Range-Extended Electric Vehicle

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...

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...

You may have noticed we feature the late Mazda RX-8 rather less often than the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car. Considering the final iteration of the four-seat, four-door sports car delivered just 23 mpg highway from its 1.3-liter Renesis rotary engine, it really wasn’t a green...

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...

There are many types of plug-in cars; some makers go for battery electrics, others for plug-in hybrids or range-extended electric vehicles. At the Geneva Motor Show yesterday, Hyundai unveiled a concept coupe showing how it might package an electric car offering a 75-mile range with a...

Korean automaker Hyundai has revealed the first image of an electric concept due to hit the show stands at Geneva next week. Rather than a pure battery-electric vehicle though, the "i-oniq" concept uses a gasoline range-extending engine to keep the vehicle moving when the batteries die. The i-oniq...

If the proverbial Chinese curse is true, Fisker Automotive has truly been living in interesting times. Its Karma range-extended electric luxury sport sedan struggled into the market in December, months late, and in January the DoE froze $336 million in untapped loans to the company. Now Fisker has...

John McDole, the inventor behind the Volt gun rack, shares his thoughts on the Volt, its critics and the politics surrounding the car.

Now that Fisker has managed to launch its 2012 Karma and start delivering cars to customers, the company is looking ahead toward expanding its model range. Reports today in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf indicate that it will unveil the production version of its 2013 Fisker Surf 'shooting brake'...

"New Bus for London" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Routemaster", but the mission is the same - to improve London's busy public transport system, just like the original Routemaster did from its introduction in 1956. But while the original was revolutionary for its lightweight aluminum...

Can a Republican firearms instructor also love the series-hybrid Chevrolet Volt? The author says yes.

After four years, an economic crisis, an industry meltdown, and plug-in cars becoming politically problematic, the 2012 Fisker Karma is on the streets at last. And it's a real car. We've driven it, shot video behind the wheel, and now we've formally reviewed it. We're still sorting out what we...

This is the week when driving impressions of the 2012 Fisker Karma have started to appear, as Fisker invites in waves of automotive journalists for a half-day of driving in and around Los Angeles. (We'll have our report early next week, but we had a brief drive a few weeks ago, and another with...

Sixteen months ago, General Electric announced it would place the "largest order in history" for electric cars, to be used by its employees who are issued company cars. Now, those cars are starting to arrive and be placed with employees. And where changes are made, personnel policies are sure to...

To say the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car has become a political punching bag would be to understate the obvious. Now, GM is slowly, carefully trying to get the facts about the Volt out to the public at large, hoping to win hearts and minds in a larger battle involving electric cars...

With last month's sales of the 2012 Chevy Volt less than half what they were in December, Chevrolet has stepped up its efforts to sell its innovative but pricey range-extended electric car. And it's doing it the old-fashioned way, by "putting money on the hood," as salespeople say. According to...

Range extenders, small gasoline engines that produce electricity to run electric cars after their battery packs discharge, will likely see huge innovation in the coming years. While the Chevy Volt and Fisker Karma both use off-the-shelf GM engines as range extenders, many companies are working on...

You may recall that a few years ago, there was a flurry of interest in compressed-air cars. In the end, it didn't pan out. Compressed air just isn't a dense enough form of energy storage to make it practical for vehicle use--even in very lightweight cars--and no such passenger car is sold anywhere...

Often, timing is everything. So Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) and his plans for Wednesday likely aren't helped by the NHTSA's decision last Friday to close its Volt battery-safety inquiry after GM developed upgrades for the Volt battery crash structure and coolant filler, and offered them to all existing...

This is a perfectly serious question. A basic 2012 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 full-size pickup truck starts around $23,000, and the rear-wheel drive XFE model is rated by the EPA at 18 mpg combined. The Silverado Hybrid model, a 1500 twin-cab, starts at around $40,000, and the RWD model is rated at...