Electric vehicle charging stations are now popping up at locations scattered across the country. Because of the low penetration rates of EVs and charging equipment during the next year, utilities are generally comfortable that their ability to reliably serve customers won’t be impacted.

This is partly because both categories of (more…)

Having started on October 2nd, the 2010 Paris Motor Show is officially underway at the Paris Expo, Porte de Versailles. Held in the autumn every other year, the show has traditionally been one of the biggest places for car manufacturers to announce the latest and greatest designs that would be coming for the future. This year, so far, has been no exception with an impressive set (more…)

In August of 2009, the White House announced a stimulus package worth $2.4 billion to move the electric vehicle industry closer to commercialization. The bulk of the money went to companies involved in producing batteries to help speed up the cost reductions that are felt to be necessary to make EVs affordable to most consumers.

Now 14 months later, very little of that money (more…)

At the Paris Motor Show today, electric cars are everywhere.

Chevrolet is showing off the Volt, its plug-in hybrid due in U.S. showrooms this December. (Motown music blared as a Chevy rep told me all about the car’s performance.) Nissan is displaying the Leaf, its all-electric sedan scheduled to roll (more…)

Oregon electric vehicle fleet is getting a boost with the expansion of electric vehicle charging stations. The northwestern metropolitan areas of Portland, Salem, Corvallis and Eugene are playing host to what is deemed the “largest rollout of EV infrastructure in the world” and will include more than a thousand publicly available chargers. (more…)

The local and federal governments of Canada, along with significant prompting from Electric Mobility Canada, are determined that the nation will keep pace with the United States, Europe and Asia in electrifying its transportation industry.

That sentiment was echoed throughout the EV 2010 VE conference, which featured (more…)

As always, the range of electric vehicles remains one of the primary selling points for any company pushing alternative transportation. In the quest to increase the range more and more, different methods of battery charging has been introduced or methods of keeping a battery at maximum efficiency for as long as possible as been explored. However, some still think it should (more…)

Capitalizing on the success of its Prius hybrid, Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, has announced that it will introduce six new hybrid models by the end of 2012. Toyota, whose Prius is the top-selling car in Japan, is stepping up its competition in the growing green vehicle market by introducing two hybrid versions of its luxury Lexus brand and four new Toyota (more…)

As concerns over air pollution and climate change continue to mount, the electric vehicle (EV) market is predicted to expand at a corresponding rate. And charging stations for electric vehicles is an equally high-growth market.

In August, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden released the White House’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery (more…)

Green cars are going to be bigger than renewable energy, we heard yesterday. HSBC reckons 8.65m electric vehicles and 9.23m plug-in and hybrid electric vehicles will be sold globally in 2020, up from around 5,000 and 657,000 respectively last year.

But what are these cars actually like (more…)