Green

Mac or PC? Leaf or Volt? The car you drive says a lot about your personality and your outlook on life, be it a big SUV or a Smart. With the 2011 Nissan Leaf and 2011 Chevrolet Volt both set to hit the roads this Fall, is one a PC and the other a Mac? And if so, which is which? Are Leaf owners more...

We've driven a 2009 Tesla Roadster, contributed to the complete review, and written about the torturous tradeoff between using the stupendous acceleration and maintaining enough battery range to get you home again. While the Roadster will go down in history for making electric vehicles sexy, Tesla...

Coulomb Technologies unveiled ambitious plans today to install 4,600 new charging stations for plug-in vehicles in homes and commercial spaces across the U.S. — a project nearly half-funded by federal stimulus money.The news comes at a tenuous time for electric car makers and electric grid...

Last week, VentureBeat reported that Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk was personally running low on cash, a fact he disclosed in court papers as part of his divorce proceedings. We asked if the company, which is seeking to go public, should have included those facts in its filings with the Securities...

The Challenge Bibendum brings the sustainable-mobility world together every year or so--though sometimes, the 2010 edition of the Bibendum didn't come together as quickly as planned. It's a long way from North America to South America, after all. On day one, our travel group was cleaved in half by...

Continuing to diversify the green powertrain options it offers to buyers, Mercedes-Benz will add a clean-diesel model to its largest sedan line, the S-Class. The new 2011 Mercedes-Benz S350 BlueTEC sedan joins this year's S400 Hybrid, which adds a mild hybrid system with a 15-kilowatt electric...

By the end of this year, several fully modern, highway-capable electric vehicles will go on sale. Sooner or later, one of them will get into an accident. What should emergency responders do when faced with a high-voltage battery pack that could kill them if mishandled? To prepare first responders...

To the long list of dead U.S. car brands, you can now add one more: Mercury. The Ford Motor Company announced today that Mercury production would cease by the end of this year. That means that the widely anticipated compact Mercury version of the 2012 Ford Focus--named "Tracer" after the...

We know that Prius owners love their cars. Sometimes they talk endlessly about them, their great fuel efficiency, how cool the all-electric mode is, and so forth. But could you get so enthusiastic about Prius that you'd let your own child starve to death? Good. We didn't think so. And, no, it's not...

It's been more than a year since Volkswagen confirmed it would sell its Polo subcompact in the U.S. But the company also said it would modify the Polo to make it more suitable for the U.S. market, which prefers sedans to hatchbacks. Now, the other shoe has dropped: VW has just unveiled the Polo...

It's the start of the month, which means it's time for another newsletter from Aptera, the company struggling against the odds to launch its ultra-aerodynamic, ultra-futuristic three-wheeled electric vehicle by the end of 2011. According to Aptera the vehicle is going through some more redesigns...

The surprise partnership between Tesla Motors and Toyota announced two weeks ago generated a lot of head-scratching. The big question is, What does Toyota get out of the deal? It's easy to see what Tesla gets: more capital (Toyota will invest $50 million in Tesla just before its planned public...

Launching a brand-new car make is a tough task; just ask General Motors (RIP Saturn). But if you're electric-car startup Coda Automotive, you have at least one plus (it's a pure electric car, which is sexy) to offset several potential minuses (who's Coda? it's made in China? I can't buy one outside...

For decades, the world's been wondering what comes next--after the era of gasoline, that is. And since 1998, a global convocation of scientists, politicians, transportation companies and journalists have gathered somewhere in the world for the Challenge Bibendum, a sort of green-car congress that...

Automakers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to squeeze the last erg of electric energy from a whole range of forthcoming electric cars. Expensive software controllers and astronomically costly bits of composite body pieces are part of the game plan for vehicles like the 2011 Nissan Leaf...

General Motors may be trying to spread Chevrolet through Europe and Asia, but it won't put the Chevy bowtie on its Volt extended-range electric vehicle when that car goes on sale in China next year. Instead, the car that hits U.S. dealerships this November as the 2011 Chevrolet Volt will be sold in...

Until Toyota stepped in last week, Daimler was the only major auto manufacturer to take a stake in electric-car startup Tesla Motors — a company that has now become synonymous with next-generation transportation. Now Daimler wants to work the same magic with BYD, the Chinese battery and electric...

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk seems to have it all. The electric-car entrepreneur is the toast of Silicon Valley, Sacramento, and Tokyo after unveiling a plan to revive Toyota’s shuttered NUMMI plant last week. And deal-hungry Wall Street bankers are angling to take his company public. He’s even a...

Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger traded a hydrogen powered Humvee for a diminutive Mitsubishi i-Miev this week as the Governonator's office and Department of General Services borrow two 2011 Mitsubishi all electric i-Miev cars as part of a trial into electric vehicles. The i-Miev has been...

While Mark Twain apparently didn't say, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," the statement has passed into legend. Twain's quote applies neatly to the 2010 Toyota Matrix hatchback, which has not--despite our erroneous reporting, here and here--been killed off. It remains in production...