Green Car News

Sometimes even well-informed industry analysts get it wrong. Or miss the forest for the trees. A recent posting by Pike Research, entlted "Europe Leads, U.S. Lags In Start-Stop Hybrids," correctly notes that adoption of start-stop systems is well advanced in Europe, but lags behind in the U.S. But...

For all the grief Toyota Prius hybrid drivers get, you'd think they were some deranged combination of green storm troopers and mentally defective traffic impediments. But every now and then, a Prius driver does do something jaw-droppingly idiotic. Take, for instance, the unidentified (and possibly...

When buying a new car some people pay a lot of attention to the resale value, others pay little attention to it, but either way it can be an important piece of financial information for the future. How do you find out what the resale value of a particular car is? Well, luck would have it that...

The Ford Mustang is probably one of the best-known sport/muscle cars in America. It is also one of the longest running with production starting with the 64-½ model year and continuing, uninterrupted, through to the present 2011 model year. Of course, over the long production history the...

We took a look a few weeks ago at the five electric cars we reckoned you should do your best to see at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. Our list included the 2011 Nissan Leaf, 2011 Chevrolet Volt, 2011 Coda Sedan, the 2012 Toyota RAV4 EV and the 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Our opinion hasn't changed -...

It isn’t clear when the switch happened, but at some point automotive manufacturers decided that electric vehicles (EVs) were worth investing valuable R&D monies. Recently, AllSmallCars.com has reported on the Chevrolet Volt and the numerous awards it is winning from the automotive press...

With all the talk of purchase price, charging costs, tax incentives, congestion charging exemptions and maintenance costs for EVs, there's one financial area which often gets overlooked - insuring them. With so few EVs on the road it's been difficult to gauge whether they'll cost more or less than...

The 2012 Fiat 500 minicar is the first all-new car to be sold as part of Fiat's takeover of Chrysler. It's also a very cool and stylish little vehicle that won numerous awards in its first year on the market ... and it's the kind of car conventional wisdom says will never, ever sell in the U.S...

Kia has been on a roll lately. The younger, lower-priced sibling of Korean car colossus Hyundai has received rave reviews for the styling, features, and general competence of its its new 2011 Optima midsize sedan. Now Kia has iced the cake by adding a hybrid-electric model of the Optima to the...

We often get asked by readers just how much it will cost to run an EV. And while we’re able to say that an EV costs less to run once purchased than a gasoline car we’ve had to guess refer them to their local utility company for exact pricing. So what if you could enter into a monthly...

There's a lot we don't know about the 2012 Toyota RAV4 EV that Japan's largest automaker is prototyping with Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors. That includes the battery pack size, traction motor power, and stated range--although 100 miles is the goal, according to Jim Lentz, president of Toyota...

General Motors [NYSE: GM] stock might be up for initial public offering today under the same stock symbol as before, but the company is trying hard to show that it's not the same company in many respects. "We'll do that by demonstrating that GM is doing things differently," said CEO Dan Akerson...

A team of intrepid engineers turned explorers have just finished an epic road-trip from Chena Hot Springs Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina. Built in 9 months by a team of graduates from Imperial College London, the two-seat modified racing car drove over the finish line 135 days after it began its...

The past couple weeks, heck the past couple of hours, have been full of automotive news with the press soaking all of the information in from the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. A lot of the news revolves around the hybrid and electric vehicle (EV) segment. Specifically, we have seen the 2011 Chevrolet...

You’ve read the reports, drooled over the spy shots and saved your pennies for an all-electric or plug-in hybrid electric car. But do you know how you’re going to charge your new car at home, the office or at your parents’ place? There are many different chargers available now or...

Earlier this month, a warehouse containing memorabilia owned by rocker Neil Young was involved in a three-alarm fire that destroyed many priceless possessions. Among the charred remains in the San Carlos fire was a classic ’59 Lincoln Continental. Converted to a hybrid power train by...

As they say, everything old is new again. Fourteen years after it launched its very first RAV4 crossover at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Toyota returned to LA to launch an all-electric version of its latest RAV4. And this one is, as the logos in a teaser photo released earlier said, "powered by...

This afternoon, Honda unveiled its plans for an all-electric version of the Honda Fit subcompact hatchback to be launched globally in 2012. The announcement came at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. The announcement represented a full circle of sorts, since Los Angeles was the home of many of the 300...

The 2010 Los Angles Auto Show is nearly upon us, and we're getting excited for the wealth of new electric cars on display at the show. It's not just about the cars themselves though - equally imporant are the companies displaying EV-related technology. One such company is Southern California...

At the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, Nissan has unveiled a concept design that points the way toward some of its next-generation sedan models—even though Nissan swears that its Ellure show car is not “intended as preview of any upcoming production model,” in the words of Shiro...