John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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Many readers on this site are concerned with miles per gallon, or how much fuel their car uses.
And while any site called Green Car Reports is bound to have an environmental tilt, most car buyers are...
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Most Popular Posts of 2010: Mazda2, Prius Crashes, Leaf, Volt, and Other EVsWe love looking back to see what's been popular over the course of a full year. And 2010 was definitely chock-full of green car news. Our 10 most popular posts this year are a little less random than last year's most popular, which featured Muslims and ethanol, urine, hybrid Ferraris, and our...
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Green Advice: You Filled A Diesel Car With Gasoline; Now What?Unless you're Argonne Laboratories, putting gasoline into a diesel fueled car is a bad problem. Maybe it was brain fade. Perhaps you rented or borrowed an unfamiliar car. Or you simply didn't realize that nice Volkswagen or Mercedes-Benz was a new, clean-diesel car. (It also happens to particularly...
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Could Waste Oil Power Your Range-Extended Electric Car One Day?We're suckers for new kinds of combustion engines. Ever since we first saw and wrote about the Cyclone external-combustion engine, we've been intrigued by it. Now we have an automotive angle: Suppose you could power a Chevy Volt-like range-extended electric car on nothing more than used motor oil...
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BMW's Plug-In Hybrid Supercar May Be Named i8, Cost $200,000BMW is pressing forward with its plans to build a production version of the striking plug-in hybrid concept car it called Vision Efficient Dynamics, unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 2009. According to reports filtering out of Germany, the model that goes on sale in October 2013 may...
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2011 Detroit Auto Show Preview: 2012 BYD e6 Electric Crossover, Plug-In Hybrid SedansNow that the 2011 Nissan Leaf and 2011 Chevy Volt have reached showrooms--a handful of them, anyhow--a new crop of electric vehicles will launch into the market for 2011. One of those may be the e6 all-electric crossover built by Chinese manufacturer BYD. Famed financier Warren Buffet was so...
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Start-stop systems, which shut off car engines when the vehicle comes to a stop, have been offered in Europe for several years.
But until now, no automaker other than Porsche has offered them on...
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Paris To Test Banning Gas-Guzzlers (Yes, SUVs!) In City CoreWhy are many European carmakers now planning to build electric vehicles? Because many European cities are widely expected to ban high-emissions vehicles from their city cores over the next decade--perhaps even vehicles with any emissions at all. Now, Paris may be the first city to experiment with...
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2011 Fisker Karma 'Final Pricing' Goes Up Again, To $95,900The 2011 Fisker Karma is still on track to reach U.S. dealers in March or April, according to the company. But there's one new piece of info: The price of the extended-range electric sports sedan has gone up. Again. Originally announced in 2008 at a price of $80,000, the Karma fairly quickly went...
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Chevy's Got the Volt; Will Cadillac Be GM's Hybrid Leader?Among car buyers, none of the four surviving General Motors brands are really associated with hybrid vehicles. Now that customer deliveries have started for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car, GM's other brands will need some green cred too. What's the future of GM's Two-Mode...
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Would You Pay $10 A Day To Cut Your Commute By 35 Minutes?How much is your time worth? If you live in southern California and drive to work, the answer for some of you seems to be more than $17 an hour. That conclusion is drawn from data contained in an Infrastrurist interview with Jack Finn, the head of toll services for HTNB, an infrastructure firm that...
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Automakers Sue To Stop E15 Gasoline Over Fears It Harms CarsEvery major automaker selling cars in the U.S. has signed onto a lawsuit filed Monday aimed at halting the rollout of E15 gasoline, which has a higher proportion of ethanol (15 percent) than today's E10 gasoline. The companies cite fears that the greater concentration of ethanol will damage engines...
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The General Motors EV1 still exerts a strange fascination for electric-car fans and civilians alike.
Its sleek, aerodynamic shape and pioneering all-electric drive (despite an initial range of only...
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BMW Green Vehicles, Including Megacity Electric, Named 'i'The BMW "MegaCity" carbon-fiber all-electric car, scheduled for launch in 2013, may be the most radical BMW in decades. BMW had confirmed that this first production electric car to wear the BMW badge would be the first of a sub-brand within the make, much as its "M" series of performance editions...
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U.S. Gasoline Usage Peaked In 2006, Will Plummet In FutureEven if you may not have heard of the Peak Oil theory, everyone knows that we'll continue to use more and more gasoline in years to come. Right? Well, errrrr, no. Maybe not. At least, that's the conclusion of both industry analysts and the oil companies themselves. The peak year for U.S. gasoline...
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2012 Tesla Model S All-Electric Sedan: Progress and ScheduleIt's been a while since we checked in on the car that will likely make or break Silicon Valley electric-car startup Tesla Motors: the Model S, a five-door midsize sports luxury sedan it hopes to launch somewhere toward the end of 2012. Tesla hasn't said much about the Model S lately, but a number...
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Reader Question: Can I Tow My Prius Behind My RV or Motorhome?We love reader questions, and occasionally they prompt posts, like this one: I'm thinking of buying a motorhome. Can I tow my 2008 Toyota Prius behind it? Stumped us, so we turned to the good people at Toyota. They sent us excerpts from the Prius owner's manual, complete with many, many, many...
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Electric Honda Fit Hits The Road In CA, Accord Plug-In Hybrid To FollowWell, that was quick. Just one month after it unveiled the electric Fit EV prototype at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Honda is about to put the first of its electric subcompacts into daily use in southern California. Amusingly, it's in Torrance, where rival automaker and hybrid leader Toyota has its...
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Auto executives always want you to buy their cars, today. That goes without saying.
But it's slightly less common for them to say, in effect, "This is the month to buy, 'cause we're going to be...
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First 2011 Chevy Volt Buyer in U.S. Gets His Keys In New JerseyIt's been four years coming, but today, the first retail buyer in the U.S. took delivery of his 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car. The happy event occurred on a cold winter day at Gearhart Chevrolet, in Denville, New Jersey. The buyer is Jeffrey Kaffee, a retired airline pilot who...
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Electric-Car Deliveries? Mercedes-Benz Says, Hey, Fuel Cells Too!It's the week of green-car delivery publicity. Nissan delivered its first Leaf in San Francisco Saturday (and three more in San Diego, Portland, and Southern California this week), and not to be left out, Chevy delivered a Volt this morning in New Jersey. Well, damnit, says Mercedes-Benz, we...
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Range Rover Decides Hybrids Make Most Sense For Gas GuzzlersThe 2012 Range Rover Evoque--the stylish new baby "soft-roader" that's Land Rover's smallest-ever luxury vehicle--will not be offered with a hybrid-electric version to improve its gas mileage. That's the word from John Edwards, Land Rover's global brand director, who noted that in Europe, the...
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Fisker To Skip Detroit Auto Show, 2011 Karma Next In GenevaFor next month's Detroit Auto Show, we're making our list and checking it twice. But it turns out that one notable name in green cars is giving the country's largest auto show a miss. Fisker Automotive confirmed to GreenCarReports yesterday that it won't be present at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show...
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Russian Billionaire's Natural-Gas Hybrid Electric Car, YoNever let it be said that Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov doesn't put his money where his mouth is. He plans to invest 150 million euros, or about $200 million, in a new company that will build the world's first production natural-gas series hybrid vehicle. The car will be called Yo, which is...
John Voelcker