Toyota Prius v, Mitsubishi i among five best 2012 'green' cars

The 2012 Ford Focus Electric, 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas, 2012 Mitsubishi i, 2012 Toyota Prius v and 2012 Volkswagen Passat TDI are the finalists for The Green Car of the Year award presented by the Green Car Journal yearly at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

For the seventh consecutive year, the Green Car of the Year will honor environmental leadership in the automotive field, with the winner being announced during a press conference Nov. 17 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

These five finalists are also honored as Green Car Journal’s Top 5 Green Cars for 2012 for rising to the top of a field replete with increasingly more environmentally conscious and exciting models.

What is notable about this year’s nominees is the manufacuturers' collectively diverse definitions "green."

Honda’s Civic Natural Gas champions an alternative fuel that burns cleanly and is abundant in the U.S. The Volkswagen Passat TDI continues this automaker’s expansion of new clean diesel products that produce significantly lower emissions while achieving an impressively high mpg rating. The Prius v is a larger variant of Toyota’s popular hybrid model and marks an expansion of Prius into its own family of vehicles. Ford’s Focus Electric and Mitsubishi’s i continue the march toward greater choices of zero-emission all-electric vehicles on American highways.

Green Car of the Year jurors include leaders of the nation’s top environmental organizations, including Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club; Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council; Jean-Michel Cousteau, president of Ocean Futures Society and Matt Petersen, president of Global Green USA.

Jay Leno, noted auto enthusiast and host of the “Tonight Show,” as well as automotive icon Carroll Shelby also also the jurors this year.