Whether Tesla Motors will fly or flail has always seemed to me uncertain. The goals Tesla Motors is out to achieve are big, very big, nothing shorter than ending fossil fuel consumption. Which of course will be incredibly hard, and has meant a chorus of naysayers singing about the impossibility of…
Yesterday, Lightning Motorcycle CEO Richard Hatfield delivered the very first Lightning LS-218 electric superbike. Over eight years in development, the LS-218 is the fastest electric motorcycle in production and perhaps the fastest motorcycle of any kind in production. The company has followed a strategy for several years of innovation through…
I like to outright own my cars, driving them for many years, preferably not driving very much, all to make the best return-on-investment on each car. But I, and many electric car buyers, say that at this stage of the electric vehicle market it’s better to lease, rather than buy. …
Zero Motorcycles announced today specifications and pricing for their 2015 lineup of electric motorcycles. The Scotts Valley, CA, based company has been building electric motorcycles since 2006, and its’ market leadership is demonstrated through multiple models addressing both off-road and on-road motorcycling. The improvements for the 2015 model year are…
The PlugIn2014 Conference has come to San Jose, and I managed to snag a press pass, so expect to see a few reports over the next couple days about conference sessions. The activity today was getting to do test drives with a few electric vehicles. I got to drive…
Last night a Tesla Model S was STOLEN, and after a 100+ miles/hr police chase it crashed in Hollywood, impacting several other cars, the Model S tore in half from the impact, multiple cars caught fire, and several people went to the hospital in critical condition. There’s a glaring…
Volkswagen recently announced details of the 2015 VW e-Golf electric car, that’s slated to go on sale in the U.S. in the 4th quarter of 2014. Going by the press release it should be an excellent electric car, and will finally justify VW’s role in helping the SAE delay the…
The Chevy Volt may have sold the more units in North America than the Nissan Leaf et al, but that doesn’t mean GM really understands what to do with the Volt. Also, both Nissan and Tesla are showing more commitment to electrified-cars-with-plugs than GM is. Yes, GM is doing quite…
What will it take for the rest of the automobile industry to stop dismissing Tesla Motors as a boutique car manufacturer? That phrase was actually used by a Nissan sales representative at the Silicon Valley Driving Charged and Connected event two weeks ago. He was answering a question about whether…
In part what will drive electric vehicle adoption is the fact that electricity is a cheaper fuel than gasoline – so long as electricity rates stay about what they are today. But the price premium for today’s electric vehicles over equivalent gasoline powered vehicles make it hard to recognize the…
2013 Ford C-MAX Energi Ford today released some sales figures for the Ford C-MAX Energi and Ford Fusion Energi demonstrating that their plan to win market share from Toyota and Honda, in California, is beginning to work. Taken together, Ford’s two Plug-in Hybrid’s have 34% market-share, beating both the Toyota…
While Ford and Toyota disappoint us in announcing they won’t collaborate on hybrid drive trains for full-capability SUV’s and light trucks, Nissan gladdens us with news they’ve sold their 100,000th electric vehicle. I frequently come across naysayer articles pointing out that electric car sales are 0.5% of all car sales. …
To gauge the success of the Chevy Volt, against which car should it be compared, and does the Toyota Prius V make a fair comparison? The horse race over which of the electric or hybrid cars outsells the other is supposedly going to determine which of these electrified cars wins…
Instead of showing that “federal investigation of three fires that occurred after Volt crash tests lowered demand for the Chevy Volt” a recent report instead shows interest in the Volt has fallen due to its price. A number of news reports are circulating a claim, credited to CNW Market Research,…
While many voices in politics and the media want us to believe electric cars, like the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt, are failing, Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf cases show that their’s is hardly the only interpretation of reality. Are the electric cars from Nissan, GM and Tesla a flop…
