The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority just cut back on a big reason that drivers buy electric cars: free access to toll lanes in the county. Caltrans, the state department of transportation, still allows electric cars to use high-occupancy vehicle lanes statewide. However, the toll lanes in Los Angeles County are managed...
Trucks use an awful lot more fuel than cars. Consequently, the fuel you can save from making small improvements can be massive. That’s what Bob Sliwa aims to do when he sets out from San Diego, Calif., on May 17 in his Shell Airflow Starship record truck. Hauling his full-sized trailer fully loaded to the truck's 80,000 pounds capacity, he...
What ever happened to electric-car company BYD? And what's BMW's new electric-car strategy? This is our look back at the Week In Reverse—right here at Green Car Reports—for the week ending on Friday, April 17, 2018. On Friday, we took learned some more details about the new diesel F150, and had a chance to offer some driving...
Porsche builds its own super fast electric-car charging network. road trip gas mileage review: Can the Toyota Camry Hybrid XLE live up to its 44 mpg highway fuel economy rating? And students vote for and fund the first battery-powered all electric bus fleet at the University of California Irvine. All this and more on Green Car Reports. Porsche...
BYD is a Chinese electric car company that was founded to "Build Your Dreams." Now it claims to be the biggest electric vehicle company in the world—and it's building buses. We're not sure who dreams about buses, but the company is now building the first battery-powered, all-electric bus fleet at the University of California, Irvine...
The grim reaper might be coming for sedans, but the 2018 Toyota Camry isn’t ready to go. Today’s Toyota Camry suffers from multiple personality disorder, which, I discovered after 800 miles behind the wheel, might also be its biggest asset. Dressed up in Camry XSE trim, it wants to be a sports car. Slumming it with hubcaps, the Camry L...
Porsche is getting its dealerships on board with selling electric cars, in preparation for its upcoming Mission E electric sedan, by insisting that each of the company's 189 U.S dealerships install fast charger with enough juice to charge the car's big, 300-mile battery to substantially full in just over 20 minutes. Presumably during this time...
Ford has a gem of a diesel engine under the hood of the 2018 F-150 Power Stroke—as long as drivers aren’t enamored with good fuel economy. Wait, what? After a day of driving F-150 diesels in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado, unladen, with beds loaded up with heavy building materials, and with big trailers...
Passenger cars at Ford have short lives. The automaker announced Wednesday that it would pare its lineup to just two cars: The Mustang and a new Focus Active crossover, which is based on the next-generation Focus unveiled this month. The Ford Fiesta, Fusion, Taurus, and Focus hatchback and sedan will not be renewed for future generations in the...
After Lexus introduced a new ES 300h hybrid yesterday, we finished out test drive in the considerably more luxurious LC 500h coupe. Honda introduced its new electric car for China, and it's based on the small HR-V SUV that it sells here. And we take a deep dive into the next technology that will make gas engines more fuel effiicent. All this and...
As fast as electric cars are improving and expanding, there are some things that gas engines do better—many experts agree that gasoline engines will be around for several decades. Developing electric cars and refining gas engines aren't mutually exclusive. Vehicle electrification will continue to expand rapidly, and internal combustion...
Ever since Honda announced 10 years ago that it would build an SUV based on the Fit, it also talked about building a hybrid version of the new car. Indeed, a hybrid version of the HR-V is already on sale in much of the world, where the car is known as the Honda Vezel. At the Beijing auto show this week, Honda took the concept one step further with...
As the industry marches toward greener cars, battery and hybrid drivetrains are expanding into vehicle segments never before concerned with fuel economy ratings or much with emissions. No segment is excluded from this progress, not even luxury grand tourers. Toyota, along with its luxury division Lexus, is the king of hybrids, so it was no...
Lexus reveals its new ES sedan, complete with its hybrid counterpart, the ES 300h. Fuel economy and power both go up. If California didn't have enough incentives for its citizens to buy electric cars, the state's biggest utility, PG&E is offering a $3,000 rebate for its customers to buy a new Nissan Leaf. BMW releases more details about its...
In honor of Earth Day last weekend, we re-ran our story about when citizens might see cars with tailpipes as morally wrong, somewhat like they do smoking or polluting factories today. This year, we decided to accompany it with a different question in our Twitter poll: When will buying gasoline cars seem weird, if not necessarily outright immoral?...
Beijing’s plan will change little on the ground and offers a slim chance to become the starting point in talks to avert a trade war with Washington.
The iX3 SUV, revealed in Beijing today, brings BMW into the mainstream when it comes to electric cars. No longer will BMW electrics be specialized models that look like science experiments, made of space-age carbon fiber or riding on skinny tires for the ultimate efficiency. Instead, the company will revert to building electric versions of its...
California is already by far the No. 1 state for sales of electric cars, and the state's biggest utility apparently wants to add to that momentum. PG&E (formerly Pacific Gas & Electric) announced yesterday a new $3,000 purchase incentive for new Nissan Leafs. The utility company rebate is taken off the purchase price and comes on top of a...
Lexus unveiled Tuesday its newest ES sedan, and the mid-size luxury stalwart appears to have an edgier attitude. The big news for readers interested in green cars is that the new ES 300h hybrid is rated at 44 mpg, up 10 percent from the previous model. The ES has always been a version of a Toyota sedan, and the new version is no exception. The...
Infiniti announces a new lineup of electric cars in China, new portable electric car chargers are fast and cheap, New York federal appeals court reinstates increase in fines for automakers who miss fuel economy targets, and our weekly Twitter poll: Tell us what gas mileage level you think average cars should get. All this and more on Green Car...
