We’re big fans of Danny’s Contentment, an electric car video blog produced by Danny Fleet.

Check out his latest video below - a ride in the back seat of a Commuter Cars Tango. The Tango is an ultra narrow, ultra-rapid 2-seat electric car part-developed in the UK by Prodrive. When you're done with part 1, check out part 2 over at Danny's site - a hair-raising ride at highway speed...

At $108,000 the Tango is not exactly a cheap alternative to taking the bus, but it looks like a lot more fun.

The clever stop-start mechanism you’ll find under the bonnet of plush BMWs and posh modern Minis is about to find a new and more egalitarian home: in among the oily bits of a Kia Cee’d.

The Cee’d ISG (Idle Stop&Go) is to get the same Bosch-developed starter and engine management system required to stop the engine when the car is stationary and – more crucially – to get it going again smartly when the lights change.

In the Kia, the system will halt the car’s 1.4-litre engine when the car is in neutral with the clutch released. Depressing the clutch to engage first gear triggers the starter. Obviously the system only saves fuel when the car is stopped, so congested city streets are the place to be if you want to see the Cee’d ISG’s claimed 15 per cent improvement.

The ISG will, apparently, come to Britain in January.

Further down the line, we may yet see a hybrid Cee’d in the UK – the company has a Honda-Civic-style setup in development, by which we mean a small electric motor to supplement a relatively normal conventional engine, as opposed to the Toyota Prius setup which uses a much larger motor to give more electric oomph.

Meanwhile, BMW is pushing its own game onward. It has admitted it is working on an electric car, and this month a Mini without a tailpipe was spotted trundling around Munich’s roads. There have been persistent rumours that the company will breathe new life into its dead Isetta brand with a sub-Mini city car. And the latest edition of Car Magazine states that work has begun on a project dubbed “i car”, which will apparently yield a 1-Series sized vehicle with front-wheel drive, that will be “spacious and much lighter” – and less luxurious – than its blue-propeller brethren.

Car suggests that this car will wear a BMW badge, but we are not sure that the German firm’s brand champions will want to go there. We still suspect the company will dust off its Metro badge. We seem to be alone in that belief, but we continue to think it.

BMW will not be the only maker currently developing battery-powered vehicles - new Californian regulations require the major makers to sell a small proportion of zero-emissions vehicles from 2012.

So we finally know what the production version of Chevrolet’s Volt will look like – not much like the concept, in short. Gone are the aggressive proportions, huge-but-narrow wheels, and the transparent Lexan tops to the door skins – Chevy’s designers having used the somewhat cheaper trick of black paint to suggest the double-beltline effect of the concept.

Last year, when the concept was unveiled at the Detroit Motor Show, GM designers enthused that the Volt’s extreme wheel-at-each-corner stance was possible because the engine didn’t need to be connected to the wheels. It’s a shame, then, that their final effort has such conventional proportions.

Thankfully the range-extended electric vehicle concept of the underlying E-Flex platform remains unscathed, which is of more consequence in the end. Unlike, say, a Toyota Prius hybrid, the Volt uses electricity alone to move the wheels at all times and speeds. That electricity comes either straight out of a battery, or from the petrol-powered on-board generator.

For trips up to 40 miles (at unspecified speeds – energy consumption tends to go up with the square of speed) – the Volt is powered by its 16kWh, lithium-ion battery pack. When the charge runs out, the engine coughs into life to get the electrons going again. GM says this eliminates "range anxiety," which will be familiar to any EV driver – and of course anyone who has ever wondered if they’ll make it to the next filling station.

A full recharge will take eight hours from a standard US household 120V outlet, according to GM, while a 240V socket will cut the time to under three hours, apparently.

The Volt’s 220 lithium-ion cells are arranged in a T-formation, down the car’s centre spine and behind the rear seats. The drive motor offers 150bhp and 273 lb-ft maximum torque. Electric motors run out of puff at high revs, explaining the low-ish top speed of 100mph.

All of which is still academic as the first customers won’t get behind the wheel until late 2010, with the first European Volt sales due a year later.

An E-Flex-based Vauxhall/Opel Astra is due around the same time, which will probably be a diesel-electric and will probably be quite a bit nicer to sit in than the US-aimed Volt.

At least European buyers won’t be underwhelmed when that car arrives, as many have been by the Volt’s transition from motor show to showroom. The European E-Flex concept car, the Opel Flextreme, had realistic proportions and silly details. Just about the opposite of the Volt concept, in other words.

The New York Times has published a superb Q&A with Gordon Murray, designer of intelligent cars from the furiously fast McLaren F1 to the lusciously lean Light Car Company Rocket. And, of course, the man in the process of building the already intriguing T.25 city car.

Quotes of which to take note:

“Building an ultra-light but safe and efficient car at a very low cost and sales price requires the exact same lateral thinking and philosophy we applied to the McLaren F1... it was a new start in sports-car packaging by fitting three adults, a 6-litre V-12 engine, 90 liters of fuel and five suitcases in a footprint smaller than a Porsche Boxster.”

“[The Rocket] remains today the world’s lightest production car at 370kg.”

“Our projected fuel consumption is about 80mpg ... [the projected purchase price is] £5,500.”

The UK’s mainstream car mags have been let loose on real roads with some pre-production examples of the innovative Toyota iQ – the upcoming 3+1-seater city car. Their verdicts may disappoint those hoping the pint-sized box-on-wheels might deliver a unique combination of quality, capability and frugality when it arrives in the UK in January.

Auto Express cheekily describes its driving opportunity as “exclusive”, and then proceeds to spout 500 words of factoids from the press release that have almost nothing to do with how the car feels from the driving seat. In the last couple of paragraphs the mag finally manages to note that the driving experience “could be sharper”, that the car is slow but “firm and planted, with safe and predictable handling”, and that it’s “nippy and fun” and “better to drive than a Smart”. Overall Auto Express gives the car a broad thumbs-up, although given the lazy reporting we’re not sure that this opinion counts for much.

At least Autocar’s report gives the impression that someone has actually driven the thing. Autocar says the iQ is “impressively refined” and “very stable even at higher motorway speeds ... unaffected by passing lorries”, which is good to hear given the light weight, slab sides, and shortish wheelbase.

Autocar is very happy with the 1.3 litre petrol engine plus “clean shifting” CVT gearbox, labelling it an impressive combination offering “surprisingly muscular performance”. The tight turning circle is also singled out for praise.

Negatives? The wide B-pillar and small rear side window mean that “the over-shoulder view is poor”. The ride also seems a bit rough, according to Autocar, and the brakes feel lifeless.

Overall, Autocar suspects Toyota hasn’t done enough to make the iQ feel like a premium product, predicting that it will have a tough time prising customers out of their ordinary superminis, given its likely price premium.

Car Magazine, meanwhile, sampled the smaller 1.0-litre engine and it sounds as if this is a spec to avoid, the weedy three-pot leaving the road tester “finger-tapping, disappointed by the lack of oomph” up hills.

Like Autocar, Car thought the 3.9m turning circle “brilliant” and “a real boon” around town. The “organ-wrenching body roll” on fast corners was not quite so welcome, though.

And while Autocar liked the CVT gearbox, Car finds it “dismal” and as welcome as a dose of the plague. The manual alternative, meanwhile, offers “incredibly long” gearing sufficient to reach 60mph in second.

Inside, Car says the ambience is “pretty special” – although evidently not that special as the reporter goes on to say he was “disappointed” by the interior: “It's roomy and clever – and head-swivellingly different – but it ain't posh.”

What conclusions can we draw from these contradictory impressions?

Well, the iQ clearly won’t drive like a sports car, but it should feel safe. It will need to be keenly priced to compete with Minis above and Fiat 500s below. The unusual interior layout works, but the overall impression isn’t quite the posh-car-boil-washed that Toyota promised. And the CVT gearbox probably needs the bigger engine.

We’re a tad disappointed by the consensus, but will wait our own first test drive to really make up our minds.

At last year’s Tokyo Motor Show, Honda promised to build an affordable hybrid to undercut Toyota’s Prius (and Honda’s own Civic IMA). Today it published the first official pictures of that car – the new Honda Insight hybrid.

The new car will make its debut at the Paris motor show in a month’s time and although Honda is not yet saying what affordable will mean in pounds and pence, the mainstream car mags are all of a mind, predicting a base price of £15,000 – Ford Focus money, in other words.

The car looks strikingly similar in profile to a Prius. This is presumably no accident, and probably has twin causes. The laws of fluid dynamics are no respecter of brand differentiation, giving the thumbs-up to slope-tailed humpback shapes irrespective of which group of Japanese engineers plug in the numbers. But then it’s also always a canny marketing move to ape the competition when you plan to undercut it on price.

And the similarities go beyond the aerodynamic profile. At the rear, the tailgate screen is split into a near horizontal upper pane swept by a wiper, plus an oblong, upright lower section, flanked by pointed lamp clusters. Just like the current Prius. But in Honda’s defence, the 2003 Prius 2’s rear-end happens to resemble two earlier Hondas: the original 1999 Insight and the 1987 CRX 2.

No word yet on powerplants and, in particular, the petrol-electric power equation. Will the new Insight follow the Civic IMA’s recipe of one part electric to four parts petrol power, or adopt the more radical Prius pairing of motor and engine with equal outputs?

Alas, for the moment, a couple of pictures and a few vague words are all the details Honda is willing to divulge.