Green Car News

Never let it be said that New York City doesn't get everything it can out of its 50 million-plus tourist visitors each year. In this case, it's pedal-powered energy to offset the roughly 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity consumed by the famous lighted ball that drops to signal the New Year. Times...

Today on Green Car Reports: We start to run down what's happened in green-car news and social media, an electric-car evangelist explains how it's done, and ethanol faces strong headwinds in next year's Congress. All this and more on Green Car Reports. While hydrogen-powered vehicles like the 2015...

At the end of every year, we look back at our traffic to identify the most popular stories we've published. Some of them may be evergreen topics that draw consistent traffic--three of the five were first published in 2012--while others are news or reviews that really took off and captured readers'...

Some solar-energy companies have had a hard time in recent years, but SolarCity may look a little more promising. That isn't just because Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is the company's chairman, either--though it can't hurt. Instead, says The Atlantic (on Mashable), it's because the company is...

Fiat, like MINI before it, thinks it's on to a good thing with its retro-styled small car, the 500. And like MINI, the Italian automaker thinks the best way of expanding on the car's popularity is to apply the badge to a whole range of vehicles--the latest being a four-door version of the currently...

Ethanol has been a key component of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard since the 2007 passage of the Energy Security and Independence Act. Now, there appears to be a chance that rules requiring minimum volumes of ethanol to be blended into vehicle fuel could be reformed or scrapped altogether in...

Electric car enthusiasts are a passionate bunch. We've seen as much from reading the comments on Green Car Reports articles, and suspect more than a few of our readers have helped change the opinions of friends, family and co-workers on electric cars. Maybe they've even tested or bought one as a...

Over the last five years, Green Car Reports has steadily grown in both traffic and readership. Our articles on hybrids, diesels, plug-in hybrids, all-electric cars, and even hydrogen-powered vehicles seem to be gaining a following. Car buyers are still interested in the same things as...

Hydrogen fuel cells have often been viewed as alternatives to large battery packs for powering electric vehicles. But what if a small hydrogen fuel cell could be used in a battery-electric vehicle--solely as a range extender? The French postal service, La Poste, is about to test that concept in...

It may have been a holiday week, but that didn't stop the green automotive news from erupting. Here's a look back at what happened this week on Green Car Reports: With the new 2015 Ford F-150 on the horizon, we laid out what we know so far regarding the new pickup truck's fuel economy. A few...

Fueled by consumers disillusioned by the rising cost of driving and with less desire to own their own vehicles, the car sharing industry is growing rapidly. So rapidly, predicts Navigant Research, that global membership is forecast to have grown from around 2.3 million at the beginning of 2013 to...

Perhaps the auto world is Wonderland--for, as Alice famously said, it gets curiouser and curiouser. The latest oddity is a report last Sunday from the enthusiast site Ford Authority that Ford Motor Company has filed for a trademark on "Model E." It's odd because reports last summer indicated that...

European readers may be quite familiar with the concept of a tower full of tiny vehicles, dispensing them to people below. Smart used just such a building to store its vehicles at Smart dealerships all around Europe when the vehicle was first released. Now, China is using a similar system for tiny...

Once in a while, we're blind-sided by responses to an article we publish--and we learn something in the process. On December 23, we wrote about ways that the all-new 2015 Ford F-150 full-size pickup truck might get better gas mileage. We learned that at least some of our readers seem to resent the...

It's telling that some of the most exciting transport designs these days can be found in one of the fastest-growing sectors: electric bicycles. We've covered several electric bicycles on Green Car Reports in the past and the vast majority are veritable works of art--whether retro-inspired or...

Stop-start engine technology is used widely in cars in Europe, but until recently very few automakers have applied it to vehicles sold in the U.S. For the most part, that's because the benefits aren't shown up in EPA testing. But a few automakers are also worried that customers may not be accepting...

Many people like to think they can predict the future, but only futurists (and psychics) get paid to do it. And futurist Lars Thomsen thinks that electric cars are such a disruptive technology that they will make gasoline cars obsolete--starting in 2016, or much earlier than most other analysts...

In recent years, Korean twins Hyundai and Kia have lain claim to some of the best average fuel efficiency figures in their respective sectors. That all changed in late 2012 when it was discovered that the two marques had been overstating the EPA mileage figures on a wide range of vehicles. Now...

London's famous retro-style black taxis are as much a part of the landscape as Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament, but so too is the pollution they create. The diesel engines used over several generations of taxi have been picked for their durability--racking up many hundreds of...

Launching early next year, the 2015 BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports coupe is the second stage in BMW's i-car program, dedicated to vehicles with electric drivetrains. While it isn't a full battery-electric vehicle (or range-extended EV) like the i3 city car, electric power is still an important part...