John Voelcker, Contributing Editor
Articles
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Think California is the land of fast-flowing freeways and drop-top driving under the endless sun? Think again.
The California Air Resources Board is now writing rules to implement a law passed two...
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Peugeot, Audi Diesels Lead Petit Le Mans, Porsche Hybrid Finishes RaceEndurance racing has more than its share of heartbreak. For Porsche Motorsport, this weekend's Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta provided sweet relief to a galling memory: Its unique 911 GT3 R Hybrid race car retired less than two hours before the checkered flag during May's 24 Hours of Nurburgring...
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Tuning Porsche's 911 GT3 R Hybrid Race Car: It's All SoftwareRoad Atlanta -- Two days before the Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid competes for the first time on U.S. soil, the head of its development team said the company plans further development of the technology. Dr. Daniel Armbruster, whose official title is manager of the motorsports development process for the...
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How the 2011 Coda Sedan Hopes To Compete With the Nissan LeafCoda Automotive, the California startup that will begin delivering its 2011 Coda Sedan electric car at the end of the year, has ambitious plans. CEO Kevin Czinger expects to sell up to 14,000 all-electric compact sedans in the company's first full year of operations. The car is assembled in the...
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Hertz To Rent Electric Cars Like Nissan Leaf In Selected AreasRenting a car is one of the most common ways of driving a model you’re not familiar with. Now, as electric cars start to make their way into dealerships, they will be showing up in rental fleets as well. Hertz, the nation’s largest rental brand, announced last week that it would add...
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Paris Motor Show: Ford Confirms C-Max Hybrid And Plug-In MinivansSince launching the Ford Escape Hybrid in 2004, Ford has confined sales of its hybrid-electric vehicles to North America. But that's about to change. In European markets, where up to 50 percent of new cars are fitted with high-efficiency diesel engines, Ford has focused its efforts over the last...
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We don't use exclamation points all that often, but once in a while it's justified.
In this case, the Jaguar C-X75 Concept supercar just unveiled at the 2010 Paris Motor Show deserves one. If not...
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GM Electric Meriva Van Tests Vehicle-to-Grid Charging in GermanyLast summer, Karl Stracke, the vice president of global vehicle engineering of General Motors, said the company planned to test three battery-electric vehicles in different global regions. This morning, the company's Opel unit announced that it would test a fleet of Opel Meriva small minivans...
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2010 Paris Motor Show: Green Car Roundup of Concept VehiclesJust two more days to go until the official media day at the 2010 Paris Motor Show. And even before that, there's a slew of announcements, reveals, receptions, parties, and other festivities, all focused around the first event on the global autumn auto-show calendar. Following our roundup of the...
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Will the 2011 Wheego LiFe Be the First Electric Car On Sale?Sometimes we avoid covering certain cars, for good reasons or not. One of those cars is the 2011 Wheego LiFe, a derivative of the 2009 Wheego Whip. Never heard of it? Not surprising. Wheego Electric Cars is a startup electric-car company, in this case selling an electric conversion of a...
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Mercedes-Benz Reporter: Plug-In Hybrid Pickup Truck ConceptIf you're all about saving gasoline--or "displacing petroleum," as energy wonks say--then the place to start may not be passenger cars. It may be commercial vehicles. From electric trucks in urban delivery fleets to more efficient hybrid-electric powertrains, there's a lot of innovation happening...
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2010 Paris Motor Show: Green Car Roundup of Production ModelsThe fall's first big European auto show, the 2010 Paris Motor Show, officially kicks off on Thursday, which is when all the press conferences happen. But the industry has been leaking out selected images, teasers, and occasionally full details on the concepts and production cars that will appear...
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The 2010 Toyota Prius had an exceptionally long model year, introduced in early spring 2009 and delivered to dealers by May or June that year.
But now the 2011 Prius hybrids are arriving at...
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Could Your Car's Body Be Its Battery Too? Volvo Is TryingThe biggest challenge for battery electric vehicles is clearly the cost and the weight of today's lithium-ion battery packs. Now Volvo is experimenting with a new composite material that can store and release energy more quickly than a convention lithium-ion cell and, it says, might one day replace...
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2011 Toyota Highlander Hybrid: New Styling, Higher MileageThe 2011 Toyota Highlander Hybrid has been restyled and made more powerful as part of a comprehensive freshening of the Toyota Highlander line, last fully redesigned for the 2008 model year. Along with more prosaic gasoline-powered Highlanders, the front-end styling has been updated. The hood and...
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So Much For World Car-Free Day; Most of the World WANTS CarsYesterday was was World Car-Free Day. Did you notice? Nope, us either. Because while it may be amusing--for a few seconds--to imagine a world without vehicles, it's also sorta silly. It's like imagining a world without vapid blond stars who get way, way, WAY too much press. Might be nice, never...
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Will U.S. Green Buyers Accept Subcompacts, And Does It Matter?It's always important for writers to check their cultural biases when analyzing the auto market. Or at least admit them up front. So we appreciate our colleague Scott Burgess being honest about his point of view: He doesn't like subcompacts. Nope. Doesn't have any time for 'em. Animus up front In...
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California Wants 1 Million Electric Cars On Its Road By 2020During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama famously said that he wanted one million plug-in cars on U.S. roads by 2015. That's a goal that many experts continue to think will be extremely hard to attain. Now California has adopted the same goal for the state alone, but with a different...
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Pretty much everyone loves renewable energy. The problem is that wind usually blows at night--often sporadically, at that--and solar power is unpredictable. Suppose the secret to harnessing their...
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Are Hatchbacks Back? Five-Doors Are Two-Thirds of Ford Fiesta SalesThe term "hatchback" has long been considered poison in Detroit, an indicator of a slow, cheap, tinny, undesirable econobox. (And when's the last time you heard "econobox," for that matter?) No one wants 'em, says the conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom may be getting knocked upside the...
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Waiting For Fisker: First Factory-Built 2011 Karma At Paris Motor ShowIt's been a year of press announcements but no cars from Fisker Automotive. Now the company says that the first factory-built 2011 Fisker Karma will debut at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, to be held at the end of the month. That may allow Fisker to keep its promise to deliver a handful of production...
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2015 Lotus Elite Coupe To Offer Flywheel Hybrid Option For V8Add Lotus to the list of luxury and sports car makers offering hybrid models to raise fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It won't be on the market until the "spring of 2014," says Lotus, but 10 days from now at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, it will introduce a concept for its...
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GM To Test 100-Mile Chevrolet Cruze Electric Car in S KoreaFor U.S. car buyers, GM is convinced that a range-extended electric vehicle--its 2011 Chevrolet Volt, to be specific--is the best solution to meeting the needs of drivers who may need to go further than the 40 miles a Volt will do on battery power. But elsewhere in the world, GM is quietly pursuing...
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Exclusive: 2011 Coda Sedan Electric Car - Production Photos!It doesn't get mentioned as much in the press as the 2011 Nissan Leaf and 2011 Chevrolet Volt, but there's a third compact electric car coming to market within the next six months. It's the 2011 Coda Sedan, and now Green Car Reports is happy to bring you the first published photos of the production...
John Voelcker