For years, Stacy Zoern, a Texas lawyer who lives alone and uses a 400-pound power wheelchair, yearned for more independence. Because of a neuromuscular condition, Ms. Zoern, 33, has never walked, and for a while drove a custom van. But the van was destroyed in a crash, and she didn’t have $80,000 to buy another. “I was feeling frustrated and stagnant,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Austin. “I was so sick of being dependent on others t...

8:29 a.m. | Updated WHITE MARSH, Md. – Electric cars can take a while to charge. In part, that’s because the alternating current electricity that comes from the grid has to be converted to direct current before a car’s batteries can store it, and the capacity of the electronics that make the A.C.-to-D.C. conversion is a bottleneck.

Austin-based Community Cars hopes to begin building the Kenguru, a wheelchair-accessible single-passenger vehicle, later this year.

VW says that with its turbocharged gas-powered V-6 and two electric motors, the plug-in hybrid CrossBlue Coupé concept can hit 147 miles per hour while getting as much as 79 miles per gallon.