Polls

While electric cars received a disproportionate amount of media attention over the last five years, the focus is now turning. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show and Detroit Auto Show earlier this month, cynical journalists were moved to propose a drinking game. Participants would have to take...

With news stories literally every day about autonomous vehicle tests, and the growing number of plug-in electric vehicles on sale, the future is ... well, up in the air. Readers of this site tend to be more future-oriented than many car buyers, so we polled our Twitter followers about their views...

Well, that was decisive! Our readers are clearly, unquestionably, absolutely intending to switch from driving on fossil fuels to driving on grid electricity. That's the only conclusion we can draw from the results of our most recent Twitter poll, this one on what respondents planned to buy for...

It may reflect unshakable confidence in the future prospects of electric cars. Or perhaps it's a lack of conviction that the incoming Trump Administration can have enough effect on incentives, emission regulations, and gas-mileage rules to make a difference. Either way, the respondents to our most...

There's no single silver bullet that will reduce the energy consumption and emissions from the 80 million new road vehicles sold globally each year. Instead, thousands of individual efforts to improve the efficiency of powertrains, reduce vehicle weight, cut wind resistance, and all the rest come...

We've now been running a series of Twitter polls for several weeks, and last week we decided to use one poll for a different purpose. We wanted to survey our audience, which we haven't done in any large-scale or systematic way. A Twitter poll isn't particularly scientific, but like reading the...

It wasn't even close. When we asked our Twitter followers which electric car they thought would be judged by history as most important thus far, it was a slam-dunk. Fully four out of five survey participants voted for the same vehicle out of the four choices we offered. DON'T MISS: Tesla Model S...

Ah, Tesla Motors, source of hope, dreams, visions, contempt, dismissal, hilarity, frustration, and so much more. The Silicon Valley startup automaker, now in its ninth year of making electric cars, has built close to 150,000 expensive battery-powered luxury vehicles and defied critics numerous...

To those of us who cover the world of electric cars, Tesla's refusal to release its sales data in the conventional format is a continual irritant. Starting in June 2012, when the company said it didn't plan to release monthly sales because its backers didn't care, Tesla Motors has provided only...

Sales of plug-in electric cars were essentially flat in the U.S. last year compared to 2014, and this year isn't necessarily going to be much better. Part of that is due to product cadence: the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S, two of the top-selling cars in previous years, are now relatively old...

Plug-in electric cars are going to be a bigger part of the vehicle mix in future than they have been to date. That much is abundantly clear. Electric cars are one of four significant forces that will likely change what we think of as an "automobile" forever, the others being autonomy, connectivity...

Next year should be an interesting one for sales of plug-in electric cars, with the 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV rolling out to selected dealers in all 50 states, Chevy says. The 2017 BMW i3 gets 50 percent more range, and the Ford Focus Electric and Volkswagen e-Golf are expected to get range upgrades...

The questions of whether and when sales of plug-in electric cars will resume their climb after a static 2015 are much on the minds of green-car advocates these days. It's taken as an article of faith that cars with plugs will grow as a proportion of the global market, ultimately supplanting large...

The largest number of one single battery-electric car sold in the U.S. in a single year is 30,000, the total logged in 2014 by the Nissan Leaf. (Of course, we don't know Tesla's sales because the company doesn't break out its quarterly global delivery totals by country.) But those were back in the...

Cars that plug in to recharge, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid, are a very small proportion of total U.S. vehicle sales today. And the same applies to their global sales, which are less than 1 percent of a total worldwide volume now headed toward 90 million vehicles a year. So today, the...

A few weeks ago, we asked our Twitter followers how low electric-car prices would have to go for them to succeed in the market. The answers were revealing, because the sweet spot seemed to be around $25,000, the price chosen by half the respondents. Another quarter of the survey participants chose...

One of the challenges of making and selling electric cars is that their batteries are still expensive. And despite some makers' absorbing losses on the earliest cars, that means they sell for prices higher than those of similarly sized vehicles with combustion engines. Sure, owners will save money...

The handful of mass-priced electric cars offered 200 miles or more of range scheduled to launch over the next two years will clearly bring one question to the forefront. How much rated electric range is "enough" in a mass-market car to make North American buyers consider it sufficient for safe and...

Energy infrastructure is key to any serious effort to make zero-emission vehicles practical for mass-market car buyers. The world has spent more than a century building an efficient, global distribution and delivery system for gasoline and diesel fuel, and any new energy source requires the same...

While you might think that any zero-emission vehicle would be viewed as a good thing, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles continue to generate opposition among some electric-car fans. Perhaps viewing them as competition for long-range battery electric vehicles of the sort now planned by virtually every...