This afternoon, President Barack Obama will ask Congress to direct our cars, trucks and buses to a realm that doesn’t include gas stations. During a visit to Argonne National Laboratory, he will call for $2-billion energy security trust fund dedicated to research to boost automobile efficiency, enhance battery technology and expand the use of biofuels, [...]

Since America’s love affair with cars really got rolling after World War II, nothing but a gasoline-burning internal combustion engine would do. Until now. The gearheads at Motor Trend have named the Tesla Model S the car of the year for 2013—the first time an all-electric vehicle has ever won the honor. “The turning point [...]

Whenever Scientific American posts an article about electric cars, we see comments along the lines of “electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, so electric cars don’t really reduce your carbon footprint, and the electricity is more expensive than gas anyway,” possibly with more expletives. Ignoring issues of civility, it’s a good question. There’s no such [...]

Drive through a pounding thunderstorm or heavy snowfall at night and you’ll notice that your headlights illuminate the maelstrom of raindrops or flakes more than they shed light on the road ahead. This safety hazard can be greatly reduced by anticipating the movement and velocity of the drops or flakes and shining the headlights into [...]

Booze is behind an estimated 2.1 million car accidents each year in the U.S.—which cause almost 11,000 traffic fatalities annually. But many drug users have claimed that a few puffs of pot before getting behind the wheel are perfectly harmless. A new study, however, shows that drivers who smoke marijuana within a few hours of [...]

To press the "accelerator" on a Tesla Roadster 2.5 is to get an intimation of life as a race car driver. In perhaps the signature display of an electric car’s appeal to gearheads, the Roadster instantly applies more than 300 amps of electric current to deliver 288 horsepower worth of acceleration—it’s called instant torque, 273 [...]

Amidst frigid weather conditions, 350 ice-covered Chevrolet Volts hit the roads aboard transport trucks headed from General Motors’s Detroit assembly plant to car dealerships in California, New York, Texas and Washington, D.C. As such, GM just makes its self-imposed deadline of shipping the car, which features both a battery-powered electric drive unit and gas-powered engine, [...]

Each year, Independence Day arrives with an array of festivities that make us vulnerable to a number of potential hazards: bug bites, burns from backyard grills, food poisoning from cookouts, and injuries from fireworks. But driving? The thought of possibly getting in a car accident at this time of year probably doesn’t even cross your [...]