Free Republic

President Obama revealed what he might think we should be driving when he visited Tesla Motors , a firm building electric cars in San Carlos, California, while on his Tonight Show trip to the Coast. Unlike political rhetoric read from a teleprompter, cars are real. You can touch them and drive them and determine whether or not they're good, bad or indifferent. And the reality is that electric cars don't match the performance of conventional vehicles you're driving now. There's one major shortcoming, which manufacturers never seem to cover in detail, illuminated in a March 26 Silicon Valley Mercury News...

Battery technology is still not good enough to jumpstart an electric car revolution "I am absolutely committed to working with Congress and the auto companies to meet one goal: the United States of America will lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars," declared President Barack Obama this week when he announced his administration's plan to nationalize the American automobile industry. What does he mean by "clean cars"? During the presidential campaign, candidate Obama promised to enact $7,500 tax credit for new plug-in electric hybrid (PHEV) cars, vowing to "put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars—cars that can...

We're in the City of Angels this week to drive a bunch of new Fords, including the new 2010 Mustang and Fusion. We started off Monday afternoon with a mileage challenge in the new 2010 Fusion Hybrid.

Get ready to pull the plug: Tesla is done. Well, almost. While the fledgling electrocar specialists haven’t hung a “gone fishing” sign on the front door just yet, it might be just a matter of time. That isn’t changing anytime soon, regardless of how much money company founder and newly appointed CEO Elon Musk can scare up for his pet project. And this group of Silicon Valley geniuses isn’t alone. You can simply add Tesla’s name to the long list of electric car builders that have talked a big game and failed to deliver. You remember Tesla, right? It’s that...

The California Independent System Operator said Thursday it is eyeing an expected influx of thousands of plug-in electric cars in the state by the year 2012 that could pose a challenge to its grid's power flows unless the cars are developed to charge only at night. The ISO met with researchers from the University of California-Davis on Wednesday, who are studying plug-in cars, to get a handle on what sort of impact plug-in cars will have on the grid in coming years. "We really don't know yet," what the impact will be, and the university researchers were not able to...