Politics

Think California is the land of fast-flowing freeways and drop-top driving under the endless sun? Think again. The California Air Resources Board is now writing rules to implement a law passed two years ago that will require regional reductions in vehicle miles traveled. In other words, the state...

We like it when a study confirms a common-held belief. And for hundreds of would-be electric car owners across the U.S. a recent study has done just that. Years into the Military Conflict in the Middle East, and just months after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill a team at Rice University have...

During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama famously said that he wanted one million plug-in cars on U.S. roads by 2015. That's a goal that many experts continue to think will be extremely hard to attain. Now California has adopted the same goal for the state alone, but with a different...

It’s not a secret that Hawaii is keen to become the most electric car-friendly state in the whole of the U.S. And now two more electric car companies are laying a claim to the electric vehicle market in the island state. Earlier this week at the Asia Pacific Clean Energy Summit and Expo, the...

With electricity not always generated through renewable methods, it can be hard to claim that an EV is truly zero-emissions. It's generally accepted that you aren't pumping any gasses out the back as you drive along, though. Well, the car shouldn't be anyway... Despite this, electric vehicle...

Green conscience and new technology are both laudable, but getting extra money in your back pocket is nice too. Now, after all those years of paying taxes on your hard work, you can finally get some of it back. Consider it a tax refund for buying an electric car. Now that we know the purchase and...

  The 2011 Chevrolet Volt has been in gestation so long, we've wondered if it ever would become a reality. Now the reality is here. GM announced the price for the 2011 Volt at Plug-In 2010, a conference being held this week in San Jose. The Volt's MSRP will be $41,000, which includes a $720...

Electric cars like the 2011 Nissan Leaf require lots of lithium and other precious heavy metals to make them go. Today's sources of lithium are far and few: Bolivia has something like 40 percent of the world's deposits, while Russia, South Africa, Chile and Argentina have some. This weekend, the...

The Washington D.C. metropolitan area is one of three key markets for the roll-out for the current wave of electric cars and yesterday residents of Maryland were given a whole new set of incentives to go electric. Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley signed two historic bills into state law to give...

What a shock! Who'd ever have thought it? Will wonders never cease? Yes, yet another survey shows that fuel efficiency matters to car and truck buyers. And that more than half say their next vehicle will get better gas mileage than their current ride. Fuel efficiency: It matters Capital One Auto...

The nice thing about buying advanced-technology cars is that many of them, at one point or another, come with financial incentives meant to encourage fuel efficiency. Even if the car in question is a 2010 Tesla Roadster, the $109,000 two-seat all-electric convertible that blasts from 0 to 60 mph in...

Almost a year ago, we called Bentley's much-touted biofuels strategy "bogus," in an alliterative headline to a piece that was much forwarded around the green-car world. Now we've had a chat with the very reasonable and polite David Reuter, Bentley's head of PR and communications. We still think...

Speakers throughout today's Electric Drive Transportation Association conference agree: Plug-in electric cars that use little or no gasoline are coming. It's no longer an "if", it's now a "when." To help boost early adoption of cars that run mostly or entirely on grid power, the Federal government...

One problem with raising fuel efficiency is that unless total miles driven rises radically, receipts from gasoline taxes will fall over time. And that poses a major problem for the steady stream of revenue needed for road construction and repairs. Taxing vehicle miles traveled has been one proposed...

Attendees excitedly swarmed around a prototype of the all-electric 2012 Ford Focus EV at an October conference held on Microsoft's Redmond campus, outside Seattle, Washington. But a newer, nice, cooler, and much flashier prototype of the 2012 Focus EV made its debut a few weeks earlier in rather...

Auto executives know how to get U.S. drivers to save a whole lot more gasoline: Raise the price of gas, to at least $4 a gallon. That was the message at the recent Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit this week. The simplest way to get U.S. drivers into cars with higher gas mileage is economic: Make it...

It's starting to seem like tit-for-tat around here, as startup electric automakers Tesla and Fisker vie for--and get--federal- and state-funded loans and tax concessions to build future electric cars. The latest salvo, mere days after Fisker announced its purchase of a former GM plant in Delaware...

[REVISED UPDATE, October 23: For awhile, it seemed too good to be true. The full text of Colorado House bill 09-1331, "An Act Concerning Incentives For Efficient Motor Vehicles," turns out to include a cap of $6,000 on the tax credit available for any low-emission car. The all-important phrase...

We don't hear so much about ethanol these days, now that gasoline is back down to $2.50 a gallon. But we still get e-mails, so here's a post to answer the question: What's going on with flex-fuel cars? Short answer: Manufacturers are slowly increasing the number of vehicles they build that can...

As the saying goes, if the French didn't exit, we'd have to invent them: A nation that reveres Jerry Lewis, builds cars with single-spoke steering wheels or names like Kangoo BeBop ZE, and threatens to blow up factories if strike demands aren't met (and then changes its mind). The latest evidence...