2018 BMW i3 electric car range adds sportier i3s version

2018 BMW i3 and i3sWhile the 2018 BMW i3 will formally debut next week at the Frankfurt auto show, the company has released details ahead of time on the updates to the lineup of its compact electric car. While battery range stays the same as last year, a new i3s model (for Sport) has been added, with revised suspension and a Sport mode added to its drive-mode...

Electric cars and public charging: hot dog and bun, not chicken or egg?

2015 Nissan Leaf at evGo fast charger at Livingston Mall, Livingston, NJ   [photo: John Briggs]It's an old cliche used to indicate an unsolvable problem: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Sometimes it's applied to the challenge of electric-car charging stations: which comes first, sales of the cars or installation of public charging to support them? Well, Jeff Allen isn't having any of it. He wants to talk about hot dogs, and buns...

Here’s how to comment on EPA proposal to loosen emission limits on cars

Chrome exhaust pipeOn August 10, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would reopen the Comment Period for the vehicle-emission standards for model years 2022 through 2025 it had finalized in January. The auto industry and its lobbyists had complained that the agency had moved too quickly, despite its issuance last summer of a voluminous Technical...

VW engineer gets 40 months in jail, $200K fine, for diesel cheating role

2015 Volkswagen Golf TDI SEFormer Volkswagen employee James Liang was sentenced in Detroit yesterday to serve 40 months in prison and pay a $200,000 fine for his role in the global Volkswagen diesel-emission cheating scandal. It was a stiffer sentence than expected for an engineer who helped to create software that controlled exhaust emissions only when Volkswagen and...

New LG Michigan plant could boost GM electric-car domestic content

2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV pre-production vehicles at Orion Township Assembly Plant, March 2016The question of where consumer goods are made has become more prominent in our political discourse of late, cars among them. Every automobile sold in the U.S. carries a listing of content sources, specifying what percentage by value of its overall content comes from which countries or regions. Electric cars, it turns out, have some anomalies...