On April 24, executives from the grievously wounded plug-in-hybrid firm Fisker Automotive will face a House of Representatives oversight committee. The question of the day: Why did the Department of Energy loan nearly $200 million to a company that is now facing bankruptcy? (Secondary purpose: to allow grandstanding congressmen to repeat, as many times as [...]

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 [...]

The first morning lecture series for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is focused on physics for this, its 62nd anniversary year, got off to a cosmic start, tracing the origins and evolution of the universe, before crashing back to Earth with a discussion of climate change. (You can read all our coverage this week, [...]

The future of electric vehicles (EVs) in the U.S. balances tenuously these days on a chicken-and-egg quandary. Roadside stations that charge EVs in less than 30 minutes are needed to encourage drivers to buy EVs, yet there must also be enough EVs already on the road to justify the investment in a fast-charging infrastructure. The [...]

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, [...]

Interest in electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids has come on strong over the past year or so, pushed relentlessly by carmakers promoting a newer, greener generation of transportation. As the Chevy Volt, Ford Transit Connect Electric, Nissan Leaf and others trickle out into the marketplace over the next year, it’s clear that they will [...]