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About Electric and Future

The automobile is going through its biggest change since the assembly line. For more than a century, nearly every car ran on gasoline or diesel burned in a piston engine; now batteries, electric motors, hybrid systems and software are rewriting the formula, and the companies that master them may look very different from the ones that dominated the last century. The transition is uneven, contested and expensive, which is exactly what makes it worth following closely.

The shift has come in waves. Hybrids such as the Toyota Prius proved in the late 1990s that electrification could work for ordinary drivers, the Nissan Leaf and Tesla's cars made fully electric vehicles practical in the 2010s, and Chinese automakers and battery makers have since scaled up faster than anyone predicted. At the same time, cars have become computers on wheels, with large screens, connected services and over-the-air updates, and concept cars have turned from flights of fancy into previews of production technology.

The subpages cover each strand of that change: electric vehicles themselves, the batteries that power them, the charging networks that keep them moving, hybrids and alternative fuels such as hydrogen and synthetic fuels, the software and infotainment systems that define the modern cabin, and the concepts and prototypes that show where designers think the car is going. Together they trace a future that is arriving faster in some places than others.