John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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Finishing our last few stories from the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, we realized we forgot one piece of consumer news: Mercedes-Benz started taking orders for its 2011 B-Class F-Cell hydrogen...
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Hybrids Don't Cost More To Repair or Run, But Payback DebatableIt's a concern that comes up over and over: If I buy a hybrid car, won't I have to spend thousands of dollars to replace the battery pack in a few years? The answer is, No. Not only are automakers required to warranty the high-voltage battery packs in hybrid-electric vehicles for 8 years/100,000...
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Toyota To Service, Not Recall, Hybrid Cooling-Pump ComponentsToyota plans to service approximately 650,000 of the more than 2 million Prius hybrids it has built to date, to correct a potential flaw in a cooling pump that could cause overheating. About 390,000 of the affected models are in the U.S. While the company hasn't yet released details on what it...
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Honda Unveils Brio, Its Smallest Car, For Asian Markets OnlyThe smallest Honda sold in the U.S. market is the 2011 Fit subcompact, its well-reviewed and enormously versatile five-door hatchback. But other markets demand different types of cars, and today at the Thailand Motor Expo, the company unveiled the Honda Brio prototype, a lightly disguised version...
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2010 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid Prototype: Drive ReportThe main thing to understand about the Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid is that it's not an "electric car" as many people use the term. Yes, it plugs in to any electric socket to recharge the 5.2-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. And, yes, its Hybrid Synergy Drive system uses electric torque...
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Will Hyundai Hammer Honda In Fight For Greenest Carmaker Title?For many years, Honda was routinely awarded the title of greenest carmaker in the U.S. market. But its most recent green cars have stumbled, and a dark-horse competitor is rising fast toward taking the coveted title, conferred every few years by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It's not Nissan...
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The 2011 Nissan Leaf all-electric car has been designated as Europe's 2011 Car of the Year, according to reports in Autocar and other media outlets.
While the Leaf won our GreenCarReports 2011 Best...
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Did We Err On The Leaf, Or Is GM Volt Boosterism Bashing It?Last week at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, we announced that the 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car was the winner of the GreenCarReports 2011 Best Car To Buy award. That same week, a flurry of other media outlets almost uniformly gave their "car of year" awards to the 2011 Chevrolet Volt...
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2010 Los Angeles Auto Show Photos: Coda Sedan Electric CarStartup electric-car company Coda Automotive didn't hold a press conference at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show last week, but they did exhibit their car for the first time. Under the theme "Zen meets Tech," their booth featured a bright yellow 2011 Coda Sedan in the center, next to a full-size model...
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2011 Wheego Whip LiFe Electric Car: First Drive ReportThe 2011 Wheego Whip LiFe is a small, two-seat electric car from a startup company you've never heard of with an unusual name. It doesn't have the fit, finish, or driving quality of a 2011 Nissan Leaf or the Japanese-market Mitsubishi "i" we tested two years ago. And it's only got two seats, which...
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Five Questions: Mac Heller, Coda Automotive Interim CEOIt can't have been a particular easy 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show for Coda Autmotive's newly minted interim CEO, Steven "Mac" Heller. Just one day before Coda hosted a reception at its new "Zen meets Tech" display booth at the greenest of all U.S. auto shows, the startup electric car company...
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Making Silent Electric Cars Noisier: 3 Carmakers, 3 SoundsIt looks like carmakers are going to make their quiet, electrically powered cars a lot noisier. And that's going to happen regardless of whether there's any actual data to support the notion that electric cars are so silent they pose a hazard to blind pedestrians. As of now, three different...
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So it's come down to this, has it? The U.S. car-buying public is apparently so stupid that the Environmental Protection Agency has to rate the efficiency of an all-electric car that burns no gasoline...
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2010 LA Auto Show: 2012 Mitsubishi 'i' Electric MinicarIt was the first electric car sold in volume anywhere in the world, starting more than a year ago, and now the 2012 Mitsubishi "i" is officially coming to the U.S. market. The U.S. version was unveiled on Thursday at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, though Mitsubishi provided few new details on how...
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Slow U.S. Adoption of Start-Stop Systems: The Real ReasonsSometimes even well-informed industry analysts get it wrong. Or miss the forest for the trees. A recent posting by Pike Research, entlted "Europe Leads, U.S. Lags In Start-Stop Hybrids," correctly notes that adoption of start-stop systems is well advanced in Europe, but lags behind in the U.S. But...
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Video: Really Bad Prius Driver Slams Police Car, Then TreeFor all the grief Toyota Prius hybrid drivers get, you'd think they were some deranged combination of green storm troopers and mentally defective traffic impediments. But every now and then, a Prius driver does do something jaw-droppingly idiotic. Take, for instance, the unidentified (and possibly...
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2010 LA Auto Show: Photo Gallery, 2012 Fiat 500 LaunchThe 2012 Fiat 500 minicar is the first all-new car to be sold as part of Fiat's takeover of Chrysler. It's also a very cool and stylish little vehicle that won numerous awards in its first year on the market ... and it's the kind of car conventional wisdom says will never, ever sell in the U.S...
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2010 Los Angeles Auto Show: 2011 Kia Optima Hybrid DetailsKia has been on a roll lately. The younger, lower-priced sibling of Korean car colossus Hyundai has received rave reviews for the styling, features, and general competence of its its new 2011 Optima midsize sedan. Now Kia has iced the cake by adding a hybrid-electric model of the Optima to the...
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By all accounts, the initial public offering of General Motors stock yesterday was a huge success.
Demand for the shares was five times the initial allocation, prompting the company both to raise the...
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2010 LA Auto Show: Toyota-Tesla RAV4 EV, Under the HoodThere's a lot we don't know about the 2012 Toyota RAV4 EV that Japan's largest automaker is prototyping with Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors. That includes the battery pack size, traction motor power, and stated range--although 100 miles is the goal, according to Jim Lentz, president of Toyota...
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2010 LA Auto Show: 2012 Toyota RAV4 EV Powered By TeslaAs they say, everything old is new again. Fourteen years after it launched its very first RAV4 crossover at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Toyota returned to LA to launch an all-electric version of its latest RAV4. And this one is, as the logos in a teaser photo released earlier said, "powered by...
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2010 LA Auto Show: 2012 Honda Fit Electric Car, World DebutThis afternoon, Honda unveiled its plans for an all-electric version of the Honda Fit subcompact hatchback to be launched globally in 2012. The announcement came at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. The announcement represented a full circle of sorts, since Los Angeles was the home of many of the 300...
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2010 Los Angeles Auto Show: Nissan Ellure Concept CarAt the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, Nissan has unveiled a concept design that points the way toward some of its next-generation sedan models—even though Nissan swears that its Ellure show car is not “intended as preview of any upcoming production model,” in the words of Shiro...
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GM Mild Hybrids: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try AgainThe 2011 Chevrolet Volt has gotten all the attention lately, including a narrow second-place finish in our GreenCarReports 2011 Best Car To Buy award, but General Motors also has a significant hybrid-electric vehicle program. While its full-size Two-Mode Hybrid trucks have had mixed success, the...
John Voelcker