Green Car News

The Canadian plug-in electric vehicle market in May was a good news/bad news sandwich: Sales held roughly steady from April, but dropped 40 percenton a year-over-year basis. Rounding out the month with some good news, May almost certainly marked the sale of the country's 3,000th electric car from a...

Plug-In Hybrids like the Ford Fusion Energi and Ford C-Max Energi—or the Toyota Prius Plug-In, among others—encourage those with regular commutes to plug in daily and do some (or all) of their commute in electric-only mode, without the gasoline engine ever firing up. But it appears that...

You want a four-seat car with the highest EPA combined gas-mileage rating you can get--but you've decided you don't want a hybrid. For 2014, two new competitors are joining the fray--and they seem likely to offer considerably better fuel efficiency than today's best-of-the-pack. This year, your...

The word "hyper", when used as a prefix, is generally considered to be bigger and better than anything prefixed with "super". Hypermarkets and superstores, for example. Or hypercars like the thousand-horsepower Bugatti Veyron, compared to supercars like the 560-horsepower Ferrari 458. Thus, Silex...

It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical when an alternative energy organization says we should move away from fossil fuels, and likewise reasonable to be skeptical when the fossil fuel industry says we have nothing to worry about. But when the world's largest coal producer turns to solar power...

The Audi A1 e-tron was almost a sideshow to our day at the company's future lab tron-experience at Berlin's spectacular and disused Tempelhof Airport. Drives squeezed in over lunch or at the end of the day reflect the A1 e-tron's unfortunate status: Stillborn prototype, rather than fully-fledged...

The problem with battery electric cars is that you can't take them on long trips, because they take so long to recharge. Or so goes the common wisdom, anyhow. Would a trip from Los Angeles to New York City in an electric car perhaps refute that statement? That's the idea discussed by CEO Elon Musk...

The Toyota Corolla has been the most popular compact car in the U.S. for more years than we can count. But this year's model is the oldest model in a category that has seen every one of its competitors refreshed in the last three years. The new 2014 Toyota Corolla, the 11th generation of a...

Name one car convenience feature you absolutely couldn't live without, and it'd probably be air conditioning. Whether you live in a hot or cold climate its cooling and demisting benefits can't be understated--it has safety benefits as much as comfort and convenience ones. It also has an effect on...

We lost count of just how many times Audi engineers used the phrase "no compromises" during their 'tron' presentations in Berlin. And driving the Audi A3 Sportback g-tron, a near-standard A3 running on natural gas, it's hard not to agree with them--at least initially. For the average car buyer, the...

Audi's 'tron' program has been, well, a little confusing over recent years. Back in the early days it was oh so simple--one concept car, known simply as the Audi e-tron, represented Audi's foray into future mobility. Since then it seems a dozen models have come and gone, but after presentations...

"Electric cars sold out!" isn't a phrase you'll have heard often over the past few years, but that's just what's happened in Southern California recently. Recent lease deals putting electric vehicles within reach of many consumers have led to a rush of sales--and certain models have sold out...

Mitsubishi has recalled 4,313 of its Outlander Plug-In Hybrids in Japan to fix a potential defect that it identified last month. The company resumed production of the plug-in hybrid Outlander after discovering the cause of a fire in one lithium-ion battery pack at a dealership in Japan. The first...

Toyota said today it would recall some 2010 Toyota Prius and 2010 Lexus HS 250h hybrid cars in the U.S. due to a potentially faulty brake-pressure accumulator. The component, said the company, may develop an internal crack due to metal fatigue caused by vibrations over the course of the vehicle...

It just keeps rising: Average gas mileage for new cars has once again hit a new high in the U.S. Statistics kept by the University of Michigan's Transport Research Institute (UMTRI) show sales-weighted MPG of 24.8 mpg in May. That contrasts with 24.6 mpg in March, and a rise from 24.5 mpg in...

It was small, unassuming, almost a shrinking violet, really. The first-generation Toyota Prius hybrid -- launched in the U.S. in 2001 -- was the first five-seat family car to offer hybrid-electric drive and unimaginably high gas mileage. Twelve years after its initial launch, the Prius family has...

Paul Scott may be one of the most dedicated electric-car advocates around. He sells Nissan Leafs for a living, and helped found advocacy group Plug-In America. A few weeks ago, he had a brilliant idea. Scott used a significant chunk of his life savings for a ticket to a pricey Barack Obama...

Plug-in car sales continued at a steady pace in May, with early estimates of perhaps 6,500 to 7,000 sold overall. As always, precise figures are impossible because Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] does not report monthly sales as every other carmaker does. We'll refine our totals as more reports come in...

We all know producing electricity is an energy-intensive process, but the complications don't stop at how utilities generate that power. Demand for electricity ebbs and flows, and often doesn't correlate with generating capacity. One way of dealing with these fluctuations in supply and demand is to...

Slowly, the economic recession is winding down and consumer moods are improving. Plus, today's new cars get better gas mileage than they did just a few years ago. Is this year the best time to buy a new car? According to several industry analysts quoted in The Detroit News, the answer is...