Green Car News

What makes an electric vehicle environmentally friendly or green? Most would say it is the zero-emissions of the all-electric motor. However, the 2012 Ford Focus Electric has more going for it than just the all-electric powertrain and global C-segment chassis. When building a car that is marketed...

Coda Automotive, the electric-car startup that last fall delayed the launch of its all-electric Sedan, announced this afternoon that it had hired Phil Murtaugh as its new CEO. It also revealed that it plans to launch its Coda Sedan electric car into the domestic Chinese market once the car has been...

Range is one of those recurring talking points with electric cars, used by EV critics whenever they want a cheap shot. Keen to make sure safety doesn't become another, the manufacturers are fighting back by proving their electric cars can be just as safe as their gasoline counterparts. Mitsubishi...

If you're eagerly waiting for the first 2011 Scion iQ minicar to show up at your dealer, sit down and have a nice cup of tea. You're going to have wait a bit longer. Scion's parent, Toyota, is delaying the U.S. launch of the iQ, originally scheduled to happen by March of this year, to sometime this...

The littlest Lexus, the 2011 CT 200h five-door hybrid hatchback, will start showing up at U.S. dealers over the next couple of months. It's clearly a different kind of Lexus--the perplexing "Darker Side of Green" ad campaign and its associated video proved that--but Lexus is using the new car to...

Following its October approval of E15 gasoline for 2007 or newer cars, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is to announce today that it will expand the approval to cars from the 2001 through 2006 model year as well. E15 contains 15 percent ethanol, half again as high as the legal maximum today...

After initially appearing skeptical about the electric car, Audi has been busy over the past few years with a selection of plugin hybrid and fully electric-powered concepts, showing them off at prestigious events such as the Le Mans 24 hour race. But unlike the R8 e-tron, R4 e-tron spyder and A1...

Later this year Mitsubishi’s battery-powered i-MiEV will finally go on sale in the U.S., having already gone on sale in Europe and Japan and making an appearence at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show last November. However, it’s hard to get excited over Mitsubishi’s zero-emission...

We like small cars, not only because they're fuel efficient but because they're usually more fun and engaging to drive than larger ones. But this being winter in the Northeast, we also need an all-wheel-drive vehicle on weekends, when we head up into the mountains. And that severely limits the...

Another in our irregular series of answering questions from readers, this one from John Q of Eugene, Oregon: Question: I was wondering how an electric car provides heat and defrosting. Using batteries to generate the heat will drain them pretty fast. Maybe with the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the internal...

Build a $30,000 electric car in under four years. That’s the promise made last night by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Speaking at the Cleantech Investor Summit in Palm Springs, California, the 39-year old businessman shared his plans for the venture-backed automaker. In addition to bringing the 2012...

In case you didn’t know, Mitsubishi is in the midst of a dramatic corporate change of direction. While it may be more known for its pickup trucks, SUVs and rally cars, the automaker is planning to build on the success of its 2011 i-Miev electric car by unveiling at least six more plug-in...

Possibly the most rapturously received vehicle at last week's Detroit Auto Show was the Porsche 918 RSR coupe, a hybrid race car that isn't even street-legal. And it's about as far from the quintessential Toyota Prius hybrid as you could get. It doesn't use a battery pack at all, in fact, but the...

Smart's current range, just like its sole product, the ForTwo, is short and sweet. The lineup consists of the Pure and Passion specifications, and convertible versions of each. A Ford Fiesta rival is expected in the fall, based on the new Nissan March/Micra subcompact. And although it's not...

Mercedes-Benz likes to launch technologies and lead trends, but sometimes they follow along with the crowd. In this case, Hyundai's doing it. Chevy's doing it. Chrysler's going to do it. Even Porsche will be doing it. And now Mercedes-Benz has joined the gang: The luxury carmaker too will fit a...

It was announced nearly 3 years ago and we’ll not see it on the roads for another year, but Tesla’s Model S has made another important step towards production: the obligatory drive-by road video. As our John Voelcker reported yesterday over at GreenCarReports, the all-electric...

The times are a changing, at least as far as the relationship between engine size and power output are concerned. We are starting to see V8 coming down to V6 with direct injection and turbochargers and V6 engines coming down to four-cylinder engines with direct injection and a combination of either...

Earlier this week we heard from Sergio Marchionne, the demanding CEO of Fiat-Chrysler, that a hybrid version of the new 2011 Chrysler 300 sedan would arrive sometime in 2013. Now, at Chrysler’s Windsor plant in Canada, Marchionne has revealed that the hybrid 300 will be joined in 2013 by a...

Hot on the heels of its appearance at last week's Detroit Auto Show as a body-in-white, the 2012 Tesla Model S sedan also clearly moves under its own power. Tesla Motors just posted a beautiful, scenic video on the company's blog showing about 90 seconds worth of a Model S "alpha" prototype...

2011 has been touted as the year when electric cars will well and truly break into the public consciousness. Unfortunately for Renault, the story making all the headlines so far hasn't been the launch of one of its upcoming Z.E. models, but the news of industrial espionage and selling technical...