The thought came like a flash while on the highway heading into New York's Catskill Mountains: This is what all cars will be like soon. The 2017 Volkswagen e-Golf is absolutely the most normal, invisible, unremarkable electric car you can buy today. No one knew it was electric, or paid it any attention; it was simply another VW Golf in the... 2017 Volkswagen e-Golf: weekend drive report and range test
The thought came like a flash while on the highway heading into New York's Catskill Mountains: This is what all cars will be like soon. The 2017 Volkswagen e-Golf is absolutely the most normal, invisible, unremarkable electric car you can buy today. No one knew it was electric, or paid it any attention; it was simply another VW Golf in the...
I well remember the first time I saw a Renault Twizy. Wandering along the Champs Elysees in Paris in the spring of 2012, I happened upon a Renault showroom hosting an electric car extravaganza. Amid flashing lights, blasting techno music, and vamping supermodels sat a couple of Renault Zoes, the then-new electric subcompact. DON'T MISS: Is An...
Ensuring electric cars fit the needs of their owners is a requirement for boosting electric-vehicle sales. Adequate cargo space for an owner is necessary no matter what kind of car is being considered. Now, in one handy video, YouTuber Bjorn Nyquist has shown just how much cargo space is provided by a handful of popular electric cars on the market...
Of our eight Green Car Reports Best Car To Buy award winners since 2011, five have been compact five-door hatchbacks. It's a good, sensible format, by far the most popular segment in Europe and stronger even in Canada than in the U.S. Sadly, U.S. car buyers are not only ignoring small hatchbacks but passenger sedans as well—and moving...
BMW will use media days at the Los Angeles auto show, which begin on November 29, to unveil a new electric car that's never before been seen. The electric model that will debut in California wasn't otherwise specified in the German maker's announcement, which called it simply "a world premiere vehicle." It's entirely possible, however, that it...
Hyundai is known in the auto industry as an aggressive and very capable competitor, and the world's largest makers watch it closely and take it very seriously. The company didn't introduce its first hybrid car in the U.S. until 2011 and, frankly, that year's hybrid Sonata sedan wasn't very good. Just six model years later, the company's hybrids...
Electric cars provide a zero-emission driving experience, but one of the most important raw materials for their batteries—cobalt—has a supply chain that needs some work. About half of the world's cobalt supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country with high rates of child labor under very poor working conditions...
The dominant duo of the Chevy Volt and Bolt EV continued their winning ways in the Canadian market for new plug-in electric cars during October. Chevrolet sold 424 Volts to start the fourth quarter, down slightly from 483 in September. The vehicle’s 3,431 sales through October all but tied last year’s total of 3,469 and the Volt may...
If any electric car aside from the Tesla Model 3 can be called "long-awaited," it would be the redesigned 2018 Nissan Leaf. First thought to arrive as a 2016 model, it was widely assumed to be a 2017 to go head-to-head with the 238-mile Chevrolet Bolt EV launched last December. In the event, the second-generation Leaf has arrived as a 2018 model...
Both Hyundai and Kia planned to approach the electric and plug-in car market aggressively, but now the Korean siblings plan to boost production even over totals announced earlier this year. This past summer, both brands said they would increase their electrified car production to 50,000 units next year. Now, according to a report earlier this...
Chevy did it again. More specifically, GM delivered 2,781 Chevrolet Bolt EVs to buyers during October, a new high for its 238-mile electric car, and the highest reported sales of any plug-in electric vehicle last month. That brings the total number of Bolt EVs sold in 11 months to 17,083 (plus an additional 579 in the last two weeks of last...
Utility vehicles are hot. There's no denying it. The best-selling passenger cars in the U.S. have been mid-size sedans like the Toyota Camry for a couple of decades, but now they're likely to be eclipsed by compact crossover utility models like the Toyota RAV4. Of course, the Ford F-Series line of full-size pickup trucks—with a profuse array...
When electric cars first arrived in 2011, it was a reasonable question: Aren't you just shifting emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack? The answer is yes, but the carbon emissions per mile of an electric car—properly measured on a wells-to-wheels basis—are virtually always lower than those of a gasoline or diesel car. It's not...
First-hand details about the Tesla Model 3 remain almost as rare as the cars themselves; Tesla has built only a few hundred Model 3 electric cars since its launch in July Now a new video provides an incredibly in-depth look at Tesla's mass-production car, though we suspect it may have been approved by the company. It gives us a detailed look at...
Only one topic really mattered in the Tesla third-quarter financial results call for analysts held Wednesday afternoon: Model 3. In light of far lower September deliveries than promised as late as July by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, all interest focused on the more-affordable, higher-volume electric car that's meant to catapult Tesla to selling half a...
Although electric cars offer numerous benefits in engineering, design, and zero-emission operation, their overall weight remains a hurdle for automakers, especially as bigger batteries with longer ranges become more important. It now appears that Toyota may look to airless tires as a way to cut weight in its future electric cars: It debuted the...
It is just over five years since I bought my Better Place Renault 2012 Fluence ZE in Israel—and a little over five months since I returned it to Israel’s Renault importer for a cash settlement. By that time, the 22-kilowatt-hour battery capacity was down to 11.3 kwh, and a warning light had been on continuously since July 2016. I gave...
As automakers commit to more electric and electrified cars in the near future, many hurdles remain that can make owning an electric car more difficult than a conventional vehicle. Meanwhile, as electrified cars become more common, automakers and brands will also continue to introduce new models for vehicle ownership, many of them subscription...