'electric vehicle'

Better Place has raised $350 million to build its charging network for electric cars, the start-up said Monday.

The series B round was led by HSBC Holdings and brought new investors Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Lazard Asset Management. The investment, which follows a $200 million round in 2007, is likely to be one of the largest in the green-tech area this year.

Better Place also said that its first two projects in Denmark and Israel are on track to go online in 2011 using all-electric Renault sedans. The new money will allow the company to further build its technology … Read more

Filled with flowcharts, and accompanied by a Delirium house-mix song, this video from YouTube's GMVolt channel offers all of the reasons folks should drive electric-powered vehicles.

Although some of the information about the birth of the automobile and the car population in the United States, is interesting, the charts are fuzzy and confusing. Check it out for yourself.

Quebec's power utility is teaming up with Mitsubishi Motors to road-test the performance of up to 50 all-electric vehicles against the rigors of the Canadian climate and measure their infrastructure needs.

The $4.4 million project, which organizers say will be Canada's biggest trial yet of all-electric vehicles, is planned for this autumn near the Boucherville research facility of Hydro-Quebec, the provincial government-owned electricity utility.

"It will allow us to advance our knowledge of the technology and its integration into our grid, which in turn, will help us plan the necessary charging infrastructure for homes, offices and … Read more

Electric vehicles are one of the top stories coming from the auto show in Detroit this week. But despite the introduction of even more electric concept cars, familiar old hybrids are projected to be the dominant form of electric vehicles.

Boston Consulting Group sought to inject some reality into the electric-car buzz even before the doors opened at the North American International Auto Show with the release of a study that concluded battery cost will keep pure EVs from taking over any time soon.

Specifically, auto makers need to lower the cost of batteries to $250 per kilowatt hour, which … Read more

KAWASAKI, Japan--If open sourcing works for the Linux computer operating system, Japanese engineer Hiroshi Shimizu wagers, it also will work for electric vehicles.

His idea: bring automakers and suppliers together in a brain trust that will jointly develop a new eight-wheeled electric car by 2011 and share any resulting technology breakthroughs.

The brain trust will be SIM-Drive Corp., a start-up that Shimizu founded in September.

Participating companies will chip in ?20 million (about $215,000 at current exchange rates) and one engineer to jointly develop the prototype vehicle. They then have the right to adopt any technology that has been … Read more

Tianjin Qingyuan Electric Vehicle, the first Chinese automaker to break into the United States, hopes to significantly boost sales of its self-developed electric models in the world's second-largest market this year, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

State-backed Qingyuan is among a growing army of Chinese automakers, including BYD, partly-owned by U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett, eager to tap the fledgling green car sector in mature markets.

Qingyuan hopes to sell 3,000 self-made electric vehicles mostly in the United States in 2010, 50 percent more than what it shipped there in the past … Read more

Plugging in your electric vehicle, or extended-range hybrid, may soon be a thing of the past. Evatran is developing a "hands-free" proximity charging system with the engineering team from Colorado company Syncroness.

The idea is to pull up to the Plugless Power system and get your car recharged. Evatran has a short animation depicting the process. The company will not have a product available until fall 2010, according to a press release.

Automakers tend to agree that the electrification of the car is inevitable, but Nissan is leading the way by readying a mass-market, affordable electric car for production. The Leaf is a midsize hatchback with a range of a little more than 100 miles, according to Nissan. Although Nissan didn't let us drive it, the company brought the Leaf to CNET's headquarters so we could get a close look at what might be the future of driving.

When Nissan first released pictures of the car, commenters found it ugly, with its bulbous headlights giving it a frog-like appearance. But … Read more

A group of CEOs on Monday came out favor of a regional roll-out of electric vehicles in up to eight cities to demonstrate the viability of the technology and incubate the fledgling industry.

The Electricifcation Coalition held a press conference in Washington, D.C. and released an Electrification Roadmap, which prescribes the business and policy steps required to ramp up electric vehicle adoption.

There are 13 members of the coalition, including the CEOs of Nissan Motor, FedEx, Pacific Gas & Electric, and battery maker A123 Systems. The coalition was spun out of Securing America's Future Energy, a lobbying group … Read more