Free Republic

The Chevrolet Volt, the first mass-market electric vehicle from General Motors Co., will have a sticker price starting at $41,000 when it hits showrooms later this year. But government tax credits and rebates designed to speed the entry of electric vehicles into the marketplace will make the price more attractive. There's a federal tax credit of $7,500 for electric vehicles. That lowers the Volt price to $33,500. An earlier report factored in an additional $5,000 credit for Californians, which would have brought the price to $28,500, but GM said the Volt will not be included in the state's special rebate...

Companies are starting to compete to provide services, but a dominant approach and standard have yet to emergeAnton Klima is a self-described electric car fanatic. The Los Angeles television cameraman is already on his second electric vehicle, a battery-powered BMW Mini E. To make sure he's carbon-free, he charges the car from solar panels on the roof of his Hollywood Hills home. But when he's out and about, Klima has to make do with a patchy network of public chargers left over from California's original electric-car campaign a decade ago. Though he can now track down chargers with an iPhone...

As American consumers abandon gas-guzzling SUVs for greener alternatives, they also face a new kind of sticker shock -- confusing claims about the energy efficiency of electric cars heading for showrooms. Federal fuel economy standards and household budgets have been built around relatively simple measurements of how many miles vehicles can travel per gallon of gasoline, a number that features on a sticker displayed in the windows of new cars in U.S. showrooms. So what should those stickers show for new battery-powered cars that will draw most or all of their power from the country's electricity grid? General Motors Co...

ValuJet was reborn as AirTran. Philip Morris rechristened itself Altria. Blackwater became Xe. Would a name change work for beleaguered General Motors? It would mean casting aside a brand that stood for almost a century as a symbol of American industrial might, but some marketing experts say it might be just the thing to help the once-mighty automaker make a fresh start. "If the goal is to try and put this company on a massive diet and just turn it into a smaller car manufacturing operation, I'm not sure there'd be that much harm in rebranding," said Jean-Pierre Dube, a...