Look, it still totally works!

Okay, this is maybe not as fuel-efficient as the other half-size cars. Or as easy to drive. Or as cute. But one step at a time, right?

The Hiriko Fold (you think that’s Japanese, but it’s from the Basque for “urban”! Basque! Didn’t see THAT coming, did you?) was conceived a decade ago by researchers at MIT media lab, who wanted to design a small car that got even smaller for tight city parking. Now it’s finally going into commercial production, which means you could have your own sweet little fold-up car as early as 2013.

The all-electric Fold is normally eight feet long, already smaller than a SmartCar. But it folds up to a mere five feet long for parking, about the size of a shopping cart — small enough that three (and a half) of them can fit in a standard parking space. And all four wheels can swivel up to 60 degrees, which means you can just sort of sidle into the space instead of dealing with all that parallel-parking hoo-hah.

This is definitely not a road-trip car. It’s got a range of about 75 miles on one charge of its lithium-ion battery, and a top speed of 31 miles per hour. And if you’re already an accomplished urban biker, you might want to save your money — your bike already fits in small spaces, and the Fold will cost $16,400, which can buy you a lot of padded shorts. But for non-cyclists who want to zip around the city, you could do a lot worse than a zero-emissions car that can fit into the spaces shitty parkers leave behind.

The designers aren’t interested in the private market, though, so much as in the idea of selling fleets of Hiroki Folds for municipal car-sharing programs. If they get their wish, cities like Berlin, Barcelona, and San Francisco could be equipped with flocks of wee carlets for tourists and commuters to borrow. (Note that two of those target cities have some serious killer hills, making an EV-share program more realistic for non-Übermenschen than bikes.) Instead of spending all your milk money on a Fold, then, you could join a program that would let you use one on the weekdays to get to work. Or you could just borrow one to fold it and unfold it and fold it and unfold it a couple of times. We won’t judge.

As usual, leave it to the Onion to tell us about the really innovative green breakthroughs, the ones so-called “real” news sites won’t report on simply because they are fake and also morally reprehensible. In this case it’s the Prius Solution, the first car that can reduce your carbon footprint to zero, because it kills you with a spike as soon as you get in.

Photo by Michael Edson.

I’ve been thinking about upgrading to an electric car for awhile now. And in today’s market, there are plenty of models to choose from.

But having a lot of options makes for a complicated decision! Each model of electric car has its own unique mix of efficiency, charging time, and driving range — and since buying a car is a big decision, I want to find the model that makes the most sense for my family. To add to the confusion, there doesn’t seem to be any single, unified source of information on the many electric car options out there.

So, for my own convenience — and hopefully yours — I pulled together a table with basic stats on the major electric and plug-in hybrid cars:

Click to embiggen. (Sources include the manufacturers’ websites, Wikipedia, FuelEconomy.gov, and Motor Trend Magazine.)

What I took away from this research is that there’s no “perfect” choice among the EVs on the market. They’re all far more efficient in electric mode than gas-only models. That means less money spent on fueling your car, and lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions for each mile driven. But whether you’re willing to pay a premium for a longer range, a faster charge, or a higher top speed seems like a personal choice that I can’t help you out with.

But at least you now have the numbers. Happy comparing!

And now for the notes and caveats:

• I’ve restricted my search to electric and plug-in hybrid sedans that can carry at least four people — which is what my own family needs most days of the week — and to cars that are either on the market right now, or are expected to be offered later this year, in at least some part of the Pacific Northwest. I decided not to include a couple of cars — the Coda and the Toyota RAV4 EV — that are only being sold in California right now. If I’ve missed some cars, let me know in comments and I’ll be happy to update the table!

• MPGe stands for “miles per gallon equivalent” — which is how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rates the efficiency of electric vehicles.

• I sorted the models by base MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) minus the maximum U.S. tax credit allowed for that model. But note that you only get the full tax credit if you actually owe that much in federal income tax! Also, I decided not to include the cost of installing an in-home 240-volt charger in the vehicle price, since people with ready access to a public charging station might not need one.

• Some of the figures above are estimates, rather than official figures. I did my best, but unfortunately you may need to check the official figures as they’re released.

• The Honda Fit EV isn’t actually available for sale yet. A limited run will be leased to customers in Oregon and California beginning this summer. I’ve included its MSRP price (with tax credit) for comparison’s sake, but folks who lease a Honda Fit aren’t even allowed to buy it after the lease is over. That means that the price I quote is sort of irrelevant at this point.

• Retail deliveries for the Tesla Model S are scheduled to begin in June, but it looks like the smaller-battery models won’t be shipped until late 2012. I wasn’t able to find solid data on 120-volt charging times on the Tesla website, and the 240-volt charging time estimate can be cut in half if you buy an optional “twin charger” for $1,500. The Tesla website quotes a 300-mile range for its 85-kilowatt-hour (kWh) model … but recently announced that its range is 265 miles under EPA’s new test cycle, which, as a reader pointed out, could mean that the ranges for the 40- and 60-kWh models may be slightly overstated — thus the asterisk.

• The MPGe figures for the Prius Plug-in and Chevy Volt are for electric-mode only. The Volt gets 37 mpg in all-gas mode, and the Prius gets 50 mpg.

• And as a reminder, the differences in MPGe in all-electric mode are actually quite small. As we’ve written a number of times, miles-per-gallon math is actually quite deceptive: Differences at the low end of the mpg scale matter much more than do differences at the high end of the scale. So the difference between the top performer (the Honda Fit, at 116 MPGe) and its closest rival (the Mitsubishi MiEV, at 112 MPGe) is actually quite small.

Electric cars are a modern new technology, so modern and unproven that many [Republicans] would say they couldn’t possibly be plausible. Except for how they’ve actually been around since the turn of the 20th century. This photo of an electric car charging (above, click to embiggen) is from 1909, and by that point the technology was already 15 years old.

The first “Electrobat” flapped onto the streets of Gotham (uh, Philadelphia) in 1894. It “weighed 4,400 pounds and was powered by an adapted ship motor,” writes Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, but it’s not like gas-powered automobile technology was all that sleek. In fact, around the turn of the century, the market was evenly split between gas, electric, and horse-powered vehicles.

So what happened? Madrigal has the full story, but here’s the condensed version: The company that planned to manufacture and operate the vehicles (private ownership wasn’t a consideration — it was planned as more of an electric taxi fleet) started strong but eventually crumbled. Mismanaged vehicles and poorly trained drivers meant the service lost money everywhere outside of New York, and it never rallied. Don’t think too hard about what transportation might look like today if it had done a little better, and EVs had emerged victorious from the electric/gas/horse-driven three-way standoff.

In England, when you want to say that a guy or a gal is h-o-t-t HOT, you say “He/she is FIT!” And that is what we want to say about the 2013 Honda Fit EV. The Fit is FIT. F-i-t-t FIT!

This car — this car! — according to the EPA, gets the fuel efficiency equivalent if 118 miles per gallon.

Wow.

As an electric vehicle (EV), the car does not use fuel, so one might also say that it gets 29 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles. That’s better than the Ford Focus Electric, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, and the Nissan Leaf, according to Wired. The Fit also charges in three hours and has a range of 82 miles. It costs $36,625, which, admittedly, is pretty expensive. (A new Prius, for instance, now starts at $24,000.)

But a normal driver with a Fit will consume about $500 of electricity per year. Anyone driving a gas-guzzler might spend that much in a month or two — meaning you’re saving thousands of dollars for every year you own it. Yeah, you’re going to want to ogle this car. And start figuring out what pick-up line you’re going to use when you meet the fit owner of a Fit down at the pub sometime soon.

Shortly after we got married almost 11 years ago, my wife and I bought a used 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan. We have been driving it ever since. We drove both of our kids home from the hospital in it. We picked up our puppy in it. It’s been on every one of our road trips. I’m incredibly fond of it.

My wife, not so much. She does most of the day-to-day driving, so the nostalgia factor isn’t enough to overcome her aversion to piloting a suburban land yacht. It’s too big, too hard to maneuver and park on city streets, too fuel inefficient. She’s over it.

Consequently, we’re looking for a new car. We’re nearing a decision, but I thought I’d ask for input from you, Grist’s treasured readers. Cause y’all are smart.

Just to anticipate: Yes, I’m sure it would be wonderful if we had no car at all and got our kids around on the bus or in some fancy four-seater bike contraption. But … no. Where we live, what we do, we have to have a car. Maybe someday we’ll live in a walkable enough place that we won’t need one — I hope! — but not today. And also to anticipate: Yes, I’m aware the “greenest” thing we could do is just keep driving the minivan into the ground. But that ship has sailed. So, moving on … here’s our thought process so far:

This will be our main car (if I get my way, our only car, though there’s some internal dispute on that matter). It needs to accommodate me, my wife, my two kids, ages 6 and 8, and my 45-pound dog (who goes with us everywhere in town). The vast majority of our driving is daily commuting in the city. Here’s what we’re looking for:

• small, or at least un-huge, but big enough for all of us and some stuff;
• fuel efficient;
• comfortable;
• tan interior, not grey or black.

Yes, my wife is adamant about the interior. (We all have our things.)

One thing that’s not on the list: driving thrillz! I know lots of people fetishize how different cars accelerate or stick to turns or … whatever else you see them doing on car commercials on the beautiful winding road out in the middle of nowhere with no other cars around. But let’s face it: I’m a married dude driving my kids to Little League games. I spend a lot of time at four-way stop signs. I could really give a sh*t if my car is “exciting to drive.” It’s an appliance. I just want it to be comfortable and to work.

In Europe, you see dozens of varieties of cars catering to exactly my consumer profile: young(ish) family that needs some room, but not a ton, and prizes functionality and fuel efficiency. In the U.S. market, though, I’ve found it to be fairly slim pickins.

Chevy Volt: too expensive.

To begin with, our requirements rule out sedans. We tried, in a rented sedan, to get around with the dog between the kids in the back seats, but it didn’t work out. Dog’s too big; too much competition from backpacks and bike helmets. It’s too bad. There are tons of nice, fuel-efficient sedans around, including some fairly cheap and well-reviewed non-hybrid ones like the Hyundai Elantra, which gets 29 mpg city and 40 highway. See also: Ford Fusion or Taurus [oops, I mean Camry] hybrids, Honda Civic or Accord hybrids, and of course the Chevy Volt (which is too expensive for us anyway). The hybrid-sedan market is crazily well-covered. (Unlike, say, the hybrid-minivan market, which at least in the U.S. is empty, a phenomenon that absolutely baffles me.)

We don’t want an SUV. Too big. An SUV is just a station wagon built up to handle terrain that 95 percent of buyers will never travel on, including us. We don’t want something overbuilt; want something appropriately built. If we were going to be tempted by one it would be the Ford Escape hybrid, the most fuel-efficient SUV available at 36/31. There are moderately priced used ones available.

Lexus CT 200h: also too expensive.

Some of the larger hatchbacks (or what they’re apparently calling “5-doors” now) would do the trick for us. The Lexus CT 200h is a pretty sweet ride, but by the time any amenities are added it’s in the mid- to high 30,000s, which is rather rich for our blood. The Hyundai Elantra Touring is nice, but it drops a full 10 mpg down from the sedan, for reasons I don’t understand. The Ford Focus hatchback is powerfully tempting — it’s about the right size, decently priced, extremely well-reviewed, and reasonably fuel efficient at 26/36. (There’s also the Focus electric, but it starts at $40k. The Nissan Leaf is similarly expensive.)

What about actual station wagons? Seems like there used to be tons of them — station-wagon versions of the Honda Accord, Ford Taurus and Focus, VW Passat, etc. These days, though, there aren’t many to choose from. Some of the nicest are made by Subaru, but Subaru is terrible on fuel efficiency. (WTF, Subaru?) There are two fuel-efficient wagons that have gotten our attention.

VW Jetta SportWagen TDI: uncomfortable.

One is the VW Jetta SportWagen TDI, a super-clean diesel station wagon that wins for good looks and a credible 30/42 mpg. It’s got a nice, slim profile, enough cargo room, and VW’s sharp interior. (Seriously, why are VW’s dashboards so much nicer and more comprehensible than the crap in other cars these days?) Loaded up with the moon roof and etc., it’s around $29k, which makes my palms sweat, but is not out of reach.

Unfortunately, when I went and drove a TDI wagon, I just didn’t find it comfortable. The seats are too low to the ground for my taste and are shaped in that same horrible curved way that airplane seats are shaped, where your lower back collapses backward and your head gets shoved forward by a head rest. And the “fun” driving I heard so much about didn’t really strike me as anything special. I was sad not to like this one in practice.

Prius v: nice, but not cheap.

All of which brings us to the new Prius v. (V is for “versatile,” not five.) It looks not much bigger than the normal Prius, but the back is big enough for the dog to sit in comfortably, even accompanied by some luggage. It has as much cargo space as most SUVs, especially with the back seats folded down. It’s extremely comfortable, as I found when I test drove it (yay, lumbar support!), and while not exactly a live wire on the road, it’s certainly zippy enough for me. The back seats recline, which is unusual. It looks plain, but I like plain (I loathe the swoopy look that seems to be in vogue). And it gets 44 mpg in the city, 40 on the highway, which beats just about any other car on the road.

Ford C-Max hybrid: nice, but not yet available.

The only other car I’ve been able to find that has the same excellent fuel efficiency in the right configuration is the Ford C-Max hybrid, which isn’t even out until the fall of this year. It’s not clear yet what it will cost, but I expect it will be in the same neighborhood as the Prius v. It also comes in a plug-in version, which I expect will be considerably more expensive.

I’m half-tempted to wait until the C-Max is out. It will have an advanced lithium ion battery instead of the lead acid [sorry, I misspoke: make that nickel-metal hydride] used in the Prius, along with all the latest gizmo tech. It’s already winning awards. I like what Ford is doing lately and there is some small part of me that wants to “buy American.”

Still, we’ve been holding off on a new car for a long while and the wife is sick of holding. I’m well aware (readers have sent me spreadsheets!) that if we were only worried about total cost of ownership, it would make more sense to buy a cheaper car. It will take a looong time before fuel efficiency pays off the extra cost of the Prius. And I know that if we were only concerned about “green,” we’d probably be better off buying a used car. But it’s hard to find fuel-efficient used cars that match our specs.

Anyway, we’re not concerned with any one single metric, we’re concerned with the whole package, and the Prius v would be the right package of features for us even without the great gas mileage. With it, it tops the pack of contenders. The only problem is the $30k price tag, which is way more than I ever expected to spend on a car … or anything else, really. It makes me woozy. But it’s doable.

So, if any of you are still with me, I’m curious to know what you think. Have you hashed through the same concerns? Do you think our reasoning is off somehow? Let me know in comments. And I’ll let you know what we end up doing.

Electric vehicles are great and all, but they’re not exactly practical for everyone. Like, how’s a farmer in rural China going to a) afford a pricey green car and b) get enough access to electrical outlets and vehicle charging stations?

Well, if he’s Tang Zhengping from Beijing’s Tangzhou Wanji Yongle Town, he’ll build his own – and it’ll be AWESOME.

Fifty-five-year-old Zhengping recently constructed a totally emissions-free vehicle powered by wind and solar. The ride — which comes in a lovely shade of robin’s egg blue — is no jalopy, either: It has a range of 90 miles.

His creation, roughly the size of a box-car, is powered by batteries and two sets of electric generators. A large fan installed in the front and a pair of solar panels in the back help supply power by charging either the battery or generator, depending on which isn’t being used at the time. Altogether, the project cost Zhengping the Chinese equivalent of around 1,600 dollars.

Zhengping only needed three months to build this amazeballs vehicle. Hello, GM? We’ve got your next recruit.

Update: This post originally said Zhengping’s car could travel at 90 mph. D’oh! Miles per hour and range are totally different — we’ve corrected the post to show that the electric vehicle has a range of 90 miles.

It goes 200 miles on a third as much battery power as an electric car. It has airbags and an enclosed cockpit. It’s gyroscopically stabilized, like a Segway.

It could be the future of transportation.

Think of it as either an electric velomobile on steroids or the Nissan Leaf on a crash diet — either way, two wheels plus ultra-efficient electric transport means that once oil gets really expensive, Lit Motors‘ C-1 electric motorcycle could be the best vehicle on the road.

The C-1 was unveiled on Tuesday at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif., but it’s still very much a prototype. It won’t be available for at least 18 months, and it will cost $24,000 when it arrives.

But once it comes out, its electronically-controlled power train will be capable of some pretty impressive stuff.

Lit’s website brands it “a rolling smartphone” and Kim himself describes it as an app that could be programmed to pop wheelies, corkscrews and other BMX tricks.

That’s right — it’s staggeringly fuel-efficient, it’s adorable, AND you can train it to do tricks. It’s like the world’s best vehicle and the world’s best pet in one.

Go to the Twitter feed of Smart Car of Argentina and hold down the J key. Go on. We’ll wait here for you.

AWESOME, right? Okay, I know this is just that thing where advertisers colonize every form of media or social networking and pervert it to their own capitalistic ends, but I can’t help it: This technique of using Twitter as an ASCII-art flipbook is just so cool!

Smart Cars are pretty cool in their own right — they’re teeny, cute, 85 percent recyclable, and ridiculously fuel-efficient, so if you have to have a car they’re a good way to go. But I like that they’re also putting that innovative spirit to use finding fun new ways for us to interact with the internet. Guess I’m just a sucker for advertising that doesn’t make me want to punch things.