Green Car News

Say "hybrid" and most U.S. buyers think Toyota, if not Toyota Prius. Indeed, the company just sold its millionth Prius in the United States, where roughly half of the 2 million Priuses it had built as of last fall have found homes since 2000. But Toyota's luxury marque Lexus also has hybrid models...

BMW has taken the wraps off a new plug-in hybrid prototype based on its long-wheelbase 5-Series sedan, which it will be showcasing in just a few weeks at the 2011 Shanghai Auto Show. Built in collaboration with its Chinese alliance partner Brilliance Auto, development of the new prototype is the...

South Korean electronics giant LG has just finished what it claims is the world’s largest lithium-ion battery plant for electric vehicle traction batteries. Capable of producing enough lithium ion batteries to put 100,000 electric cars on the road LG’s chemical devision LG Chem is keen...

If you haven’t seen our part one coverage of our 2011 Chevrolet test drive at the 2011 Denver Auto Show, then be sure to check that out (more here). After talking a little about how the car drives, we thought it would be good to give people who haven’t had a chance to get in one an idea...

Electric cars like the 2011 Chevrolet Volt and 2011 Fisker Karma get around the problem of range anxiety the old-fashioned way: They use gasoline engines. They do it because the battery systems of pure electric vehicles are large, heavy, and expensive, but the range they produce is still...

We all know about the Wheel of Fortune contestant Caitlin Burke who solved the TV show’s prize puzzle with one letter and won herself a luxury Caribbean holiday, but what about driving away in a new car? This week, the long-running quiz show is greening up its act, offering a 2011 Chevrolet...

There’s something quite fun about winning a competition two years in a row, especially if you’re preoccupied with impending court cases. So when its sexy two seat all-electric Roadster sport romped home in first place at the Fifth Monte Carlo Alternative Energy Rally Tesla’s board...

The fans might take some convincing on this one... President of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) and former Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 team principal Jean Todt has revealed plans to introduce new electric car, go-kart and single-seater racing categories across...

Since 2008, Barack Obama has consistently promoted the goal of having 1 million advanced technology vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. The number refers to plug-in vehicles that use grid power, stored in lithium-ion battery packs, to operate their electric traction motors. Regular hybrids like the...

Toyota announced today that it's sold more than one million of its Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles. The Prius went on sale in the U.S. market nearly eleven years ago, and while it wasn't the first hybrid on sale here—that title would go to the original Honda Insight two-seater—it has...

A three-mile, highly publicized test drive of Mikhail Prokhorov's ë-mobile (say, "yo-mobile") natural-gas hybrid car is the big car news out of Russia this week. Given Putin's previous spin in a Renault F1 car, hopping behind the wheel of the funky-looking economy car is a definite change of...

Earlier this year we heard that the a United Nations committee on noise levels in plug-in vehicles was about to mandate that all plug-in cars be made to emit artificial noises when traveling at low speed. But as we’ve illustrated in the past, we’re not entirely convinced that forcing...

A week ago I took charge of my very own 2011 Nissan Leaf. The U.K. equivalent of the 2011 Nissan Leaf SL ordered by our own Marty Padgett last year, it includes a level 3 fast charge port and 12v solar panel as standard. But with over 560 miles now on the clock shared between two drivers and a...

Cutting carbon emissions is complex. And there are a lot of myths and misinformation out there. The effective impact of some actions--reusing your grocery bags, for instance--is relatively low. Other methods, things that many people never even consider, are considerably more effective. For...

All we know so far is that Nissan will show a small car at the New York Auto Show, where media days kick off two weeks from tomorrow. But it's highly likely that the car will be an all-new 2012 Nissan Versa. It will be the latest entrant in a brewing battle among new and recently redesigned compact...

Throughout the history of the internal combustion engine there have been a multitude of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs shouting claims about revolutionary new engine designs promising greater efficiency, more power, fewer emissions and lower production and running costs. However, to this...

If you’re in the market for an electric car there are currently very few highway capable vehicles available. But for those in the U.K. another option will soon be on the market courtesy of an Indian firm which aims to make its electric cars the market leaders. Tata Motors, unfortunately...

The Honda Civic is one of the best-known and best-selling compact cars in the U.S. market. And it's just been entirely redesigned. For all the details, you'll have to wait until Wedneday, April 20, when the full line of 2012 Honda Civic models will be unveiled at the New York Auto Show. But we're...

No sooner do I discuss University of Illinois researchers who have created 3D antennas for mobile phones using nanotechnology than another group of researchers at the University of Illinois (this time at Urbana-Champaign) have developed 3D material for batteries that combines the qualities of...

The 2011 Chevy Volt continues to outsell the 2011 Nissan Leaf, but during March, the Japanese battery electric car at last started to move noticeable numbers of cars--almost five times as many as it sold in February. The two major-manufacturer plug-ins currently on the market sold a total of 906...