plug-in cars

If you own an electric car you’ll also be familiar with the wide variety of charging stations on the market today. If you’ll forgive us for saying so, very few of them are design classics. There’s a good reason too - charging stations are nothing more than appliances, built...

Right now, the sole plug-in vehicle you can buy from Chevrolet--or indeed all of General Motors--is the 2011 Volt range-extended electric car. But that doesn't mean GM isn't testing a lot of other concepts. The company just isn't doing it in North America, the sole region where Volts are sold this...

Earlier this week we said that that Nissan needed a new, quirky way of advertising its 2011 Nissan Leaf that didn’t involve making household gadgets run on gasoline or relying on trained polar bears. Nissan can’t have heard us. Instead of a quirky new ad campaign, Nissan is attempting...

How do you legally have fun with a $109,000 electric sportscar that can do 0-60 in under 4 seconds, has excellent grip, and a top speed of 125 mph? That’s exactly the question facing many Tesla Roadster owners looking to test their cars - and themselves - to the limit in a safe environment...

Making an electric car is a particularly tough business, fraught with financial risk, engineering challenges and tough competition from small-scale and mainstream automakers alike. And in that world, some automakers will succeed in bringing electric cars to market, while others flounder at the...

Earlier this year we took delivery of our very own 2011 Nissan Leaf. Just like the thousands of other customers worldwide, we took our place in the queue last year and had an agonizingly long wait before we were sitting behind the wheel. But just under 3 months and 5,000 miles after driving off the...

Chinese electric car and battery firm Build Your Dreams (BYD) has announced that its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange raised just $219 million, 65% of what the Warren-Buffet backed firm had hoped to raise. But was the $177 million delta between the actual money raised...

Californian electric auto maker Tesla Motors might be in the final stages of bringing its 2012 Model S luxury sedan to market, but if you want to own one of its iconic two-seat roadsters you’ll need to order one soon. According to vivacious Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the firm is just a few months...

Last December we told you that the His Holiness The Pope was keen on swapping his large gas-guzzling Mercedes SUV ‘popemobile’ for a suitable electric car. Now Vatican officials have confirmed the details of Pope Benedict XVI’s latest ride: a custom-made M-Class plug-in hybrid...

Google’s head offices in Mountain View, California has just got some new neighbors, but unlike most of the other companies in the fabled silicon valley it isn’t a fresh-faced venture-funded software or green tech startup firm. It’s an automaker. Moving into offices just over the...

If you were in the market for a new car then you might find yourself visiting your local dealership to get a test-drive and grill the salesperson about fuel economy, specifications and financing. But it turns out that in the case of electric cars it’s not the dealers which make the most...

Despite media attempts to conjure a "sales battle" between the 2011 Chevy Volt and the 2011 Nissan Leaf, both companies are selling every car they can manage to get into the showrooms. Now Chevrolet has released its first look at who is actually buying its Volt range-extended electric cars. The...

The transition from gasoline to plug-in hybrid and fully electric cars will admittedly be a slow one, but sometimes we wonder if our colleagues in the mainstream media would rather the transition not happen at all. At least, that’s the message we got reading an article by the usually balanced...

You probably already know this, but electric cars and gasoline cars are completely different beasts. In fact, concepts we’ve become accustomed to in gasoline cars such as the creep and kick-down functions of an automatic gearbox are not natively present in a electrical drivetrain - and yet...

Well-established charging station manufacturer Clipper Creek has just unveiled what it claims is the smallest electric vehicle charging station currently available on the market. Costing $995 and weighing in at 7 pounds, the Clipper Creek LCS-25 unit looks like the portable 110V level 1charging...

BMW can’t be accused of rushing into the electric car market. After nearly two years of BMW Mini E testing and countless hours of feedback sessions from test participants, BMW is just about to start its second round of electric car testing with its 1-series based Active-E. But if you want to...

If you're on the U.S. waiting list for a 2011 Nissan Leaf, we certainly hope you already have a charging station already installed in your garage. Bloomberg caught wind that some consumers are having their orders dropped temporarily until they install a plug-in charger at home and present the...

You’d think that General Motors already had a pretty impressive grasp of the electric vehicle market with its 2011 Chevrolet Volt, but the automaker announced today that its investment arm was providing part of the capital in a joint $30 million venture investment in a company that makes...

We’re less than a week away from Father’s Day - the annual celebration of what our Fathers mean to us - and sometimes an excuse for presents, trips and surprises. If your Father is an electric vehicle fan but you haven’t yet got him a present don’t worry: here’s just...

The 2011 Nissan Leaf may have been the first all-electric mass-produced electric car from a major automaker to hit the roads, but in the first few months following its launch Nissan came under a lot of criticism for not having a more sophisticated thermally managed battery pack inside the Leaf. Now...