3pm local time, a magnitude 9 earthquake created a Tsunami that devastated a large region of the Eastern coast of Japan, killing thousands. It also triggered meltdowns in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing explosions in three...

Could you pigeonhole the average hybrid car buyer? Well-educated, perhaps. Certainly green-minded. Someone who has settled down and started a family? How about young, free and single? That doesn't sound like your typical Prius buyer, that's for sure, but as we reported in January, as many as 60...

This much is clear: as long as there are cars, there will be people who want to race them. While the bulk of today’s racing takes place in fossil-fuel-powered automobiles, racing of the future will very likely be based around electric cars. Electric drag racing is already an established...

The 2012 New York Auto Show is fast approaching and alongside the high-profile supercars and luxury vehicles, we'll again see a number of new green cars making their world or American debuts. This year, that includes the U.S. launch of the production Mercedes-Benz A Class, and the world reveal of...

So you got yer gasoline cars, and yer electric cars. And yer extended-range electrics, and yer plug-in hybrids. Sure, old news, been there, done that. How about an electric car with a gasoline engine you can swap in and out as you need it? Think of it as a range-extended electric car (like the...

Remember the Acura NSX Concept from the 2012 Detroit Auto Show? Of course you do--it's one of the most striking concept cars in years, and its hybrid system is a statement of intent that performance and parsimony can go hand-in-hand. That same drivetrain will now feature in the 2013 Acura RL...

The Monte Carlo Rally is one of the most famous events on the motorsport calendar. While the World Rally Championship visited the event back in January and the Monte Carlo Historic rally ended in February, an equivalent, the Rallye Monte-Carlo Des Énergies Nouvelles is also held for electric...

On the face of it, biofuels seem like an ideal short to medium-term solution for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. After all, they could not only be grown at home--reducing dependence on foreign oil--but growing crops is also a renewable process, and net CO2 emissions are lower than burning...

London is making big claims that its Olympic games held this summer will be the greenest yet. To that end, it was announced last year that BMW would be supplying 4,000 of its low-emissions cars to the event, including 200 electric cars. The company has revealed that the first cars in its huge fleet...

Even supercar makers take the environment into account when designing a car these days. Modern Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches have to meet the same regulations as regular passenger cars, even if ultimately they still use more gasoline and pump out more emissions. Ferrari is hoping to cut its...

Hundreds of recalls a year get announced for gasoline cars, the vast majority completely under the radar. The high visibility of the electric-car business makes any recalls of batteries different, though. With that in mind, lithium-ion cell maker A123 Systems [NSDQ:AONE] said this morning it will...

In the years since Soviet rule ended in Russia, the number of cars on its roads have steadily increased, driving pollution and congestion to unimaginable levels. Now Yo-Auto, the same Russian company responsible for the Yo-Mobile Hybrid Electric Car -- a vehicle already as synonymous in Russia for...

Last week, we confidently predicted that we’d be hearing more about BMW’s first all-electric and plug-in hybrid production cars -- the i3 electric minicar and i8 plug-in supercar -- as we neared the BMW-sponsored 2012 Olympics. For the past few weeks, most of the news we’ve heard...

Unless you live in one of the more northern states -- or spend a lot of time in snow-covered mountains -- the idea of driving on ice might fill you with a sense of foreboding doom. Especially if that ice happens to be covering a very large expanse of water. Enter former Automotive X-Prize entrants...

You'll already be familiar with ethanol-powered cars, but what about methanol? Both are alcohols, but methanol is even simpler than ethanol, containing only one carbon atom. It has less energy content than ethanol, and only half that of gasoline, but it's easier to produce. The fuel is now...