Green Car News

Back in in the Swinging Sixties, a small, light, fiberglass car was making a big splash up and down the West coast. That car was the Meyers Manx buggy, a Volkswagen Beetle-based buggy with very little in the way of bodywork but a heck of a lot of style, the brainchild of Californian Bruce Meyers...

You’re probably already familiar with the effect that a hybrid drivetrain has on fuel economy, but now one of the key concepts of a hybrid drivetrain -- the ability for the engine to turn off and on automatically at stoplights -- is being introduced in conventional gasoline-engined cars...

Beyond the obvious Toyota, if any other make were to build hybrid cars, you might expect it to be Subaru. The small Japanese company's cars are revered for durability and standard all-wheel drive, and their drivers are often assumed to be on the liberal side of center. Subaru owners tend to cluster...

Proton is a totally unknown carmaker in the U.S., but the Malaysian company happens to own British sports car maker and engineering firm Lotus. A couple of years ago, Lotus launched--and recently revised--a range-extending three-cylinder, 1.2-liter Range Extender engine-and-generator set for...

Electric-car advocates spend a lot of time touting the advantages of driving on plug-in power rather than burning gasoline. Sometimes, it can be a lonely battle. But now the U.S. Department of Energy has weighed in on the side of electric cars, with a conclusion that may startle some: It's more...

The influential Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has designated the subcompact 2012 Chevy Sonic one of its Top Safety Picks.

Kia has priced its 2012 Rio Hatchback, which gets 40 mpg on the highway and comes standard with start-stop, to start at a base price of $14,350.

Lately it’s become obvious that China -- not the U.S. -- is the place to be if you’re an automaker wanting to develop electric cars. Daimler already has an electric vehicle partnership with chinese company BYD, and more recently General Motors announced it would start developing...

The Prius family of hybrid cars from Toyota is going to get a little bigger as of January when the Japanese automaker will launch a new compact hybrid car for the Japanese market: the 2012 Toyota Aqua. According to Reuters News Service, the Nikkei business daily reports that the compact gasoline...

Subaru has taken heed of customer complaints that its lineup wasn’t as efficient as those of its competitors, making its latest generation 2012 Impreza return an impressive 27/36 mpg city/highway gas mileage. Not only is the car still offered with the extra safety of all-wheel drive as...

CBS raised a lot of eyebrows earlier this year when it canned the human trainwreck known as Charlie Sheen from its hit sitcom, Two and a Half Men, replacing him with the younger, saner Ashton Kutcher. But little did we know that producers were adding another supporting role to the show, in the form...

You’re an SUV owner looking to upgrade your current car, but you’re also getting tired of increasing gas prices and the way those hybrid and electric car owners look at you on the freeway. At the same time, you’re not about to downsize to a sub-compact in order to get good gas...

The Finnish-built Metropolia Electric RaceAbout has cut 25 seconds off its Nordschleife lap time, setting a new record for road-legal electric cars in the process.

Within a few years, it may be possible to drive an electric car from northern Germany to the south of Spain after all. Worries over the possibility of incompatible European electric-car charging standards are starting to abate, after a proposal by several European automakers for a single European...

Bob Lutz may have taken a part-time advisory post with GM 16 months after officially retiring from his post there, but now he has a second job too. The former Vice Chairman of General Motors--and the man credited as the driving force behind the Chevrolet Volt--now seems to be working at electric...

The onslaught of four-cylinder engines into vehicles that previously wouldn't have had anything lower than six cylinders continues. It's in the service of gas mileage, and the 2012 Mercedes-Benz C 250--with a 1.8-liter turbocharged and direct-injected four putting out 201 horsepower and 229...

Over the past few months we’ve seen an increase in the number of rapid charging stations getting installed in areas where the 2011 Nissan Leaf is being sold. So far, we’ve seen rapid charging stations get installed everywhere from Walgreens to Cracker Barrel and Washington state’s...

Volkswagen is one of the few automakers to have consistently produced diesel-powered cars for the U.S. market. In fact, we told you last week that a 1974-1983 diesel VW Rabbit was still one of the most fuel-efficient classic cars you could buy. Its direct descendant -- the 2012 VW Golf TDI Clean...

Solid state batteries could be seen as everything we're looking for from an electric car battery, improving on all the fundamental characteristics needed for electric mobility. Unfortunately, we probably won't be seeing them any time soon. The latest estimations reported by Automotive News...

Remember $4 gasoline? It was just last May that gasoline soared to an average price of $4 per gallon across all U.S. markets, with even the cheapest pumps showing prices of $3.50 or more. What a difference a few months makes. Gasoline has now fallen below $3 a gallon in a handful of areas...