Electric Cars

Major evolutionary change takes a long time. That's as true for electric cars as for opposable thumbs--though it will be measured in decades, not millennia. We frequently have to say that declaring plug-in cars a sales failure after 14 months (as certain commentators have done) is wildly premature...

UPDATES, April 11, 2012: Since this article was published on March 30, we've received the following updates: This morning, Mission Valley Ford received a truckload of 10 Think City vehicles from the Indiana factory, though most are already spoken for; Sales and service are only available in the San...

In terms of renewable energy, you have to give credit to the first person who thought of using excrement as a source of fuel. At the risk of dragging things down to gutter-level, one place you'll find one heck of a lot of excrement is at a zoo. You don't need us to tell you that big animals produce...

We breathed a sigh of relief when Coda announced it had started production of its electric Sedan earlier this month. Then, we positively jumped for joy when little over a week later, the first customers started taking delivery of their new 2012 Coda Sedans. It had certainly been a long time coming...

If you've not heard of Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima then you probably don't follow the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb event, held each year at Pikes Peak in Colorado. Fans of the sport, which involves over 12 miles of twists and turns and a climb of over 4,700 feet, will recognise Monster as a...

March 11, 2011 changed Japan forever. Just before 3pm local time, a magnitude 9 earthquake created a Tsunami that devastated a large region of the Eastern coast of Japan, killing thousands. It also triggered meltdowns in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing explosions in three...

This much is clear: as long as there are cars, there will be people who want to race them. While the bulk of today’s racing takes place in fossil-fuel-powered automobiles, racing of the future will very likely be based around electric cars. Electric drag racing is already an established...

The 2012 New York Auto Show is fast approaching and alongside the high-profile supercars and luxury vehicles, we'll again see a number of new green cars making their world or American debuts. This year, that includes the U.S. launch of the production Mercedes-Benz A Class, and the world reveal of...

So you got yer gasoline cars, and yer electric cars. And yer extended-range electrics, and yer plug-in hybrids. Sure, old news, been there, done that. How about an electric car with a gasoline engine you can swap in and out as you need it? Think of it as a range-extended electric car (like the...

Lithium-ion battery cells are expensive, challenging, and time-consuming to develop. And they can be hard to get right, as the current woes of A123 Systems show. Even the large car companies that develop their own cells--Toyota is the largest among a small number--want to spread their costs. Today...

London is making big claims that its Olympic games held this summer will be the greenest yet. To that end, it was announced last year that BMW would be supplying 4,000 of its low-emissions cars to the event, including 200 electric cars. The company has revealed that the first cars in its huge fleet...

On March 28, 2011, I took delivery of a European-specification 2011 Nissan Leaf. Yesterday, a few days short of our 1-year anniversary with the car, its odometer passed the 15,000 mile mark. But what have we learned about Nissan’s first electric car after living with it daily for a year?...

Hundreds of recalls a year get announced for gasoline cars, the vast majority completely under the radar. The high visibility of the electric-car business makes any recalls of batteries different, though. With that in mind, lithium-ion cell maker A123 Systems [NSDQ:AONE] said this morning it will...

Last week, we confidently predicted that we’d be hearing more about BMW’s first all-electric and plug-in hybrid production cars -- the i3 electric minicar and i8 plug-in supercar -- as we neared the BMW-sponsored 2012 Olympics. For the past few weeks, most of the news we’ve heard...

Unless you live in one of the more northern states -- or spend a lot of time in snow-covered mountains -- the idea of driving on ice might fill you with a sense of foreboding doom. Especially if that ice happens to be covering a very large expanse of water. Enter former Automotive X-Prize entrants...

BMW might be more than a year away from bring its first production electric car -- the 2014 BMW i3 -- to production, but the German automaker wants you to know that it isn’t new to electric cars. You may not know it, but BMW’s electric car history spans 40 years. As part of its...

The last U.S. volume carmaker started from scratch by entrepreneurs whose brand is still with us was Chrysler, and that was in 1924. But Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive are both looking to change that. Tesla started a few years ago with its electric Roadster sports car, and is about to introduce...

Infiniti has been on something of a product blitz lately, launching its 2013 JX seven-seat crossover this month and a host of concept cars over the last year. Now it has confirmed it will show a new concept at the 2012 New York Auto Show two weeks hence: the Infiniti Zero Emission Concept Coupe. We...

Orders have been coming in ahead of projections for the European Opel Ampera, but sales prospects may be looking up in the U.S. too for GM's range-extended electric car.

In the toughest days of Tesla's early years, CEO Elon Musk said on film, he wired $3 million of his personal fortune to the company so it could make payroll. Now the always-quotable CEO is downplaying the effect the $465 million in U.S. Department of Energy low-interest loan guarantees it received...