The U.S.’s continued reliance on coal and natural gas to generate electricity makes efficient gasoline-powered vehicles a lower-carbon alternative to electric vehicles in most states, according to a new report by Climate Central.

In an analysis of life-cycle emissions from vehicles, (more…)

There’s been plenty of bad news recently in the world electric vehicles, mostly related to start ups like Fisker and Azure. Adding to the mix, Deloitte has released a survey showing that battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are not very popular with Generation Y (ages 19-31).

The reasons appear to be multiple, including high (more…)

At this week’s Plug-In Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Conference I had a wonderful conversation with a senior player at Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. I began by validating him for coming to a show like this; to me it shows, at a minimum, a kind of progressive, forward-thinking approach to the business. (more…)

Electric vehicles in general are a great step in reducing emissions that cause global warming. The emissions from a gasoline-powered car are always greater than the emissions created to charge an electric vehicle. However, a new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) suggests that the “greenness” of electric vehicles is not uniform across (more…)

A couple of times a year, I order up a free “press pass” and head out to a local conference on electric vehicles. Tonight, I’ll be driving south, staying with a friend in Los Angeles, then getting up early and continuing down to San Diego for the first day of the Plug-In Electric Vehicle Infrastructure USA 2012. Topics include: (more…)

Below is a wonderful video that explains the multiple drivetrains at work in the Chevy Volt. A couple of immediate impressions:

1) No wonder the price on this sucker is $41K, with all that going on. The bill of materials (costs of the individual components) must be enough to choke a horse. And the non-recurring engineering costs must (more…)

The failure to reach the sales targets for the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf has led to considerable finger pointing about so-far disappointing attempts to mass market plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). PEVs have increasingly become fodder for politics as every misstep reinforces what opponents call their inevitable failure. (more…)

Fisker Automotive has hit a rough patch (a rock quarry may be a better way to characterize it, actually). The company has seen excitement about the product crumble recently thanks to the recent, incredibly public failure of the $102,000 Fisker Karma while being prepped for testing by Consumer Reports. This was immediately followed-up with the all-but (more…)

It is not surprising how the electric vehicle growth story mirrors mobile phone growth but about 30 years later. It was in 1973, when Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher made the first analog phone call using a heavy prototype device. Then came the first generation of mobile cell sites, with ability to transfer calls from one site to next in 1979. (more…)

Cities are facing many problems, including the lack of parking spaces and air pollution. Regular electric vehicles would solve the air pollution issue, but not the parking one.

This is probably why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worked on a folding electric car codenamed CityCar. The result is Hiriko (“urban” in Basque language), a folding electric car (more…)