John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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Car sharing services are often viewed as a green transportation alternative, the idea being that users may not need to own a car--or can dispense with a second vehicle--that they only use...
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Will Plug-In Cars Outsell Hybrids? Industry Analyst Says YesWith stellar sales of the Chevrolet Volt last month, we haven't heard quite as much of the silly "electric cars are a sales failure" meme lately. After their first full year of sales, each of the two modern plug-in electric cars on sale during 2011 outsold the Toyota Prius hybrid in 2000, its first...
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Average Fuel Economy Tops 24 MPG In March For First Time EverIt's working. Concerted efforts by automakers to meet new, more stringent fuel-economy requirements are gradually driving up the efficiency of new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. A report from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute pegged the average gas mileage of new...
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$100 Million For Electric-Car Charging: Devil, Meet DetailsYou'd think that $100 million of electric-car charging stations in California would be a good thing, right? While an agreement announced last month may disturb California utility customers--the injured parties whose high power bills led to the deal--the state's electric-car drivers may benefit from...
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Fisker Atlantic Unveiled, But What Are Fisker's Chances? (Video)Standing on a New York City street with taxis, buses, and sirens in the background isn't necessarily the best place to shoot a video, as the clip above pretty much proves. But it was the backdrop for our segment on Fisker Automotive--since there were three 2012 Fisker Karma range-extended electric...
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Infiniti LE Concept Electric Sedan: New York Auto Show VideoThe Infiniti LE Concept was one of the few pure concept cars at last week's New York Auto Show media days, a design study that wasn't a production model but just an indication of how a future car might evolve. In reality, though, Infiniti hasn't bothered to disguise the fact that the LE Concept is...
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The New York Auto Show, now open to the public, occupies two floors of the Javits Convention Center, and organizers this year were strict about relegating trucks to the basement.
Chrysler was...
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2013 Smart ForTwo: Fresh Styling, New Electric Drive ModelThe Smart ForTwo minicar has had a rough ride in the U.S. of late. After debuting to stupendous sales in 2008, as gas prices soared, its sales have plummeted to just a few thousand a year. But the little Franco-German two-seater is being lightly refreshed for 2013, under new distribution through...
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Infiniti LE Electric Luxury Sedan: Tesla's Worst Nightmare?One of the surprise stars of the New York Auto Show media days this week was the Infiniti LE Concept. The design study for an electric four-door sedan is a close approximation of a car that will roll off assembly lines in Smyrna, Tennessee, in about two years. And it poses an intriguing question...
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2013 Chevrolet Spark Minicar To Be Priced At Around $13,000Amidst the unveilings and concept cars of the New York Auto Show, carmakers also make other announcements. From General Motors, we learned today that the 2013 Chevrolet Spark minicar will carry a base price of $12,995 including destination. All Sparks are fitted with a 1.2-liter four-cylinder...
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Infiniti LE Concept: Electric Sedan Full Details, NY Auto ShowYesterday, we got a brief glimpse of Infiniti's four-door sedan concept car; today, we have all the details of the Infiniti LE Concept. The four-door, all-electric sedan concept is really a thinly disguised production car that will reach Infiniti dealers within two years. It gives Nissan's luxury...
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GCR Honored With TreeHugger Best Of Green Editor's Pick AwardYou may recall we asked you to vote for Green Car Reports when we were nominated for the TreeHugger Best of Green Reader's Choice Award in the Transportation category. In fact, we asked twice. Well, we didn't win that award. But to our surprise, we got a lovely note yesterday informing us that the...
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At auto shows, sometimes cars get uncovered before their official unveilings.
The car you see here is Infiniti's Zero Emission Concept, a four-door sedan that will be formally introduced tomorrow...
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BMW X5 xDrive35d Named 2012 Diesel Car of the YearThis morning, the BMW X5 xDrive35d was named the 2012 Diesel Car of the Year by the readers of The Diesel Driver magazine. The BMW beat the new Volkswagen Passat TDI, which placed second, and the VW Golf TDI, which garnered third place. Altogether, 13 passenger cars and light trucks competed for...
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Fisker Atlantic: Video, Photos From New York Auto Show Launch
Despite the travails of Fisker Automotive, it's safe to say this: Henrik Fisker knows how to design striking cars. The Fisker Atlantic unveiled last night is a stunning mid-size sport sedan. Or, perhaps, sport sedan concept, since it wasn't shown in motion. The Atlantic range-extended electric...
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Nissan CEO On Leaf Sales: Take The Long View, It Will HappenIt's the kind of question that makes every CEO roll his eyes. In effect, it translated to: Your sales of one model last month were lousy, so is that car a failure in the market? But if the model is the Nissan Leaf, the first battery electric vehicle sold in volume in the U.S. (and around the...
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Plug-In Car Sales Soar In March, Led By Chevrolet VoltCar sales overall continued their upward trend last month, but sales of plug-in cars soared in March to more than 3,800 units. The bulk of those sales came from a resurging Chevy Volt, which logged its highest-ever single-month sales figure, along with the debut of the Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid...
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Very Efficient Gas Engines More Important Than Electrics For 2010sElectric cars get a lot of press, and they'll increase in number--slowly--over the next decade. But more efficient gasoline engines are what will drive the increase in fuel efficiency for U.S. vehicles over the next decade. We've written many times about smaller, more efficient engines, and in a...
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You may have heard and read more than you want to on the media distortions and lousy reporting about the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car.
Former GM product czar and climate-change skeptic...
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2012 Ford Focus Electric To Do Cross-Country Road TripMen's Health magazine will drive a 2012 Ford Focus Electric from New York to Los Angeles, recharging 40 to 55 times along the way.
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Electric Cars ARE Coming, But It Will Be Slow: Why Is This So Hard To Grasp?Major evolutionary change takes a long time. That's as true for electric cars as for opposable thumbs--though it will be measured in decades, not millennia. We frequently have to say that declaring plug-in cars a sales failure after 14 months (as certain commentators have done) is wildly premature...
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Discontinued 2011 Think City Electric Cars For Sale: $22,300UPDATES, April 11, 2012: Since this article was published on March 30, we've received the following updates: This morning, Mission Valley Ford received a truckload of 10 Think City vehicles from the Indiana factory, though most are already spoken for; Sales and service are only available in the San...
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Blind Man Drives Prius, With A Little Help From Google (Video)Steve Mahan got into a Toyota Prius hybrid, drove to the dry cleaner's, picked up some clothes he'd left to be cleaned, and drove home. The trip was about a mile and a half. Steve Mahan is legally blind. He's lost 95 percent of his vision. He did it, though, with a little help from Google. The car...
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80 Million Vehicles Built Globally Last Year--A New RecordWell, the numbers are in. Despite the lingering effects of economic recession, the world's auto industry built more vehicles in 2011 than ever in history: 80 million, in fact. That's a new record, and the number is 3 percent higher than the 2010 total. The data comes from the International...
John Voelcker