Our current President, Donald Trump, has made it abundantly clear where he stands on electric cars. It’s quite a contrast to our former President, Barack Obama, whose administration widely supported policy fostering more fuel-efficient vehicles, greener energy, and the path to more vehicles that plug in. This weekend marks the last one for... Obama, buy that Volt!
Our current President, Donald Trump, has made it abundantly clear where he stands on electric cars. It’s quite a contrast to our former President, Barack Obama, whose administration widely supported policy fostering more fuel-efficient vehicles, greener energy, and the path to more vehicles that plug in. This weekend marks the last one for...
Like Teslas rolling through parking lots on their own, the self-driving future is inching closer. This week, Tesla owners began to experience new features of the company's long-promised next update to its self-driving system, including Enhanced Summon, which is one of the first features of Tesla's planned Full Self-Driving capability to be...
Concept cars are relatively easy to build—particularly concepts of cars that may exist only on paper or as clay and foil design studies. That has given rise to a host of new concepts launched as online crowd-funded endeavors of various levels of seriousness and potential. One is Sono Motors, a German effort to build an electric car assisted...
If you road-trip with an electric car like a Tesla, you soon become acutely aware of miles per hour. That's not the miles per hour you see on the speedometer, but the rate at which the car will gain range when being fast-charged. That's charging miles per hour, which determines how quickly you can pull out of the charging station and back onto the...
Electric-car batteries need to get recycled or reused at the end of their road. And campers are always in need of more batteries to stay out longer and run more things without resorting to gas power. Combine the two needs and you get the Nissan x Opus, an inflatable, folding camping trailer that relies on second-life batteries from used Nissan...
You asked, now you've received. In our Twitter poll last week, readers told us that they think automakers should quit focusing on electric cars' green credentials in ads and start advertising their performance. Apparently Audi was reading their thoughts. After spending as much as $5 million (or more?) on a somewhat ethereal Super Bowl ad that...
Electric cars may be seen by some as part of a seemingly unstoppable, powerful technological wave that will disrupt not just the auto industry but most other forms of transportation. Don’t count on Bill Gates as one of those bright-eyed EV cheerleaders; on the other hand, don’t dismiss him as someone who doesn’t want to see...
In Toyota's latest ad for its new Corolla Hybrid in Britain, it's 2002 all over again. The ad shows the new Corolla Hybrid (in non-U.S. hatchback form) bypassing all kinds of road transportation alternatives from different eras—from a stagecoach and an early brass-era car to 1950s hot rods and, finally—an electric car plugged in and...
Audi’s 2019 Super Bowl ad for Sunday’s Big Game focuses in on the brand’s electric and electrified future. Like many EV ads, it’s a head-scratcher. In a series of almost clichéd nods to Field of Dreams, Back to the Future, and other movies that would be familiar to the target buyer, a man is walking through an...
Tesla claims some astonishingly quick acceleration times, and for some of us, testing and verifying those times are part of the fun. To do that, the drag strip is the only safe and fully reliable source for accurate numbers. In February of 2015, I migrated to a Model S Performance, after owning a 2013 Model S P85. As the weather turned supportive...
At CES earlier this month, GBatteries demonstrated that it could charge a 60-kwh battery pack, made up of off-the-shelf lithium-ion automotive cells, to half capacity in just 5 minutes, or to a full charge in 10 minutes. Further, the company is aiming, with a technology that employs AI elements, to boost charging speeds without accelerating...
If you're going to develop a self-driving test vehicle, why not make it one that passengers would enjoy riding in? Perhaps that's the logic behind Toyota's choice of its new Lexus LS large luxury sedan as the basis for the P4, its latest automated-driving test vehicle—unveiled yesterday by the Toyota Research Institute, or TRI. The...
Electric transportation is about more than cars. Trucks and buses are also moving toward electric propulsion. Planes, with their long ranges and high power demands seem to be harder. Where electric power does seem to be making progress in the skies is in helicopters. An independent engineering company in California this month set the Guinness...
Volkswagen has heard the naysayers. After being caught cheating on emissions tests with its diesels and being forced to promote electric cars through various legal settlements around the world, the company clearly realizes it has a steep climb to convince consumers it is serious about selling a wide range of electric cars it has planned. DON'T...
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...
A new startup automaker, Rivian, plans to beat Tesla to the punch with an electric pickup truck. After years of stealth, the company is finally poised to reveal its new pickup and SUV at the LA auto show later this month. This week, the company set up a media site complete with space for pictures of its upcoming vehicles, and released a teaser...
Tesla confirmed last Thursday that Track Mode has started rolling out for the Model 3 Performance, in an update for vehicles that have already received Version 9 of the automaker’s vehicle software. The company emphasized that Track Mode is intended specifically for closed circuits. It’s primarily a series of updates to the vehicle...
Algae-based biodiesel has been hyped in the past as a renewable fuel that can be produced here in the U.S., lowering greenhouse-gas emissions without displacing food crops or taxing water supplies. And yet it still hasn’t arrived in any significant way. There’s no single factor to blame for that, rather a combination of hurdles that no...
With all the floods from Hurricane Florence, what happens to electric cars? That's the question many electric car owners may be asking after the 100-year hurricane dropped more than two feet of rain in North Carolina, where a burgeoning electric car movement was springing up. The answer is: It depends. READ MORE: Tesla expands Supercharging access...
The French luxury arm of Citroen, DS, released plans for its first electric car last Friday. The DS 3 Crossback is a funky-looking small SUV, something along the lines of the Mini Countryman. It's set to debut at the Paris auto show early next month. While the base version will use a turbocharged 1.2-liter, 3-cylinder gas engine, the company...