John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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Seven years ago, dozens of professional stunt drivers in identical Ford Tauruses drove for hours through a ghostly and abandoned suburban California subdivision of one-story stucco homes, curving...
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BMW i3 Electric Car Buyers: Mostly New To BMW (But Not i8 Owners)The 2014 BMW i3 is proving to be very effective at luring new buyers to BMW--buyers who haven't before owned one of its cars. Such buyers, known as conquests, are highly valued by carmakers, who have a much better chance of retaining a customer if they're already driving one of its vehicles. The...
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Smart Tipping Continues: Tiny Cars Upended In San Francisco, AgainSome trends are harmless: think hula hoops. Some trends don't hold up well in the harsh glare of history: think acid-washed jeans. And some trends constitute felony vandalism: think Smart tipping. After an outbreak in early April in which three Smart cars were turned over, another pair of Smart...
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Do New EPA Emission Rules Just Hasten Coal's Inevitable Death?Take a deep breath and relax. It is highly unlikely that "millions of Americans will be freezing in the dark" (in the words of a critic) once new EPA rules lowering carbon emissions from power plants go into effect. In fact, some analyses suggest that the rules issued last week by the U.S...
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2014 BMW 328d xDrive: 40-MPG Diesel Sport Wagon ReviewedLots of people want practical vehicles to haul families and their goods around, and increasingly small and fuel-efficient diesel engines are an option--albeit often an expensive one. We've tested several diesel SUVs and crossover utility vehicles lately. But last weekend, we got a chance to test...
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Cost Of New EPA Carbon Limits? About $7 Per Car: ReportEvery time a new environmental regulation is proposed in the United States, there's a predictable chorus of doom-and-gloom predictions that it will kill jobs, cause manufacturers to move their operations out of the country, and destroy the economy. Those predictions tend to be a bit, shall we say...
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You read a lot about hybrids and electric cars these days, but fuel-efficient diesel engines will be coming in certain classes of cars this year and in the future.
The most recent crop of diesel...
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Why Tesla's Elon Musk Must Sell 6 Million Electric Cars To Make HistoryMany entrepreneurs have tried to start car companies in the U.S. over the past century, but the last person to do so from the ground up with a brand that survives to this day was Walter P. Chrysler. He started his company in December 1924--which indicates the magnitude of the challenge faced by...
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Tesla Annual Meeting Yesterday: What We Learned That Was NewTesla Motors held its annual shareholder meeting yesterday afternoon, and as always, a few nuggets of news emerged from CEO Elon Musk. You can read a complete transcript here, but here are some quick bullet points on items that struck us as newsworthy: Tesla electric cars have now covered 344...
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Plug-In Electric Car Sales In May: Highest-Ever Leaf Total, First BMW i3 Numbers: FINAL UPDATEWell, chalk up another first for Nissan: It sold 3,117 Leaf electric cars in the U.S. last month. That's not only its best-ever one-month sales performance, but it's the first time any carmaker has sold more than 3,000 battery plug-in electric cars in a month in this country--ever. (August 2013...
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Nissan To Launch Plug-In Hybrids Too, In Less Than Two YearsPlug-in hybrids will clearly be all the rage among carmakers for the next couple of years. While the number of high-volume battery-electric vehicles today can be counted on one hand--BMW i3, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S--virtually every global automaker now has plug-in hybrids planned for launch...
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NJ Bill To Permit Direct Sales By Electric-Car Maker Tesla To Be Heard TomorrowThe guerilla warfare between auto dealers and Tesla Motors continues, with the latest skirmish happening tomorrow in New Jersey. Perhaps war analogies are overstating the case, but certainly Tesla has had to fight in numerous states for the right to sell its cars directly to buyers through the...
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The all-new, third-generation 2014 MINI Cooper three-door hatchback--now called "Hardtop" by MINI--sports a longer nose, a new 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine, and an interior that at last cleans up...
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2015 Subaru Legacy Video Road Test: 30 MPG, All-Wheel-Drive Mid-Size SedanThe new 2015 Subaru Legacy is a stealth car: Other drivers may not pay it much attention, but it's sneaking up on the high-volume vehicles in the ultra-competitive mid-size sedan segment. The latest Legacy, redesigned and re-equipped for 2015, is the most competitive Subaru sedan yet--and it also...
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EPA's Coal-Plant Emissions Rules: This Will Be The Big FightToday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new regulations to cut the carbon emissions of more than 600 existing coal-fired electric power plants. And many analysts suggest that this regulation--which will likely spark a major political battle--will be the most...
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BMW, Tesla Are Only Electric-Car Makers 'To Build A Business': Really ??Sometimes we read things that just make us scratch our heads. Often, statements about the electric-car industry by (presumably) highly-paid analysts in the finance industry are among those things. Take, for example, a statement by one such analyst, contained an article published two weeks ago in...
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Japanese Electric-Car Makers Set Up Single Charging Network; Could It Ever Happen In U.S.?One challenge to more widespread adoption of electric cars is public charging--or rather, the scattered multiple networks of irregularly spaced public charging stations. In Japan, the four major electric-car makers have now joined together to form a new company whose goal is to build a single...
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Three Mercedes Plug-In Hybrids On Sale By End Of 2015: S-Class, C-Class, ML-ClassThe first wave of electric cars and plug-in hybrids has been largely centered on smaller vehicles, mostly from mass-market brands (Tesla excepted). Four years later, German luxury makers are entering the fray--and the plug-in cars and utility vehicles they sell will markedly expand the offerings on...
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BMW i3 REx Range-Extended Electric: No NJ Sales-Tax Exemption, Costing Owners Extra $3,000-Plus John Voelcker
Electric cars enjoy many incentives, from tax credits and purchase rebates through carpool-lane access, to encourage buyers to give them a try.
But the range-extended model of the BMW i3 electric...
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2016 Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In Hybrid U.S. Arrival: Fall 2015 After AllWithin the next year and a half, three different plug-in hybrid SUVs or crossovers will arrive on the U.S. market, or at least some parts of it. And one of them will be the 2016 Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In Hybrid, whose limited launch is set for sometime in autumn 2015--despite quite recent...
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Hyundai-Kia Topples Honda For UCS 'Greenest Automaker' TitleHonda has long had the reputation of offering fuel-efficient, relatively green vehicles--but this year, it has lost the "Greenest Automaker" laurels that it's held since 1998 to an upstart: Hyundai-Kia. The latest award, detailed in a report that's now been issued six times by the Union of...
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Chrysler CEO Underscores, Again: Electric Fiat 500e Loses MoneyOK, clearly he shouldn't have said, "I hope you don't buy it." But last week's little media explosion over Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne's negative comments on the 2014 Fiat 500e electric car his company sells--in limited numbers, in California only--shouldn't be a surprise. To summarize his...
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BMW i3 REx Review, Flex-Fuel VWs In Brazil, Tesla In CA: The Week In Reverse
In our new feature, The Week In Reverse, we take a look back at the most significant story we published each day of the previous week--collating them all in a single article for you to review, ogle, ponder, or simply catch up on any you may have missed. From electric cars to diesels and more, these...
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Crushed BMW ActiveE Test Fleet Headed For Scrapyard (UPDATED)Just two weeks ago, drivers of the BMW ActiveE fleet of electric test vehicles were delighted to see that their cars would have a second life. BMW announced that it would redeploy 80 ActiveE electric cars to its DriveNow car-sharing program in San Francisco. MUST READ: 2014 BMW i3 Test Drive: No...
John Voelcker