Green Car News

Smart's eBike electric bicycle has been attracting a lot of attention recently, but it's not the only electric bike to emerge from Germany. Audi has teased its own electric bike in a short video, featuring French freestyle trials rider Julien Dupont. Where Smart's bike is very much a commuting...

Unless you drive a car powered by electricity or some form of home-brew biofuel, the chances are you visit a gas-station with some form of regularity. In fact, it’s probably become so mundane that you don’t even pay attention to that little metal hose any more. But on Thursday, the...

Remember the early days of mobile phones, when lots of small carriers competed and roaming was just a far-distant dream? Welcome to the wild world of electric-car charging, folks. Right now, more than a dozen networks--some local, some regional, some national--operate Level 2 charging stations for...

Hydrogen fuel-cell cars have not progressed as fast as some companies had predicted 10 or 15 years ago. No carmaker sells a fuel-cell vehicle in any kind of volume, but plug-in electric cars are on sale in North America, Europe, and Asia, with tens of thousands sold (and likely more than 100,000...

Oh dear. This could get ugly. The owner of a new 2012 Fisker Karma that burned to the ground in Sugar Land, Texas, is trading accusations with Fisker. The fire destroyed two other cars and damaged the garage it was stored in and other parts of the house. The owner reported a smell of burning rubber...

After revealing more details about the Tesla Model S just last week, Tesla Motors said it expected to use the last of its Department of Energy loan by the end of this year. The company now confirms it also has plans to start paying back the loan this year too--and will be the first company to do...

For years, we’ve covered California’s High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane access perks for drivers of ultra-low or zero-emissions cars. Reasonably simple to understand, with a few exceptions, California’s HOV lane rules allows drivers of qualifying vehicles fitted with official HOV...

Put most people behind the wheel of an electric car, and you can guarantee one of the first things they'll talk about is the silence. Unfortunately, that silence has led some legislators to require EVs to emit a sound in order to warn pedestrians of their presence, stifling one of the genre's...

Going electric makes a lot of sense for the smallest city-commute vehicles—like the Smart Fortwo Electric Drive, which is still on the way. But in the meantime, it looks like a different Smart electric vehicle will arrive first: the Smart eBike. The Smart eBike is a bicycle, but an...

There are several ways to better gas mileage--ensuring your car is in good health, making sure the tires are correctly inflated, getting rid of unnecessary weight, removing roof-boxes... and that's before you even improve your eco-driving technique. For some, the methods above are only the start...

Electric-car infrastructure firm Better Place has spent the past few years creating some serious waves in the electric car world with grandiose claims that it can make electric cars as convenient to use as gasoline ones. Alongside its fully integrated smart-grid network of charging stations...

It's a mark of how heavily Ford has been promoting its range of efficient EcoBoost engines, that the word seems to have been around for decades. In reality, the heavy roll-out of EcoBoost-badged models in several vehicle lines means that customers have quickly taken the turbocharged motors to their...

Why would you buy a plug-in electric car? To save money on gas? To save the planet? Maybe. But that's not how they should be marketed, said Hollywood producer Dean Devlin. "The Volt is an amazing, groundbreaking car," he said. "The Leaf is a gigantic breakthrough--but they're being sold as...

Although a very small niche group might see minicars like the Scion iQ and Smart Fortwo as a fashion statement, or as a way to reap special parking or commuting benefits, for most Americans—and even a lot of green-car shoppers—it's quite frankly a little hard to see the point in getting...

What makes a new car a success? Is it the awards it wins, initial sales figures, how many people order it, or the average amount of time it stays on a dealer lot before being sold? Together, all of the above help us work out which cars are popular and which ones aren’t, but according to...

The long-running saga of Heather Peters versus Honda Motor Company has apparently come to an end after a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge overturned a previously awarded small claims judgement in Peters’ favor. Peters had been successful in pursuing her case against Honda, with a lesser court...

We already know that April was a great month for Toyota Prius hybrid sales, but it turns out that the first quarter of the year produced stellar sales numbers for hybrids in general, as well as plug-in electric cars. More than 100,000 hybrids and plug-in cars--113,457--were sold in January...

New global car programs cost a lot, usually starting at $1 billion for a new platform and all the engineering, testing, and validation of the vehicle(s) it involves. Now a high-ranking Nissan executive has given a glimpse of what the company is spending on its electric-car program: $4 billion...

Magna Steyr may be one of the most significant automakers you’ve (likely) never heard of. There are no Magna Steyr dealers, and it doesn’t sell directly to the public, but if you’re an automaker, the company is at the top of your call list when engineering services or contract...

Tesla motors has announced that it is on schedule to deliver the first examples of its Model S electric sedan by June. The company is also set to use all of its $465 million Department of Energy loan within the next six months, though Elon Musk says Tesla is still on target to turn a profit in...