John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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October is the month of electric-car media this year, with major press rollouts and lots of coverage of both the 2011 Chevrolet Volt and the 2011 Nissan Leaf.
Next year, several more electric cars...
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Two Things About Electric Cars The Wall Street Journal MissedWe read a lot of stuff about green cars and, lately, most of it's about electric cars. Sometimes the coverage is unquestioning and adulatory. More often it's cranky and dismissive. But major media outlets are working hard to understand the complexities of what is a huge, slow, expensive, and very...
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2011 Chevrolet Volt: Full Driving ImpressionsFinally, after almost four years, we've driven the 2011 Chevrolet Volt in a variety of conditions, talked over our impressions, and reached a conclusion: Yes, the 2011 Volt electric car is a real car. It may be propelled by electricity. It may plug into a wall socket or a special garage recharger...
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How To Make Your 2011 Chevy Volt Drive Like a Tesla RoadsterPretty much anyone who's driven one loves the performance of the Tesla Roadster, the first modern electric car with a lithium-ion battery pack. The 2011 Chevrolet Volt is a much less radical electric car than the Roadster in certain ways, and one of them is its accelerator response. Volt: Just like...
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Struggling Startup Carmaker V-Vehicles Names CEO, Renames ItselfStartups are hard. Automaker startups may be harder. But one of the necessary qualities in startups--tenacity--was on display recently from Next Autoworks. New name, new CEO That's the new name of the former V-Vehicles Inc., which attracted funding from famed Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner...
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2011 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid Tax Credit: $1,300, One Month Only!Like us, you may eagerly have been awaiting the arrival of the 2011 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid. You may even be planning to buy one. One of the reasons may be the tax credit for purchase of a hybrid vehicle that you can claim when you file your taxes. The 2011 Sonata Hybrid will qualify you for a credit...
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What does it cost to develop an electric vehicle these days?
In the case of the upcoming electric Toyota RAV4 crossover, $60 million.
At least, that's the amount that Toyota will pay Tesla Motors...
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2011 Chevrolet Volt Production Number To Rise Slightly, AgainOnce again, Chevrolet has upped planned production volumes of its 2011 Volt electric car in the face of strong demand and the likelihood that many dealers have more buyers than cars to sell them. In July, at a media event discussing launch markets and other details, Volt marketing manager Tony...
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EPA OKs More Ethanol In Gasoline, Only For 2007 Or Newer CarsYesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency approved raising the proportion of ethanol in pump gasoline from 10 percent (E10) to as much as 15 percent (E15). It would be the first increase in ethanol percentage since 1978, when the 10-percent blend was approved. Roughly 70 percent of U.S...
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All the Gasoline You Could Use, for $40 A Month? In Detroit?Business of Plugging In 2010 conference, Detroit -- Some executives always hit the talking points, while others clearly relish their topic and aren't afraid to add some opinion to their presentations. Tony Earley, CEO of DTE Corp., the parent company of Detroit Edison, is the rare public utility...
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2011 Volt "GM Lied" Debate: They Hate GM, They Really Hate GMThis will be our last word on the whole "GM Lied!" and "Is the Volt a hybrid?" controversy, which blew up yesterday at the first day of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt press launch. Late last night, GM issued a press release (largely reprised on its Voltage site) entitled "Clearing up confusion about the...
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Video: Charging The 2011 Chevrolet VoltFor some reason, while none of us think twice about plugging in our mobile phones to recharge overnight, the prospect of plugging in a car makes some people very nervous. On yesterday's test drive of a 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car, we visited the Detroit-Hamtramck factory where...
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It's all about the Volt today, for better and for worse.
On the "worse" side is the tempest in a teapot that erupted today, ably dismantled by more thoughtful commentators, over whether General...
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What a 2011 Chevy Volt Has In Common With a Huge Tahoe HybridPut them side by side, and they could be vehicles from two different planets. The new 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car is GM's green halo car, its foray into the future of electric drive vehicles, and the focus of a huge marketing and publicity effort. The 2011 Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid...
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2011 Chevrolet Volt: Electric Drive ImpressionsIn one light, it was nothing more than a drive in a new car on a sunny autumn afternoon. But in another, it meant taking the wheel of the most radical new car since the 1997 Toyota Prius—perhaps more significant yet—and driving it on public roads for the first time. After almost four...
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Toyota Sells Its Two-Millionth Prius Hybrid ... And CountingWe missed a milestone a couple of weeks ago: Toyota built and sold its two-millionth Prius hybrid earlier this month. The first-generation Prius, the world's first production hybrid-electric vehicle, was launched in Japan late in 1997. It stayed a low-volume car for several years, and wasn't...
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What Do YOU Want To Know About the 2011 Chevrolet Volt Electric Car?After just shy of four years, two distinct body styles, much disbelief, and more press releases than we can count, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car is here. We'll be driving the 2011 Volt this week, and we have a lot of questions about what the car is like. But we expect you do...
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Curiouser and Curiouser: Tesla's 'Gay' Electric Car ConnectionOh, what a tangled web we weave in the insular little world of electric car advocates. Take the news earlier today that Universal Pictures has agreed to a request from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that it pull a trailer for a new Vince Vaughan movie in which the B-list star...
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The news came via a Facebook status from another automotive journalist: "Interesting. Phrase 'Electric cars are gay' pulled from Ron Howard movie."
To which we could only respond, huh?
[UPDATE: Turns...
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Touring Tesla: Electric Car Startup Struts Its Green StuffIt's debatable whether Tesla Motors should even be called a startup. It's five years old, it has almost 1,400 cars on the road, and it has 700 people working for it globally. Yesterday, in a bid to reinforce its credentials as a real automaker--the kind that can design, engineer, test, and build a...
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2012 Ford Focus Electric: 120-Volt Charging 'Convenience Cord'Electric cars need to be recharged, obviously. How car companies choose to provide the all-new equipment to do that varies significantly among makers. For its upcoming 2012 Ford Focus Electric, Ford just jumped out ahead of the car to announce that it will provide what it calls a "convenience cord"...
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Surprise, Surprise: Yes, Young Buyers Will Pay More For LessIf you listen to conventional wisdom coming out of Detroit, you'd think that every single U.S. car buyer secretly wants a Suburban. Call it the bigger-longer-badder-better principle: Everyone wants the largest car they can afford. Often that's true. But not always. Sometimes people want the most...
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Ferrari California HELE Adds Stop-Start, Gas-Saving GizmosNo, it's not pronounced "hell" ... although that word was heard from many Modena fans when news first broke that Ferrari was planning a hybrid-electric drivetrain in some models. The first fruits of Ferrari's wide-ranging quest to improve the fuel efficiency of its models was unveiled at the Paris...
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Get Green Car Reports Via Our New E-Mail, Better RSS FeedsWant to follow the latest news and information on green cars of all varieties, from high-mileage to hybrid, clean diesel to fully electric vehicles? Now we're launching a brand-new, redesigned daily e-mail update. If you'd like to have all our headlines delivered to your Inbox in one nice, tidy...
John Voelcker