As world leaders gather at a climate conference in Poland, the U.S. EPA proposes new looser standards for coal plants. A VW executive says electric cars could spell the end of front-wheel drive. And Electrify America opens its first two 350-kilowatt DC fast chargers a few miles from the Tesla factory. All this and more on Green Car Reports... Ghosn charged, more ultra-fast chargers, EPA rollbacks: Today’s Car News
As world leaders gather at a climate conference in Poland, the U.S. EPA proposes new looser standards for coal plants. A VW executive says electric cars could spell the end of front-wheel drive. And Electrify America opens its first two 350-kilowatt DC fast chargers a few miles from the Tesla factory. All this and more on Green Car Reports... 
Japanese prosecutors charged former Nissan chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn on Monday with underreporting his income for eight years. He was arrested Nov. 19 and has been held in a Tokyo jail since, but has not been formally charged until now. Ghosn is known as the father of the Nissan Leaf electric car, after committing the company publicly to the... 
Electrify America installed its first 350-kilowatt fast chargers next to a Tesla Supercharging station at an outlet mall outside San Francisco last week. The two new 350-kw chargers are among the fastest publicly available units in the U.S., capable of recharging certain cars at up to 20 miles per minute of charging—even though the first of... 
On Thursday, EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced a new rule that will allow coal-fired power plants to emit more than 35 percent more global warming pollution than the current law allows. The proposal came on the eve of a climate summit in Poland that started over the weekend where world leaders were set to codify the next steps in... 
First it was Tesla, now Volkswagen. Ever since British designer and engineer Alec Issigonis developed the original Mini Cooper for 1959, front-wheel-drive vehicles have been consolidating their hegemony on the car market. Volkswagen itself was one of the main champions of front-wheel drive when it switched from the rear-wheel-drive Beetle to the... 
Wealthy buyers looking for an electric Aston Martin may not have to wait until the brand's new Rapide E performance car—at least not previous owners who may already have an old Aston Martin laying around. The company has joined other European automakers in developing an electric drive system for its classic cars. Aston Martin mounts its... 
Which automaker made a commitment to end gas engine production (eventually)? What electric car may finally have gotten a name? This is our look back at the Week In Reverse—right here at Green Car Reports—for the week ending Dec. 7, 2018. This week our news came mostly from follow-up insights from the LA Auto Show as well as mainly... 
Road-tripping along in the 2019 Audi e-tron, your passenger might not even know (or care) that you’re in an all-electric utility vehicle—rather than just an extraordinarily quiet gasoline one. And as the driver, you might even forget. It gets right to Audi’s point behind the e-tron, which is to make a vehicle that’s an Audi... 
We had the first chance to drive the new electric Audi e-tron quattro SUV. Startup electric truck-maker Rivian says it plans to follow Tesla's lead in selling cars directly to consumers—mostly. Toyota reveals how the new Prius AWD-e gets great gas mileage. And a new report shows greenhouse gas emissions are back on the rise. All this and... 
Electric cars worry traditional car dealerships. Tesla sells cars nationwide without dealers—even if buyers have to drive over state lines to get them in some cases. Electric cars eat into one of dealerships' main profit centers, service, because they don't need oil changes, spark plugs, or even air filters. And traditional dealerships have... 
![Smokestacks [CREDIT: Global Climate Budget 2018]](https://images.hgmsites.net/tmb/smokestacks-credit-global-climate-budget-2018_100682094_t.gif)
Blame China—and India. Global carbon emissions are on the rise, and hit record levels in 2018, after remaining flat in 2016 and experiencing a small gain last year, a new report shows. The report by the Global Carbon Project came out just as world leaders gathered in Poland to discuss the next steps for reducing carbon emissions under the... 
The all-wheel drive version of the Toyota Prius introduced last week at the LA Auto Show earns an astoundingly good EPA fuel economy rating of 50 mpg combined—nearly as good as the 52 mpg earned by much of the Prius lineup (LE, XLE and Limited). But the system isn’t nearly as capable as the one you might encounter in Toyota’s... 
VW announced that it is now designing the last combustion engines it will sell. Ford trademarks two possible names that could go on its upcoming electric SUV. Toyota explains why it still uses nickel-metal hydride batteries. And a Chinese battery company says it will pass the magic $100-per-kilowatt-hour threshold as soon as 2020. All this and... 
Toyota continues to stay the course with nickel-metal hydride battery cells for many of its hybrid vehicles, even though most other hybrid vehicles from other brands have moved on to using lithium-ion cells exclusively. According to Prius chief engineer Shoichi Kaneko, in an interview this past week at the LA Auto Show, most of Toyota’s... 
Fans of the Ford Mustang didn't take it well earlier this year when Ford suggested it might call its upcoming 300-mile electric SUV the Mach 1. Now new trademark filings discovered by The Drive show a new possibility for the name: the "Mach E" or the "Mach-E." Ford filed trademark applications for both names on Nov. 26, the report notes, for use... 
Envision Energy, a Chinese company that bought Nissan's former AESC battery business, says it will be able to make battery packs for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour in the next two years. That number is significant, because it's the threshold at which automakers and analysts say electric cars will become cheaper to manufacture and sell than gas... 
Our readers speculate a lot on this site about how long it will be until gas and diesel engines fade out, and the transition to electric cars is complete. Volkswagen may just have given an answer to that question in a conference at the automaker's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, on Tuesday. The brand's strategy chief, Michael Jost, said the... 
Toyota announced pricing for the new 2019 Prius AWD-e. In trade talks with the Trump administration, VW's CEO revealed the company could use Ford factories in the U.S. to build new models—which could include electric cars. Rioters in France this month won what they wanted: a reprieve from higher gas taxes meant to reduce climate change. And... 
In trade talks in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess revealed the automaker is talking with Ford about using its factories in the U.S., and possibly sharing its upcoming electric car platform the American automaker. The two automakers announced in June that they planned an alliance to collaborate on some future products... 
Pickups and electric cars. Two opposites that haven't been attracted to each other—until now. Our readers, though, seem excited about the possibility of combining the two. In our Twitter poll last week, we asked, "What electric car are you most excited to hear about from the LA Auto Show?" And our respondents overwhelmingly picked the Rivian...