electric cars

Tesla Motors has some good news for fans of the American maker of electric cars. The Model S -- its first reasonably priced vehicle -- may hit the streets as early as June. Will this be the vehicle that jump starts electric car sales?

Bad news for GM: The Chevy Volt still isn't selling the way the automaker hoped it would, so it's temporarily halting production of the battery-powered hybrids for five weeks. Worse news for GM: Shutdowns like this only make the Volt a harder sell.

The electric car has arrived, but odds are that there isn't one in your driveway. Several factors have gotten in the way of the eco-friendly automotive revolution, but at least now we can ask conspiracy theorists -- who argue that oil companies and the government are blocking plug-in cars from the road -- to leave the room and take their tinfoil hats with them. The electric car is here; drivers simply don't want them yet.

Toyota has sold 3 million hybrid vehicles since launching the Prius in 1997.

A slight slip in the price of oil allowed Japanese investors to focus attention on positive employment figures out of the U.S., boosting the Nikkei 225 Index by 0.9%. In Hong Kong the Hang Seng also Index added 0.3%, while the Shanghai Composite Index edged down 0.4%.

Billions of dollars of electricity is wasted annually by inefficient power-conversion systems. But a fledgling company called Transphorm believes its technology can cut electric bills significantly -- and hike mileage for hybrid electric cars and boost output flowing from solar panels.

Is the Nissan Leaf or any of the other battery cars now hitting the market "zero emission"? No, actually not, though it may seem like a no-brainer-if a car doesn't have a tailpipe, it doesn't have any emissions, right? In reality, electric cars produce emissions because they plug into a grid...

In the State of the Union address in January, President Barack Obama set a goal of getting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. Now he's proposed $7,500 rebates, instead of tax credits, to reach that goal. Will that be enough to make it doable?

Is there an electric car in your future? A study just released by IBM's Institute for Business Value probed U.S. consumers' opinions about electric cars, timely since two models, the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt, just hit the road in this country. The results show a hefty interest among those...

Life is about change, so we might as well embrace it. Looking into our crystal ball, here are a dozen things to look forward to in 2011. It should prove to be a very interesting (and entertaining) year. 1. Oprah Launches Her Own Network After 25 years of toiling in syndication for a few measily...