Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV)

Riding high on a bout of good press of its Chevy Volt, GM is putting $7 million into its next big bet on electric cars: cheaper, higher-energy batteries. In his state of the union address yesterday, President Obama called for the U.S. to be the first country to put one million electric cars on the...

Another in our irregular series of answering questions from readers, this one from John Q of Eugene, Oregon: Question: I was wondering how an electric car provides heat and defrosting. Using batteries to generate the heat will drain them pretty fast. Maybe with the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the internal...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Actually, no--fairly recently and not so far from home, the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory patented a battery technology known as nickel manganese cobalt (NMC). Discovering and patenting new battery technology in an era so...

Following years of claims they weren't interested in developing a battery-electric vehicle, Honda backtracked earlier this year and decided that they would produce one, with the 2012 Honda Fit EV concept finally revealed at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show last month. Now, Honda has announced that...

With the focus naturally going towards some of the big electric car launches we've had this year or established players like Tesla Motors, it's all too easy to forget that there are a wealth of smaller companies out there producing their own, unique take on electric transport. One such company is...

As any businessman will tell you, understanding your market is the key to selling your product. So as automakers worldwide ramp up electric car production ahead of a mass launch of plug-in vehicles they are seeking the answer to one very important question: What sort of person buys electric cars?...

Let us run a few engines past you. A warbling flat six. A growling V8. The howl of an inline four changing cam profiles. The smooth buzz of a rotary. How about some names now? Hemi. Vortec. Powerstroke. VTEC. Renesis. Ecoboost. Noticing a pattern? The first list is clearly engine layouts, and the...

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...

Startup 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...

The 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...

We love it when people send us photos. Especially photos of things that manufacturers aren't necessarily keeping front and center for the cameras. The photo here is a "range extender" that Nissan uses to keep its 2011 Leaf electric cars fully charged for media events. The picture was taken (by a...

First came the sketch, now come the photos. Mitsubishi has released the first official images of the U.S. version of its 2012 i-MiEV electric minicar, just a week before the car is unveiled at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. The company also released some specifications for the little i-MiEV...

For the next few years, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car will be the sole focus of GM's advanced powertrain efforts for U.S. car buyers. But that hasn't stopped it from putting battery electric cars into production elsewhere in the world. Electric minicars in China Last week, in...

Recycling old electronics isn’t necessarily something most Americans do. Many of us, it turns out, just stash our old computers, printers, and TV sets in the closet. Or we leave them at the curb. But suppose properly recycling those electronics could help redress a potentially critical...

What does British Petroleum, one of the most-hated corporate villains in the past twenty years do to become a little more loved by environmentalists? Allow a network of electric car charging stations to be installed at its filling stations. But while there are more than 11,000 BP owned gas stations...

The 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...

Joining the electric-vehicle party, Mercedes-Benz has released final details of its first mass-produced all-electric car, which will start coming down the line in October at its plant in Rastatt, Germany. Its formal debut will be at the 2010 Paris Motor Show later this month. Don't get your hopes...

With several big electric vehicle launches due over the next few years and order books filling up quickly, we're sure to start seeing more of them on the roads. Research agency Pike Research has announced that combined sales of full-electric (battery electric, or BEV) vehicles and plug-in hybrid...

Don't want a 2011 Chevrolet Volt or 2011 Nissan Leaf? Fear not - there are a raft of other EVs waiting in the wings to satisfy your desire for something different. If you live in the U.S. though, you'll have to wait until late 2011 to get your hands on Mitsubishi's 2012 i-MiEV. For EV fans in 14...

The electric motor is a great invention, but it's entirely limited by the power that the battery can feed to it, and that power is limited by the amount of energy the battery can store. Battery technology is in constant development behind the scenes, though, and the latest to emerge in research at...