Green Car News

Companies that convert regular gasoline cars to electric, or add a plug-in option to regular hybrids, are nothing new. The same can't be said for companies taking electric cars and turning them into range-extended electric vehicles with small gasoline engines--but that's exactly what Hyperdrive...

The 'Ultra' tag will be familiar to fans of endurance motor racing, seen since 2010 on Audi's Le Mans-winning race cars. It hasn't yet featured on an Audi production car though, up until now--and as you'd expect, it's Audi's most fuel-efficient production car ever. The Audi A3 1.6 TDI Ultra uses a...

July marked the 237th anniversary of the American Republic, and the 146th birthday of Canadian Confederation. While it could also have marked another month for the Chevy Volt as the best-selling Canadian plug-in electric vehicle, when the vehicle registration data comes out, we may see the Tesla...

Hyundai has announced plans to transform an existing hydrogen refueling station in California into a cutting edge renewable fueling station. The station will be built on the site of an existing hydrogen station at Hyundai America Technical Center Inc. in Chino, California. The original station was...

It's still fairly early days for the Tesla Model S, and while the car is finding fans across the globe, it's still seeing various updates and option packages that early buyers didn't have access to. Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] has recently announced a new line of option packages and pricing for...

Marketing plug-in electric cars isn't all that easy. There are many different reasons people buy electric cars, and for the mass market, the high prices against gasoline cars of the same size can lead to sticker shock. So among the many efforts to put a little muscle behind explaining why plug-in...

Discovering fire is undoubtedly a high point in mankind's history, but it's easy to overlook its benefits when it's consuming something you own. We'll forgive you if your thoughts turned towards electric cars at this stage. After all, the last few years have seen a few high-profile electric car...

Just how close do cars get to their official EPA gas mileage figures? We expect it's a question many of our readers are familiar with--either in keeping an eye on their own car's gas mileage, or from friends asking about their next car. It's become all the more important in recent months, with...

Over the next few months, the Chevrolet Volt will get just that little bit more American--as its battery cells are now produced in the U.S. Korean battery maker LG Chem opened a plant in Holland, Michigan two years ago, and production of lithium-ion cells for Chevy's range-extended plug-in Volt is...

Some of our electric car-owning readers already reap the benefits of solar energy with roof-mounted panels, but on a grid level solar still has a long way to go. The U.S. Department of Energy wants to change that, revealing targets that would mean one third of the Western U.S. energy demands could...

The environmental impact of plug-in electric cars is a hot topic right now, and a fiercely debated one at that. A couple of weeks ago, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk pledged to dive into it himself. Musk tweeted, "Am seeing many poorly argued attacks on 'true' CO2 impact of electric cars. Will rewrite...

All eyes have been on BMW over the past few weeks as it launched the 2014 i3 electric car, two years after the concept first debuted at the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show. So where does BMW go from here? A wider range of electric cars, perhaps? Well, yes--with the BMW i8 sports car and mooted i5 on the...

Sales of plug-in electric cars continued at a relatively steady pace in July, keeping the sector on track for something near 100,000 sales by the end of the year. While last month's half-year total wasn't quite enough to double the 2012 total of 53,000 electric cars, sales are now running at an...

Many buyers of new Ford cars--both its 2013 C-Max and Fusion hybrids, and those fitted with its EcoBoost line of downsized, turbocharged engines--report real-world gas mileage much lower than the cars' EPA ratings. Ford is trying to counter almost a year's worth of media attention to these concerns...

Japanese companies have explored the concept of electric vehicles powering houses for some time, but with events like last year's Hurricane Sandy fresh in peoples' minds, some U.S. organizations are investigating it too. One of these is the Department of Defense. Another is Via Motors, the Bob...

$40,000 will get you plenty of electric cars these days, including the recently-unveiled 2014 BMW i3. They can be fun on the right road, and it's great knowing you aren't using any gas... but there have to be bigger electric thrills elsewhere, right? The GreenWing eSpyder could be what you need to...

Want an indication of just how quickly gas mileage is improving? Consider the 2011 BMW 335d. BMW's last diesel 3-Series model achieved a respectable 36 mpg on the highway and an unimpressive 23 mpg city, for a combined 27 mpg figure. The 2014 BMW 328d's gas mileage figures have just been revealed...

Land Rover's iconic Defender has proved itself many thousands of times over by now on everything from farms to off-road endurance rallies to the battlefield. Its latest task is a little more relaxed than those duties, but then the powertrain is a little different too. Land Rover's first electric...

Government lending to green technology companies has been a political hot potato in recent years. Huge loans were offered to dozens of companies. Automakers, solar companies, biofuel concerns and more received money, but high-profile failures like Solyndra lent credence to those critical of the...

California loves its hybrids. And according to figures from Toyota, it loves their hybrids more than anyone else's. A full 61 percent of new hybrids sold in California are from the Toyota brand, despite tough and growing competition from marques like Ford. The Blue Oval places second in...