Green

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?...

Every now and then, readers write to grumble about new cars and their gas mileage. The gist is usually something like this: You wrote that the new 2011 [Make & Model] gets 40 mpg highway? Well, big whoop-de-doo. I always got at least 45 mpg in my 1992 Geo Metro, and it was a whole lot cheaper...

Compact cars are pretty much a known quantity, and hence easy to visualize. Many are headed for 40-mpg highway ratings, and Hyundai recently threw down the gauntlet in saying it would start to report sales of 40-mpg vehicles--and challenged other makers to do the same. Imagine a compact car,and...

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...

The U.S. launch of the 2011 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid has slipped a month, just enough to preclude buyers from taking advantage of a $1,300 Federal tax credit that expires December 31. According to Hyundai, the first cars will now reach dealers in January or perhaps later, rather than in early or mid...

The first of Ford’s new Transit Connect Electric commercial vans are being delivered to customers in North America and the UK, just 13 months after Ford initially announced plans to develop the zero-emissions vehicles. To help speed their development Ford joined forces with Azure Dynamics, a...

It's all very strange. Just last March, Chrysler definitively killed the Ram Hemi Hybrid pickup it had been developing for several years. RIP Hemi Hybrid. Now comes a mysterious post on fan site Allpar.com that proposes that the company's Ram 1500 pickup truck will offer a Cummins 5.0-liter...

One of the main reasons buyers steered away from the old Ford Explorer sport utility vehicle, according to Ford itself, was its fuel economy. So gas mileage had to be a major selling point for the all-new 2011 Ford Explorer. Like so many new cars and crossovers, the latest model does indeed get...

Hyundai’s vehicle fleet is about to get a whole lot more fuel efficient as there are plans to introduce a new range of advanced dual clutch transmissions and more continuously variable transmissions (CVT) as early as next year. The move is just one part of the Hyundai’s overall goal of...

Just days after Nissan confirmed that customer deliveries of the 2011 Leaf would commence in Japan on December 20, Nissan USA has confirmed that the very first customer vehicle will be delivered in a few days’ time, on December 11. The delivery will be to an unnamed Northern Californian...

Last summer, when Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne lauded his company's line of European vehicles that run on compressed natural gas, it may have seemed like an off-the-cuff remark. But in fact, natural gas may be the only green or alternative fuel that Chrysler can feasibly adopt in any kind of...

As it gears up to offer electric cars in selected rental fleets across the country, Hertz has dribbled out details of how its Global EV program will actually work. Today we learn that New York City will be the first region to receive the electric and plug-in hybrid rental cars, with rentals to...

The 2011 Honda CR-Z hybrid hot-hatch was meant to be the car that showed hybrids could be sporty as well as green, but its paltry 122 horsepower and dismal 0-60 times were never going to excite anyone. And don’t think its fuel economy is anything to write home about; the CR-Z returns 36/38...

What happens when you take a single electric car and distribute it through three different dealers in the same city? On paper we’d assume that three dealers vying for customers looking to buy the 2011 Mitsubishi i would breed healthy competition, lower prices and excellent deals...

We've already taken a behind-the-scenes look at how the 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car is produced with a "how it's made" video at the maker's Oppama factory in Japan. Now comes the turn of Chevrolet's Volt, with the release of a short time-lapse video in celebration of the official start to...

It doesn't really matter whether GM sells the first Chevrolet Volt electric cars at a loss or not. The company announced yesterday that it plans to hire 1,000 new engineers over the next two years to focus exclusively on developing and expanding its work in electric-drive vehicles, everything from...

Many would argue that the 2011 Tesla Roadster Sport 2.5 is a work of art, with its smooth lines, low profile and breathtaking performance. But one digital artist has taken the Californian electric sports car to a whole new level - by turning one into a work of art. Created as part of Art Basel...

The launch of the 2012 Fiat 500 at the Los Angeles Auto Show wasn't only the first new model from Chrysler's partnership with Italian automaker Fiat. It also added a new and attractive model to a category of cars that have always been an afterthought in the U.S. market: minicars, those even smaller...

Just a month ago, we suggested that 40 miles per gallon is the new bragging threshold for subcompact and even compact cars. Now, Hyundai has dropped the gloves (or thrown down the gauntlet) with a clever marketing campaign to contrast it with other makers: It will start breaking out the sales of...

He’s the Pontiff to over 1.6 billion people worldwide. But until now, His Holiness The Pope has attended appointments in his fleet of heavily modified and heavily armored Mercedes SUVs. But the Vatican told the press earlier to day that His Holiness was keen to partake of the pleasures of...