Chevrolet Volt News

It's been one of the most-asked questions about the 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car: So what kind of gas mileage will it get? Despite confusion around Chevy's claim of 230 miles per gallon, what people wanted to know was simple: After the battery is depleted, when the car's...

New Regal Shows Light At End Of the Tunnel For Buick

Last month was was a pretty great one for mainstream automakers planning to deliver plug-in vehicles. Publicity a-plenty, state and Federal grants announced, pricing revealed. The message from Detroit and Japan is clear: If you like it then you shoulda put a plug on it ... But with so many of the...

The 2011 Chevrolet Volt took another step last week in its long and highly publicized gestation, with the first complete vehicle rolling off the production line at GM's Detroit Hamtramck assembly plant. On Wenesday, March 31, the first model of the mass-produced electric car built in North America...

Pricing for the 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car, eagerly awaited for many months, has now been set for both Japanese and U.S. markets.

We're now well and truly on the road to plug-in vehicle nirvana, with the 2011 Nissan Leaf, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, and various other plug-in and electric vehicles due to hit the market within the next couple of years. But there now seem to be hundreds of car companies, enthusiastic business...

Bob Lutz, the retiring eminence grise of General Motors, is known for pithiness and plain speaking. Yesterday, he tossed off a nugget of news: GM is working on a range of pure electric cars, without range-extending engines, that will follow the 2011 Chevrolet Volt--most likely a few years hence...

Recent spy shots posted by our sister site Motor Authority show that despite delays, General Motors is continuing to develop the plug-in version of its Two-Mode Hybrid system. While the system is being tested in a discontinued Saturn Vue crossover, it now seems likely to appear in a version of...

A key member of the small team brought together four years ago to create the 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric car is unexpectedly leaving General Motors. Denise Gray, director of global battery systems engineering at General Motors, will leave the company on Friday, March 5, to take an unspecified...

One of our favorite cars from the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show was the CMT-380 supercar concept from Capstone Turbine. To show off potential automotive uses for its C30 micro-turbine, it built an extended-range electric car using the turbine to add up to 500 miles to the 80-mile range of its...

In 2009, the plug-in vehicle market gained unprecedented federal support. In addition to President Obama's proclamation of 1,000,000 plug-in cars by 2015, several newcomer companies, including Tesla, Fisker, A123, and Johnson Controls-Saft, received multimillion dollar grants and/or loans to...

General Motors will become the first U.S. automaker to design and build its own electric motors for hybrid and electric cars, the company said today. While Toyota and Honda have long made their own motors, until now GM--along with Ford--has purchased them from third-party suppliers. GM views the...

You heard it here first, folks. Maria Rohrer, the Chevrolet Volt marketing manager responsible for the remarkably awful "Volt Dance" at last month's Los Angeles Auto Show, has been reassigned. An internal General Motors memo last week said Rohrer would become director of Chevrolet truck...

New York City often startles people, and it stayed true to form in a recent analysis done by McKinsey & Company for the city's PlaNYC planning group, "Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption in New York City." In particular, one of the report's conclusions may come as a shock to many...

All good things must come to an end, and it's the same with the wildwood weed ... err, with California's HOV-Lane access perk for owners of three hybrids: the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic Hybrid, and Honda Insight. They are set to expire on December 31 of this year. Originally passed in 2005, the law...

Last Friday, startup plug-in hybrid maker Fisker Automotive announced it had raised another $115 million in funds from private backers, including lithium-ion cell supplier A123 Systems and legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Buried in the press release was a...

Last weekend, we finally got the chance to drive the 2011 Chevrolet Volt. By and large, we liked it; see our full First Drive report for more details. Riding shotgun was Andrew Farah, the chief engineer for the 2011 Volt. During our ride and after, we asked him five questions--just as we did Volt...

Only four electric vehicles really matter at the Detroit Auto Show: the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the 2012 Nissan Leaf, and the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid, plus the current 2010 Tesla Roadster. They're on sale, or destined for volume production. The rest fall into two categories:  low-volume...

The lithium-ion battery pack for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicles officially went into volume production today. The 16-kilowatt-hour battery pack, containing 220 lithium-ion cells made by Korea's LG Chem, will be assembled in a 160,000-square-foot factory in Brownstown...

Peugeot is still on track to launch the world's first diesel-hybrid vehicle late this year. Its 3008 HYbrid4 Concept is a thinly disguised version of a crossover fitted with a mild-hybrid system that will go into production late this year as a 2011 model. Now other manufacturers are joining the...