Green Car News

With good reason, it's often said that the toughest auto endurance testing in the world is in taxi duty on the streets of New York City (and Jakarta, and Beijing, and Rio). While the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission has pushed aggressively for high-mileage hybrids--mostly Ford Escape...

Okay. We admit it. Just like most automotive journalists, most of the team here at GreenCarReports love the thrill of power, speed and driving a really powerful car really fast. But we know driving huge gas-guzzling V8s around a race track isn’t exactly good for the planet, our health, or our...

When cable TV’s “MythBusters” program recently investigated the idea that emissions from motorcycles are gentler on the environment than emissions from cars, they burst the bubbles of eco-enthusiast motorcycle riders—and put a small New York company’s innovative...

If you're holding out for an electric car that gets similar range to your fossil-fuelled car, then don't hold your breath for one from Nissan. That's the message implied by Nissan North America's director of product planning and strategy, Mark Perry. Speaking with Auto Observer, Perry says there is...

Producing a vehicle that can accommodate a high number of passengers whilst retaining great gas mileage is becoming a much-prized target in the automakers, with increasingly clever methods being used to squeeze high gas mileage out of mid to large-sized cars, minivans and SUVs. Cramming 16 people...

Ask most people how long electric cars have been driving on the roads of the U.S. and they might give you an answer of a few years. If they’ve seen Chris Paine’s 2006 film Who Killed The Electric Car, or knows someone in the know, they may give you the real answer: about as long as...

If you read only certain subsections of the "news," you might be forgiven for thinking that plug-in electric cars have been a sales disaster. They haven't. The Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Chevrolet Volt are all built in quite small numbers, and their sales have been commensurately low...

The latest disaster to hit Asia this year may have centered on Thailand rather than Japan, but Japanese automaker Toyota has announced that production volumes of its 2012 Toyota Prius hybrid will be directly impacted as its supply chains suffer the effect of the worst floods to hit Thailand for 50...

Tesla’s first electric car, the 2007-2011 Roadster, may have ceased production after its planned 2,500 (ish) car production run, but the Tesla Roadster will live on in an all-new car for 2014, Tesla has confirmed. In an interview with Autocar, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed what we already...

Mitsubishi is showing U.S. specification, but pre-final production “i” cars in a touring roadshow

Chevrolet announced today that it would build the electric motor for its upcoming Spark EV battery electric car in a plant in Maryland. The carmaker also released the power specification for the motor, which will offer 85 kilowatts (114 hp) of peak output and roughly two-thirds of that in sustained...

It's been a tough week for Fisker. The startup electric-car company finally got its car approved for sale, many months late, only to have the EPA rate its gas mileage at just 20 mpg in range-sustaining mode. Now, a new wrinkle to those ratings has come out: Based on the volume measurements it uses...

Let’s face it. If it hadn’t been for the highly popular Back To The Future film trilogy of the 1980s, the stainless-steel, gullwing-doored DeLeorean DMC-12 would probably have been relegated to the history books as an overly-expensive, unreliable sports car wannabe. But thanks to the...

Given the recent spate of recalls for clean diesel cars, the public might be a little distrustful of the fuel right now. Both Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have recently issued recalls for fuel leaks in their diesel models. However, diesel may still yet have its day, according to the U.S. Coalition...

In the electric auto industry there are three types of car companies: Those who bring a successful electric car to market, those who bring an unsuccessful electric car to market, and those who perpetually claim their ground-breaking electric car is “coming soon”. California-based Aptera...

Cars of today are immeasurably safer than those even a decade ago, and manufacturers have been working very carefully to ensure that the different requirements of electric car construction don't mean taking a step back in safety. Volvo has always been known for safety and its plug-in cars are no...

Two weeks ago, Chevrolet unveiled its 2013 Spark minicar and confirmed that it would offer a Spark EV all-electric model--a story GreenCarReports broke the night before. But within a few days, an intriguing question came up: Where does GM plan to build its first new all-electric car since the late...

Coverage of the low-interest loans granted by the Energy Department to Fisker Automotive has often been remarkably shoddy, so we provide some much-needed context and background.

We're starting to see the first concept cars due at December's Tokyo Motor Show filtering through, and while many are excited for the design, the choice of powertrain is important too. The 2011 Mazda Takeri Concept certainly looks striking, with Mazda's new KODO "Soul of Motion" design language...

There's been a fair amount of commentary in politics of late about "American exceptionalism," the notion that the U.S. is qualitatively different from any other country in the world. It is occasionally interpreted to mean "We're the best, damnit, and if you don't say that a whole lot on the...