Green Car News

According to Better Place CEO Shai Agassi, the cost of the upcoming Renault Fluence ZE EV will be significantly less than the same model with a gasoline engine. The Renault Fluence ZE was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show.  It will become the first commercialized vehicle to utilize the Better...

PSA Peugeot-Citroen recently finalized a deal with Mitsubishi Motors Corp. involving an electric car project slated for production in 2011.  The deal involves both Peugeot and Citroen receiving their own electric vehicles based off of the Mitsubishi i-MiEV.  However, many now believe that the...

The Volkswagen Golf TwinDrive Plug-in hybrid prototype, introduced in mid-2008, has recently been made available to selected automotive journalists for short test-drives.  It features a unique power train architecture which incorporates elements of both series and parallel hybrid...

Chrysler's ENVI electric vehicle program has spawned several possible vehicles that may one day reach showrooms.  However, the automaker has gone silent in regard to any upcoming EV projects leading speculators to believe that the program may be dead in the water. All is about to change though as...

With the release of the Nissan’s five-passenger battery-electric vehicle, the LEAF, a little more than a year away, municipalities in the initial launch states of Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, and Tennessee are scrambling to set up in-home and public-access charging stations. This...

Will the Green Car of the Year be another TDI?

Every year the Green Car Journal presents an award to the top Green Car of the year.  The award is decided by votes from a long list of people that include Jay Leno, Matt Peterson of Global Green USA, and Carl Pop of Sierra Club.  Last year's winner was the 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI.  The...

Yesterday, we reported that Panasonic had developed a new, cheaper method to use laptop batteries strung together in electric automobiles.  Read more about it here. Now news is trickling in that the battery pack that will power the Tesla Model S will be supplied by Panasonic.  According to a...

Between car loans, trade-ins, and special promotional incentives, most people rarely write a large check for their new car purchase. But what you can get for $10,000? What's the absolutely simplest, least expensive car on the U.S. market today? Actually, there are two: the 2009 Hyundai Accent and...

As global demand remains high for the 50-MPG 2010 Toyota Prius, stocks of the car at U.S. dealers are down to a one-week supply, which is all but sold out. A normal supply is considered to equal 60 days' worth of sales. Sales of the 2010 Prius spiked in late July and August, due to a combination of...

Cracking down on crime while cracking down on CO2 emissions is the catch phrase used by Mitsubishi regarding the use of the i MiEV by police forces across the UK. The police spec i MiEV was showcased at the National Police Show in September and became a hit among the squads.  According to...

What type of EV infrastructure are we likely to see in widespread use in the coming decade?  Several options exists including fast charging stations, 230 volt curbside plug-in locations, battery swapping stations, inductive charging, and the list goes on and on.  So which one will likely dominate...

If Panasonic gets its way, your average laptop battery could be the electric vehicle power source of the future. The Japanese consumer electronics company announced Thursday that it has developed a method of binding standard lithium-ion batteries together (Tesla Motors style), for use in...

Due to generous subsidies from French President Nicolas Sakozy's administration, Daimler will produce the Smart ForTwo electric drive at its Hambach plant in the French region of Lorraine. From the source: "The initial series production will begin now with 1,000 vehicles, the first of which will be...

While Nissan goes full-bore into electric cars, including projected sales of 20,000 of its 2012 Nissan Leaf, the company's Infiniti luxury marque has neither electric cars nor hybrids in its 2010 lineup. But that will change next year, when it launches the redesigned 2011 Infiniti M luxury sedan...

Later this month, Nissan Motor Co. will unveil its two seat electric Land Glider at the Tokyo Motor Show.  Not content with the Leaf as their only EV, Nissan is hoping to take the lead in the EV category over rivals Honda and Toyota. The Land Glider is a two seater targeted at urban dwellers.  It...

In March we told you that Nissan's luxury brand, Infiniti, planned to release a hybrid version of their M sedan. Today the Japanese automaker has confirmed that the new hybrid will be available in the spring of 2011 for the 2012 model year. This will be Infiniti's first offering in the luxury...

Our editor Marty Padgett is spending the day with Volkswagen, driving new models, learning about advanced technologies, and quizzing executives. Here's his preview of VW's upcoming Touareg Hybrid sport utility vehicle. Volkswagen will launch a hybrid electric model of its Touareg sport utility...

We've written before about some of the misconceptions around high-mileage and electric cars, among them that they're essentially glorified golf carts. Now the test engineers for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt have taken their  extended-range electric vehicle up the twisty 19-mile road to the top of...

It hasn't been a great year for Toyota in the U.S., with a recall of 3.8 million vehicles for possible floor-mat hazards and a dire shortage of 2010 Prius hybrid models. So we were delighted to see the Toyota FT-EV II electric car concept for the upcoming Tokyo Motor Show, to prove that the company...