plug-in cars

Should electric cars make noise? It’s one of the most contentious arguments in the electric vehicle world today, with passionate cases made on both sides for and against warning systems designed to announce the presence of a plug-in car to pedestrians. But early reports coming out of a recent...

Eighteen months after Australian Tesla roadster early adopter Simon Hackett broke the world record for the longest distance travelled in a production electric vehicle Tesla Australia is planning a 3,000 kilometer (1,864 mile) trek along the country’s east coast After receiving official...

Con men are well known for their ability to sell their victims fake goods, extract money or even con them out of their homes. But con men traditionally prey on individuals, concentrating on the vulnerable, naive or greedy. So just how did con men convince an automotive giant to hand over nearly...

It was the film that many electric car advocates cite as the reason they drive electric, but now electric car “who done it?” documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? has a sequel: Revenge of the Electric Car. And as the film’s director Chris Paine tells us on the ROTEC website...

Every new car has a few teething problems, but a few reports of Nissan's all-electric Leaf running out of charge prematurely hasn't helped the age-old stereotype that electric cars will leave their owners stranded without power. But are these incidents as rare as the reports suggest and what...

Nissan may have got heat recently for its long, drawn out and significantly delayed rollout of the 2011 Nissan Leaf, but it isn’t the only company struggling to fulfil its own sales figures for 2011. Over the past two years there have been a whole barrage of cars which were promised to the...

Think car buyers understand what a hybrid is, or a plug-in electric car? Think again. A new survey conducted by research firm Synovate finds that many of almost 1,900 new-car "buyers and intenders" don't understand how hybrid vehicles work. Worse, most of them don't seem to understand how...

It all started when General Motors CEO Dan Akerson said the company wanted to "double" production of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, its range-extended electric car. Various media outlets reported the news with varying degrees of accuracy. So far, GM has not officially said it will make more Volts...

In the past few years we’ve seen electric charge stations pop up everywhere from gas stations to electronics stores and banks. But now electric car owners in the Pacific Northwest have a new place to charge: the grocery store. Enter Fred Meyer Store. Based in Portland Oregon, the firm has...

Yesterday Tesla Motors Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Ownership Experience George Blankenship wrote an update on the upcoming Model S electric sedan on the company blog. Alongside an update on the alpha testing of Tesla’s much anticipated seven seat sedan, Blankenship outlined the...

To battery swap or fast-charge? That’s the question facing automakers worldwide as they decide on the best standard to adopt to charge the latest generation of electric cars. But just like the early days of video cassettes, a standard war is waging in which there can only be one winner. And...

You just never know what you'll hear at conferences. You might, for instance, hear Nissan America's director of product planning, Mark Perry, casually mention that the Nissan Leaf electric car now permits Level II 240-Volt charging at 3.3 kilowatts--"and we'll raise that in a year or so." In other...

Vehicle tours, the de facto way of getting a new electric car in front of the people most likely to buy it, are pretty much an accepted stage in any electric car rollout from a major automaker. So why is General Electric, a company which doesn’t even make an electric car embarking on its own...

Democracy can be a messy and ugly thing to watch in practice. Especially when it's being pointed toward carmakers, which aren't often the subject of mass protests pointed toward their future product lines. This morning, we received an e-mail with a link to a Causes page urging Mitsubishi not to...

Battle of the Titans it ain't. But for the third month in a row, Chevrolet sold more Volt range-extended electric cars than Nissan delivered Leaf plug-ins. During February, Nissan delivered 67 Leaf battery electric hatchbacks, bringing its two-month total to 154. Adding in the 19 delivered in...

There are very few vehicles so instantly recognisable world-wide as Volkswagen’s iconic VW microbus. But while examples of the rear-engined classic have unofficially been receiving electric drivetrain transplants for decades courtesy of electric vehicle devotees, we haven’t seen an...

Ford has been burning the midnight oil for several years now, and its hard work is paying off. The automaker's One Ford philosophy has resulted in a slimmer product lineup, two fewer brands, and a healthy bottom line. Ford also boasts a much spiffier brand image among shoppers these days, thanks in...

Toyota, maker of the hybrid Prius and the upcoming plug-in version of the Prius, will launch its own home electric car charger, jumping into what is shaping up to be a crowded market. Major companies and startups alike have surged into the electric car charging segment. GE launched the WattStation...

The automotive world is, it seems, a very strange place. Less than a month after Hyundai admitted it had delayed the 2011 Sonata Hybrid launch in the U.S. to remove a feature that let the driver disable its virtual engine sound at speeds below 12 miles per hour, Nissan Europe has confirmed that it...

Google said today it had invested in a startup called Transphorm, whose power-conversion efficiency technology could some day help create more efficient electric cars. The company’s technology can reduce by up to 90 percent the power lost when one form of energy is converted to the other...