Is there room enough for both Tesla Motors and Faraday Future in our electric-car, uh, future? A Chinese billionaire is backing what hopes to be a rival to Elon Musk's enterprise. The 18-month-old company, based out of Southern California, aims to roll out its first long-range, premium model, comparable to Tesla's Model S, by 2017. The engineer who oversaw the chassis design of the Model S, Nick Sampson, is now Faraday's research-and-development chief.

Late last month, National Geographic Channel and Uber teamed up to promote a new series on scientific breakthroughs—called, appropriately enough, Breakthrough—and they chose to do it with a fleet of alternative energy vehicles on the streets of Manhattan. Obviously we've got a healthy interest in forward-looking cars here at Ars, so it seemed like a good idea to hop on a train to check out what all the fuss was about.

Porsche’s latest legal filing. Paul Walker, the late star of the high octane film franchise The Fast and the Furious, died in a car crash two years ago. He had been riding as a passenger in a 2005 Carrera GT made by Porsche. Last week the German carmaker filed legal papers aiming to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Meadow Walker, the actor’s daughter, in September. The company had earlier denied responsibility for the fatality.

John F Kennedy travelling in the presidential Lincoln Continental convertible was assassinated in Dallas, Texas 52 years ago today (22 November). He was shot twice, and an hour after his death Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the crime. No serving US president has travelled in an open top car since. The car is now at the Henry Ford museum in Michigan.

A laboratory test carried out for BBC Panorama shows that Volkswagen diesel cars programmed with a "defeat device" can cheat official European pollution tests, as well as tests in the US. The company told the BBC it believes this is the first time the cheating software has been filmed in action. VW has admitted it used the device to rig tighter pollution tests in America. But it's been more ambiguous about whether it used the same tactics to actively cheat official European tests.

A week and a half ago, we learned that Tesla is on a quest to hire more engineers to accelerate the development of its self-driving car technologies. Tesla was already no slouch in the autonomous-vehicle world, having released its Autopilot feature into the wild just over a month ago. We sampled Autopilot as soon as it hit the streets and were quite impressed, to put it mildly.

Volkswagen said U.S. sales plunged 25% in November in the wake of the German automaker's massive emissions cheating scandal. The company admitted in September that most of its diesel cars in the U.S. had software that allowed it to pass emissions tests, even though the cars dumped 40 times the allowed levels of pollutants into the atmosphere. The EPA ordered it to stop selling those cars in the U.S.

The competition is fierce, the key players are billionaires, but the path—and even the destination—remains uncertain.

Self-driving cars could disrupt the airline and hotel industries within 20 years as people sleep in their vehicles on the road, according to a senior strategist at Audi. Short-haul travel will be transformed and the hassle of getting to and from airports eliminated, said Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at the German car brand. Business travellers will be able to avoid taking domestic flights to meetings and will sleep and work in their cars en route...

Ford Motor Co. will recall as many as 451,865 cars, including 411,205 in the U.S., because their fuel tanks may crack and leak gasoline, potentially leading to fire. The company will recall its 2010-2011 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan models and won’t charge customers if parts need to be replaced, according to a notice posted Saturday on the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website. Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford said it isn’t aware of accidents...

The Obama administration on Thursday proposed a 10-year, $4 billion push to spark the development of self-driving cars, hoping to one day eliminate roadway deaths altogether. The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulators said they would seek unified national regulations on self-driving cars. They will also encourage automakers to claim an exemption to safety standards allowing companies to test new...

With a new baby on the way, I was in the market for a new vehicle. I scheduled a test-drive with Tesla Motors (Tesla) in mid-November, and was on the fence about purchasing a Tesla. I had some questions which I emailed my test-drive consultant, but didn’t receive any response and I wasn’t particularly in love with the car, so I let it go. A few weeks later, I was talking to a friend of mine who had just leased a Tesla. I explained my experience, and how I felt the price...

Volvo has made a shocking pledge: By 2020, no one will be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car or SUV. Seriously. "If you meet Swedish engineers, they're pretty genuine," said Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo Cars North America. "They don't say things when they don't believe in it." There is one big caveat. If someone really wants to hurt themselves, or is just really, really stupid... well, Volvo can't do anything about that. But, assuming you're not a suicidal...

Plunging oil prices are set to hit the electric car industry hard, but Tesla vehicles won't be the worst affected, says CEO Elon Musk. "[The] industry as a whole, I think, will definitely suffer from lower oil prices," Musk told CNN's Kristie Lu Stout on Monday. "It just makes economic sense." The drop in the cost of fuel has already filtered through into the U.S. auto market, where sales of gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs rose last year. Oil has continued its steep...

For the first time on a mass scale, a car built in China will be on sale in the United States — the Buick Envision.

Tesla Motors Inc. was built with one overriding objective: to bring electric cars to the masses. After more than a decade of work, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk believes it’s just about time. The company is set to begin taking pre-orders on its $35,000 Model 3 next month—and by $35,000, Tesla really means as little as $25,000. Tesla has confirmed that the $35,000 price tag on the Model 3 doesn't include the significant federal...

A new hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle prototype has been launched with a claimed fuel economy equivalent to 250 mpg (0.9 L/100km). Dubbed "Rasa," the new car has a lightweight carbon-fiber monocoque shell, in-wheel electric motors, a bank of supercapacitors charged by braking-regeneration, and a host of other features that enable it to travel up to a claimed 300 miles (483 km) on just a 3.3 lb (1.5 kg) tank of hydrogen.

Volvo is recalling 59,000 cars, including 7,000 in the UK, over faulty software which can briefly shut down the engine and electric system while driving. The affected models are five-cylinder diesel models: S60; V60; V60 Cross Country; XC60; V70 and XC70 from mid 2015. There have been no reported accidents due to the glitch, Volvo said.

Michigan and California, vying for control of our driverless future, are each proposing crumbling World War II military sites as ideal locations to test robot cars. Michigan’s secret weapon? Better potholes.

Half a century after its heyday, the Alden StaRRcar clearly wasn’t made for its world. It looks like a white flatiron with wheels or a sleek, plastic bullet, dwarfed by the regal sedans of 1960s Detroit. It belongs in one of Buckminster Fuller’s domed cities, a vehicle for traveling under the geodesics of a bubble-topped Manhattan. Its future wasn’t one of highways, but of narrow cement tracks looping gracefully between city and suburb...