John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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Steady-speed highway cruising doesn't actually take that much energy compared to accelerating up to, say, 70 mph in the first place.
The really hard part is getting consistently high gas mileage in...
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Vote Today For GCR To Win 'Best Of Green' Award! (Reminder)We're coming down to the wire here, and our small but plucky group of supporters may be overwhelmed by the thundering hordes voting in favor of ... well, you know, those people. We're talking about voting for the TreeHugger Best of Green Reader's Choice Award--and once more we turn to you, our...
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Azure Dynamics Bankrupt, Built Ford Transit Connect ElectricWell, that's not particularly good news: Azure Dynamics, the company that converted a handful of Ford Transit Connect small commercial vans to electric power, filed for bankruptcy on Monday. It laid off about 120 employees at a variety of locations in MIchigan, Massachusetts, Canada, and the United...
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New Ford Transit Van In 2013 Will Have Diesel Engine OptionIt's become a staple tactic of automotive PR operations: Trickle out one factoid at a time, well in advance of an actual vehicle, and get stories each time. So here's the news: The Ford Transit commercial van to be launched next year will have a diesel engine option. That was the sum total of the...
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Romanian Design Team Proposes Car With Detachable EngineSo you got yer gasoline cars, and yer electric cars. And yer extended-range electrics, and yer plug-in hybrids. Sure, old news, been there, done that. How about an electric car with a gasoline engine you can swap in and out as you need it? Think of it as a range-extended electric car (like the...
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BMW To Develop Future Lithium-Ion Batteries With ToyotaLithium-ion battery cells are expensive, challenging, and time-consuming to develop. And they can be hard to get right, as the current woes of A123 Systems show. Even the large car companies that develop their own cells--Toyota is the largest among a small number--want to spread their costs. Today...
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Hundreds of recalls a year get announced for gasoline cars, the vast majority completely under the radar.
The high visibility of the electric-car business makes any recalls of batteries different,...
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More Efficient Cars, More Domestic Energy: It's Working (Despite Gas Prices)It still hasn't really registered in public awareness, but as we've said before, U.S. gasoline consumption has been falling since 2006. Now, it turns out that U.S. energy imports have been falling as well--from 60 percent in 2005 to just 45 percent last year. That can be attributed to two factors...
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Will Infiniti G Sport Sedan Add New Hybrid, Diesel Models?The 2012 Infiniti M35h hybrid large sport sedan is marketed by Infiniti as the "world's quickest (full) hybrid sedan," based on its 0-to-62-mph acceleration time of 5.5 seconds. Now it looks like the next version of the smaller Infiniti G sedan will use the same powertrain--which, in a smaller and...
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Infiniti Zero Emission Coupe Concept To Debut At NY Auto ShowInfiniti has been on something of a product blitz lately, launching its 2013 JX seven-seat crossover this month and a host of concept cars over the last year. Now it has confirmed it will show a new concept at the 2012 New York Auto Show two weeks hence: the Infiniti Zero Emission Concept Coupe. We...
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Could Opel Ampera Outsell Its Sibling The 2012 Chevrolet Volt?Orders have been coming in ahead of projections for the European Opel Ampera, but sales prospects may be looking up in the U.S. too for GM's range-extended electric car.
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Fisker Nina To Be Unveiled Before New York Auto ShowThe 2012 New York Auto Show is almost upon us, and last night an unexpected invitation landed in journalist inboxes around the world. The sender was shown as "Fisker Nina Reveal," and the graphic was the simple line drawing above. The message inside was simply that Fisker Automotive would provide...
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It used to be that testing prototype and development cars was done in secret, under heavy camouflage, away from photographers.
Now it's a public relations ploy, it seems, complete with QR codes on...
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Skeptical About The Chevy Volt? In CA, GM May Loan You OneThere's a saying that the best way to convince someone he wants an electric car is to let him drive one. In light of lower-than-projected Chevrolet Volt sales and continued media misinformation about the car's capabilities, GM is taking that lesson to heart. In Southern California, members of the...
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First 2012 Coda Sedan Electric Cars Delivered To Paying CustomersYou can add one more to the list of electric cars now on sale in the U.S., with deliveries last week of the very first 2012 Coda Sedan models last Friday in northern and southern California. In publicized events at Coda dealers in both Los Angeles and Siicon Valley (south of San Francisco), dealer...
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AAA Adds Electric-Car Charging Info To Map ServicesMost drivers who grew up before the era of navigation systems and online mapping will remember TripTiks, the strip maps with highlighted routes that local AAA offices would provide to travelers before they set out on driving vacations. The AAA doesn't give out nearly so many paper maps these days...
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GCR Nominated For TreeHugger Best Of Green Reader's Choice AwardWe love what we do here at Green Car Reports, but we can't deny it's nice when others recognize and compliment our work. So we're particularly pleased to announce that the site has been nominated for a TreeHugger Best of Green Reader's Choice Award--and you, our valued readers, can help us win if...
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It's Tax Time: Have You Filed For Your Green-Car Credits?One month from today, your 2011 Federal and state tax returns will be due. (It would have been a month from yesterday, but April 15 falls on a Sunday this year.) So consider this your friendly reminder to make sure that if you bought a plug-in car during 2011, you remember to apply for the Federal...
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You hear both sides of the battery cost question a lot when you cover electric cars.
One side says, "Electric-car batteries will be brutally expensive for many years to come, so electric cars will...
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World's Quietest Drag Race? Nissan Leaf Vs Chevy Volt (Video)Drag racing is conventionally noisy. Very, very, very noisy. And while electric drag racing is slowly getting started--and a number of racers have been rudely surprised by the White Zombie, a 1972 Datsun converted to electric power, and lots of it--you wouldn't think of production electrics like...
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Will Hawaii Become Paradise For Plug-In Electric Cars Too?Hawaii is a beautiful state with warm tropical weather, but it's also an expensive place to drive despite the limited travel distances on each of its islands. Fuels have to be brought in by ship, and its gas prices ($4.45 a gallon this week) are some of the highest in the U.S. All those factors...
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Will Old Electric-Car Battery Packs Cause Horrible Pollution?It's an assertion that comes up a lot in comments on our stories. It goes, essentially, like this: No one recognizes the horrible pollution problems that will arrive when hybrid and electric cars are junked, and their nickel-metal-hydride and lithium-ion battery packs go into landfills. It's a...
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Ford Offers Fleet Buyers Tool To Compare Total Emissions & CostsFleet managers are very, very rational people. Unlike many retail car buyers, they analyze vehicles without a shred of emotion, basing their decisions on lifetime ownership costs for vehicles that meet their needs. More and more, though, those fleet buyers are being asked to help reduce their...
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Ronald Reagan: Father Of The Modern Electric Car?With the Chevrolet Volt having become such a punching bag of certain media outlets lately, we found ourselves musing on a remarkable notion in electric-car history: The father of the modern electric car is none other than conservative icon Ronald Reagan. That idea came a few weeks ago in an article...
John Voelcker