Green

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...

Earlier this week Nissan announced that it had finally received its EPA official ratings for the 2011 Nissan Leaf. Earlier this week our John Voelcker had a lot to say on its 99MPGe figure, indicating the equivalent miles-per-gallon fuel consumption of a car which runs on electricity. Yes, we know...

Toyota is the latest automaker to announce it’s headed down the downsized engine path as it strives for improved fuel economy, following the likes of Ford, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai, all of which have announced similar plans in the recent past. Toyota has long been the champion of hybrid...

In 2011 a crack task force was sent to the United States by a Japanese manufacturer for a car that's making headlines. These men were promptly trained to be experts in their field. Today, wanted by thousands of owners, they survive as a rapid response unit. If you have a problem, if no one else can...

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...

It looks like carmakers are going to make their quiet, electrically powered cars a lot noisier. And that's going to happen regardless of whether there's any actual data to support the notion that electric cars are so silent they pose a hazard to blind pedestrians. As of now, three different...

When power plant heavyweight NRG Energy announced yesterday that it would invest $10 million in the rollout of the nation’s first privately-finance electric vehicle charging network it also revealed that the city it would debut in would be … Houston, Texas. Um, what? Houston (pictured)...

Normally it’s Toyota that’s in the headlines whenever ‘unintended acceleration’ is concerned, however, this time ‘round it’s close rival Honda that’s in the spotlight. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced that it is...

I just spoke to electric car startup Coda’s interim CEO Steven “Mac” Heller, who is stepping in since former chief executive Kevin Czinger stepped down. Heller talked to us from Los Angeles Auto Show, where Coda is showing off its all-electric sedan — and where automotive...

Just how fuel efficient is an electric car? That’s been the question facing the EPA for months as it has battled the ratings system to give consumers a realistic and useful way of comparing electric cars against gasoline counterparts. Now we know. The EPA has decreed that the 2011 Nissan Leaf...

After several years of taunting and many months of speculation, the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show is finally the venue chosen for Mitsubishi to show off their U.S.-specification 'i' electric car to an expecting public. We've featured the Japanese-spec 'i' several times, as the company has shipped...

It was the first electric car sold in volume anywhere in the world, starting more than a year ago, and now the 2012 Mitsubishi "i" is officially coming to the U.S. market. The U.S. version was unveiled on Thursday at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, though Mitsubishi provided few new details on how...

Mitsubishi rolled out the tiny "i" electric minicar (nee i-MiEV) during last week’s 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, confirming its eventual sale in the fall of 2011. But all-electric vehicles are just one avenue the Japanese automaker is investigating as it attempts to curb emissions and end the...

Sometimes even well-informed industry analysts get it wrong. Or miss the forest for the trees. A recent posting by Pike Research, entlted "Europe Leads, U.S. Lags In Start-Stop Hybrids," correctly notes that adoption of start-stop systems is well advanced in Europe, but lags behind in the U.S. But...

For all the grief Toyota Prius hybrid drivers get, you'd think they were some deranged combination of green storm troopers and mentally defective traffic impediments. But every now and then, a Prius driver does do something jaw-droppingly idiotic. Take, for instance, the unidentified (and possibly...

With all the talk of purchase price, charging costs, tax incentives, congestion charging exemptions and maintenance costs for EVs, there's one financial area which often gets overlooked - insuring them. With so few EVs on the road it's been difficult to gauge whether they'll cost more or less than...

The 2012 Fiat 500 minicar is the first all-new car to be sold as part of Fiat's takeover of Chrysler. It's also a very cool and stylish little vehicle that won numerous awards in its first year on the market ... and it's the kind of car conventional wisdom says will never, ever sell in the U.S...

Kia has been on a roll lately. The younger, lower-priced sibling of Korean car colossus Hyundai has received rave reviews for the styling, features, and general competence of its its new 2011 Optima midsize sedan. Now Kia has iced the cake by adding a hybrid-electric model of the Optima to the...

By all accounts, the initial public offering of General Motors stock yesterday was a huge success. Demand for the shares was five times the initial allocation, prompting the company both to raise the amount it sold and raise the price. At the end of the day, GM stock [NYSE:GM] closed higher than...

There's a lot we don't know about the 2012 Toyota RAV4 EV that Japan's largest automaker is prototyping with Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors. That includes the battery pack size, traction motor power, and stated range--although 100 miles is the goal, according to Jim Lentz, president of Toyota...