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America will not achieve President Obama’s goal of 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. This is despite large subsidies from the federal government and many states for making batteries and vehicles as well as additional subsidies for purchasing these vehicles. Very few consumers are interested in expensive cars with limited range and the anxiety of not knowing if the battery charge will last for their entire journey. As a result, manufacturers are dropping prices in order to sell the vehicles they are forced to produce. First Nissan slashed prices of its plug-in vehicles early this year, then...

Electric cars are currently more damaging to the climate than some other vehicle options, mainly because of the emissions involved with producing large batteries, according to a report from Climate Central. The nonprofit research organization acknowledged that electric cars have helped to lower U.S. vehicle emissions because they are consuming electricity produced increasingly from natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal. “But when all the carbon emissions associated with building and driving electric and high-mileage gasoline cars are included in the analysis, the all-electric advantage goes up in smoke,” Climate Central said. “In the vast majority of states, the significant...

“At the end of the day, you cannot deny how smart Elon Musk is.” That’s the conclusion of Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Kelley Blue book who for years doubted electric-car maker Tesla Motors Inc.TSLA -0.31% would still be in business in 2013, much less outperforming Wall Street’s expectations with its second-quarter results released this week. Brauer’s comments reflect feelings many auto industry insiders have expressed since Tesla got started a decade ago. Like many fledgling companies, Tesla repeatedly overpromised and seemed to underestimate the difficulty of starting a clean-sheet manufacturing operation, especially in the hidebound and prohibitively expensive...

The Chevy Volt madness continued this week with General Motors announcing that consumers will see a $5,000 decrease in the price of President Obama's favorite green wonder-car. Sales of the Volt have been dismal, with most consumers refusing to be as smitten with the car as the President and the few enthusiastic green ideologues who seemed to believe that spending approximately $20,000 more for a car (over a gas-powered rival) that can save them about $3 a day in gas makes sense. What seems to go unrecognized is the fact that the price cut comes at the expense of GM...

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

On Monday, BMW announced that the U.S. base price for its all-electric i3 will be $41,350, not including any federal or state incentives. For General Motors' Chevy Volt, and possibly Tesla Motor's Model S, BMW's move spells major trouble. Here's why. Bad news, GM With a starting MSRP of $39,145 in 2012, the Volt was the best-selling EV, and it's not hard to see why. Really more of an electric hybrid than a straight EV, the Volt combines a 9.3-gallon fuel tank with a lithium-ion battery. This combination allows the Volt can go an estimated 38 miles on pure battery...

Former Electric-car Engineer: Electric Cars Pollute More Than Gas The New American 12 July 2013 Is the only "green" aspect of electric cars the money some companies make off them? If former plug-in advocate and General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner (shown) is correct, this is exactly the case. Author of the book Green Illusions, Zehner once built his own hybrid car that could run on electricity or natural gas. And, he writes in a recent article entitled "Unclean at Any Speed," he was convinced cars such as his "would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence." But he now...

The good news for GM these days is that no one has been consumed in a fiery death due to engine compartment fires since the Chevy Volt was discovered to spontaneous combust after accidents shortly after production began. The bad news for the company is that while Chevy Volt sales in June set a record, prior to June their sales for 2013 sucked despite general auto sales setting post-crash records. “With signs that sales of its Chevrolet Volt battery car could be coming unplugged,” reported NBC News in June, “General Motors is offering potential buyers as much as $5,000 in...

Conservatives have long argued that the pursuit of electric vehicles through government grants and credits is a bad idea, mainly from a public-policy and economic standpoint. But what if electric vehicles are a bad idea from an environmental standpoint, too? An environmental activist who once pushed for EVs and now works as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley now calls electric vehicles “unclean at any speed” in a recent article for the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (via Weasel Zippers and UPI): The idea of electrifying automobiles to get around their environmental shortcomings isn’t new. Twenty years ago, I myself built...

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced last month the launching of the "eGallon" - a tool that will compare the costs of fueling electric vehicles (EVs) to fueling gasoline-powered ones. According to the report, the national average eGallon price is about $1.14. This means that an EV can travel as far on $1.14

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

BERKELEY, Calif., July 1 (UPI) — Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life...

It appears that there is no end in sight to the Obama Administration's costly quest to electrify America's auto fleet, despite the recent flurry of reports that continue to confirm that the benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) are practically nonexistent in comparison to the costs. One of these reports even came from Obama's own NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) panel which downplayed the importance of EVs and claimed that electric cars will only need to account for between one and three percent of car manufacturer's product portfolios by 2025 for lofty government EPA requirements to be met. The Autoguide.com...

Tesla Motors said Thursday it would demonstrate a way to quickly recharge electric cars by swapping drained batteries for fresh power cells. Tesla chief executive and founder Elon Musk used popular the messaging service Twitter to put out word that a "live pack swap demo" was taking place at the company's design studio in the Southern California city of Hawthorne. Video from the event was to be posted on the Tesla website about 0430 GMT on Friday, according to Musk. Making it fast and easy to restore full power to electric car batteries is seen as a big step in...

General Motors has announced a $4,000 rebate (or $3,000 and a four year, zero interest loan from government-owned Ally Financial) on the slow-selling Chevy Volt. The company had a choice regarding how to deal with an excess supply of Volts that is growing faster than demand. GM could have, once again, temporarily halted production until inventory (currently at about a 6 month supply) came down to reasonable levels. It instead chooses to lose more millions of dollars by spending on incentives designed to manufacture demand that otherwise is practically nonexistent. The much-hyped Chevy Volt was originally presented by GM...

For the naysayers who maintained that Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) wasn’t going to make it, with the Model S too expensive to be successful, here is a fact worth reflecting on: in the first quarter, Tesla outsold comparable cars from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi. Tesla moved 4,750 Model S units in the first fiscal quarter. Among the top three German luxury builders, the Mercedes S Class came in second with 3,077 units sold. BMW took third place with 2,338 7-Series sedans sold and Audi’s flagship A8 sold 1,462 cars, good for fourth place. There are are few things to consider when...

California-based electric car maker, Coda, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, saying it plans to transition to the battery and energy-storage business. The company had positioned itself as a cheaper alternative to fellow electric-car maker Tesla (TSLA) and plug-in hybrid-car maker Fisker. Coda's all-electric mid-sized sedan went for roughly $37,000, but proved a huge sales disappointment, with less than 100 vehicles sold. A Tesla Model S, with its most potent battery option, goes for $72,000. Coda had the bodies and chassis of its cars built in China, with the battery systems installed in California. CEO Phil Murtaugh said in a...

“Bankruptcy now appears unavoidable, and a political reckoning is coming” writes the New York Time’s Bill Vlasic today about Fisker Motors, the Obama administration’s pet electric car company that received millions in federal loans. Vlasic described the car company as the “Solyndra of Electric car companies.” As Congress prepares to grill the leaders of Fisker Motors this afternoon, here are 47 depressing facts about Fisker:

It appears that the Mainstream Media folks may finally be starting to expose one of the worst cases of taxpayer abuse that this country has ever seen. Kudos to Deepa Seetharaman who wrote a piece for Reuters which questions the feasibility of the government-subsidized, lithium-ion based battery technology behind electric vehicles (EVs) like the Chevy Volt. While Seetharaman acknowledges the limitations of lithium-ion batteries, what remains unchallenged is the continued waste of billions of taxpayer dollars to support the failing, pseudo-green technology. The evidence that the Obama Administration's EV subsidization has been a costly fiasco (particularly regarding the Chevy Volt...

When you buy a car, there are various ratings outfits in the business of calculating the true cost of owning that particular vehicle, inc. insurance, depreciation, maintenance, cost of repairs, etc. Such a comprehensive model is surely more realistic than just looking at the monthly payment or sticker price, and the customer knows if they're actually making a cost-effective, bottom-line decision. But even if you buy-into the now imploding globaloney scam, wouldn't it make sense to apply similar logic to calculate the entire environmental impact of electric vs. internal combustion cars over the full service life... esp since the actual...