Green Car News

Electric-car charging stations may be coming to the U.S. Senate garage, under a bill passed yesterday on a bipartisan basis. But fear not, zealous guardians of the sacred taxpayer dollar--no public funds will be used for the installation. Yesterday, S.739 was passed by the Senate. The bill had been...

BMW's first-ever hybrid sedan, the BMW ActiveHybrid 7 launched for 2011, was an odd beast. Its mild-hybrid system paired a 455-horsepower 4.4-liter twin-turbo V-8 with a small electric motor, making it a bit faster than its conventional counterpart but only marginally more fuel-efficient. For 2013...

If you’re in the market for an electric car, the chances are you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that you’re going to need to spend upwards of $30,000 in order to get a modern, convenient electric car. If that’s too much, you can always go second hand with any number of...

There was a time, not so long ago, when car owners were expected to carry out basic maintenance and regular servicing on their car using a handful of wrenches and common automotive tools. Nowadays, most of the maintenance is carried out by professional garage mechanics and dealers. but there are...

Who buys a Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid car? It’s a question that we’ve tried to answer in the past, examining initial sales data from General Motors to try and create the automotive equivalent of an indentikit Volt buyer. Unsurprisingly, many early-adopting Volt buyers were green car...

There's kind of a running joke within the electric car world that the next generation of batteries is just a decade away. And the next time you ask, it's still a decade away. Even a decade later. Well, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the next generation of usable battery technology...

By carefully controlling the launch of the 2012 Ford Focus Electric, Ford is trying to appease buyers who want an electric car, while satisfying accountants who are hesitant to invest heavily in the launch.

A funny thing happened around the politics of electric cars. The screaming stopped. We've waited almost two months to write about it, but it would appear that the chorus of right-wing attacks on electric cars--including the Chevrolet Volt--has mysteriously and quite suddenly abated. In late March...

One of the most anticipated cars of the year is the 2013 Ford Fusion, which will be attempting to cater to a much wider audience than the current model thanks to the introduction of three separate variants: regular gas, hybrid and plug-in hybrid. While the plug-in hybrid, or Energi as Ford likes to...

Car buyers are notoriously fond of focusing only on the purchase price of new vehicles, without much thinking about the total cost of ownership. For electric cars that may cost twice or more what a similar-size gasoline vehicle does, that's a problem. Still, two separate pieces of evidence begin to...

Nissan announced yesterday that it would start building its e-NV 200 electric van in Spain next year The small van will be Nissan's second electric vehicle globally. It follows the Leaf compact electric hatchback, which went on sale in December 2010 as a 2011 model. First shown at this year's...

This story is now a couple of weeks old, but we haven't hurried to publish it. The gist is that the unique Aptera three-wheeled electric car is supposedly going to be reborn, and will return to the U.S. market sometime next year. A new company, Aptera USA, purchased the assets of the old Aptera...

Small cars are fun to drive--or at least they should be. But there may be a law of diminishing returns in adapting the very smallest cars from Asia and Europe to the U.S. market. We don't much like the driving experience in the Smart ForTwo, so we had high hopes for the 2012 Scion iQ minicar--the...

One of the first experiences many of today's electric car drivers had with EVs may well have been with a home-built conversion. With comparatively few factory-built electric cars available until quite recently, conversions and low-volume production models were the only ways into electric vehicle...

With Toyota celebrating the sale of its four-millionth hybrid, and Ford poised to launch another hybrid car in the U.S., it’s easy to forget that other automakers also make hybrid cars. Take the 2012 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid for example. Although Hyundai has only offered a hybrid version of its...

There are plenty of advantages to diesel engines: High fuel efficiency, low CO2 emissions, and in modern turbocharged applications, plenty of easy-to-access torque and power. However, they aren't without their faults--expense, particulate emissions and a lack of smoothness compared to the best...

Ever since Daimler invested $50 million for 9 percent of Tesla back in May 2009, the two companies have had a close working relationship on electric car technology. Since that investment, Tesla has provided Smart and Mercedes-Benz with drivetrains for various electric cars, including...

Visiting family this Memorial Day weekend? If so, you're probably driving, as it's still the most convenient way for many people to cover most distances. With millions of people simultaneously hitting the road though, that's a whole lot of fuel being used. That's why we've compiled a list of ten...

All over the U.S., police forces rely on hundreds of highly-trained motorcycle riders enforcing law and order on specially-built motorcycles like the 2012 Harley Davidson 2012 Electra Guide or 2012 BMW Boxer. Now Californian electric motorcycle manufacturer Zero motorcycles is offering police...

Every year, some car models pass from our midst, often dying quietly and unnoticed. Here's our list of the green cars that are no longer with us. There were, of course, more cars than just this handful of the greenest models that died in 2012; here's a more complete list. Chevrolet Aveo While the...