plug-in cars

One month from today, your 2011 Federal and state tax returns will be due. (It would have been a month from yesterday, but April 15 falls on a Sunday this year.) So consider this your friendly reminder to make sure that if you bought a plug-in car during 2011, you remember to apply for the Federal...

You hear both sides of the battery cost question a lot when you cover electric cars. One side says, "Electric-car batteries will be brutally expensive for many years to come, so electric cars will never be practical." The other side believes, "With wonderful new discoveries coming out of labs and...

Drag racing is conventionally noisy. Very, very, very noisy. And while electric drag racing is slowly getting started--and a number of racers have been rudely surprised by the White Zombie, a 1972 Datsun converted to electric power, and lots of it--you wouldn't think of production electrics like...

For the past year, the state of Washington has been examining the possibility of putting a $100 annual surcharge on electric vehicle registrations. A contentious issue, the house bill proposed to help the state recoup tax dollars lost as more people switch from gas-guzzling cars to plug-in and...

Hawaii is a beautiful state with warm tropical weather, but it's also an expensive place to drive despite the limited travel distances on each of its islands. Fuels have to be brought in by ship, and its gas prices ($4.45 a gallon this week) are some of the highest in the U.S. All those factors...

Over the past year, electric car charging stations have gone from being overpriced products with extortionate installation costs to items you can pick up at your local hardware store and install yourself. But if driving to your local Lowes and installing a pre-built unit seems a little easy or...

With the Chevrolet Volt having become such a punching bag of certain media outlets lately, we found ourselves musing on a remarkable notion in electric-car history: The father of the modern electric car is none other than conservative icon Ronald Reagan. That idea came a few weeks ago in an article...

We all understand what miles-per-gallon means for a gasoline car. And we can readily grasp the range in miles of an electric car. But when a car has both a gasoline engine and an electric motor, things can get complicated. The standard 2012 Toyota Prius is rated at 50 miles per gallon, and at best...

You may recognize the Jaguar C-X75 supercar from the 2010 Paris Auto Show, where it wowed the critics and public alike. You may also remember that the car was destined to be a plug-in, range-extended vehicle, the electric motors supplemented not by a regular gasoline engine, but by a series of...

Several years ago, the U.S. auto industry worried that Chinese carmakers would use inexpensive cars to gain a foothold here, just as Japanese and Korean makers had done. That hasn't happened, for many reasons--one being that making cars good enough to sell here is remarkably hard. More recently...

While the company didn't make its self-imposed deadline for first customer deliveries in February, Coda Automotive has a different reason to celebrate today. At 10:25 am Pacific time, the first production 2012 Coda Sedan electric car is set to drive off the assembly line at its plant in Benicia...

Certain parts of the media would have you believe that slow electric car sales indicate that no-one wants to drive electric cars. Not so, says all-electric car sharing service Car2Go, which has announced over 6,000 user registrations in its first 100 days. Founded last year by Daimler North America...

The news cycle can be a funny thing. We happen to have three stories today about concerns with plug-in cars: Consumer Reports' dead Fisker Karma test car, questions on the real-world range of the 2012 Tesla Model S at speed, and the so-far all-but-invisible 2012 Ford Focus Electric. We often get...

As automotive journalists, April 1 is the day we get to let our collective hair down and write stories about cars that sound plausible, but are purely fictitious. All in the spirit of April Fool’s day, of course. But sometimes our April Fool’s pranks get a little close to reality, as...

It's the first battery-electric car from a global automaker, a compact hatchback eagerly awaited for years and touted by some as a revolutionary vehicle that will change the way we drive forever. It's not the Nissan Leaf. It is, instead, the 2012 Ford Focus Electric, which earned a higher...

First off, just to be clear, the photo above is NOT a dead Fisker. It shows the 2012 Fisker Karma we road-tested three weeks ago parked at a Tesla Motors dealer in Los Angeles. But while our Fisker was running fine that day, Consumer Reports was not so lucky this week. The magazine bought a Fisker...

It’s no secret that electric cars prefer temperate weather in which to operate. That’s why many electric automakers add features to their cars to ensure that battery packs are kept at optimum temperature, regardless of how warm it is outside. But how do electric automakers test their...

Thirty years ago, bedrooms all over the world were adorned with pictures of supercars like the Ferrari 288 GTO, Ferrari Testarossa, Porsche 959 and Lamborghini Countach. At that time, very few of us worried about gas mileage, fuel economy or oil prices. All we wanted was a fast, sexy sportscar...

If you drive a plug-in car or a hybrid, the chance are you’ll be familiar with the concept of regenerative braking. But although regenerative braking might be the preferred way to slow down a plug-in or hybrid car, it could mean that your car’s traditional friction brakes don’t...

Aside from its 'i' electric car, Mitsubishi still attempts to cover the smaller sectors of the regular car market. Its new 2013 Outlander crossover, launched this week at the Geneva Motor Show, is one of its main volume models in global markets including the U.S. The all-new Outlander is the first...