Electric Cars Get Green Light From Board

Pollution: Air quality officials withstand pressure from auto makers to drop requirement. The vehicles could be on roads next year.

By Gary Polakovic, Environmental Writer
Los Angeles Times

SACRAMENTO--January 26, 2001--Air quality officials Thursday turned back industry opposition to electric vehicles, setting California on course to launch a clean-car revolution that could lead to thousands of advanced vehicles on the nation's highways as early as next year.

The unanimous vote to require auto makers to sell electric cars in California, beginning with the 2003 model year, automatically triggers copycat mandates in Vermont, Massachusetts and New York, where 8% of the nation's new cars are sold. Under federal law, those states could require electric vehicles only if California did so.

The move came after a sometimes acrimonious debate in which representatives of the automobile industry urged the California Air Resources Board to abandon the so-called zero-emission vehicle mandate. The auto makers have fought the requirement for a decade, arguing that battery-powered cars are impractical and unmarketable, and they intensified their lobbying in recent weeks.

"Our companies have explored the path of battery electric vehicles. However, electric cars with broad consumer appeal are an idea whose time has come and gone, much like eight-track tapes, Betamax and New Coke," Josephine Cooper, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, told board members.

The alliance, representing the world's 13 largest auto makers, urged the board to replace the mandate with a three-year pilot project that would not have allowed other states to require electric cars. But the auto makers' stance triggered a backlash from members of the 11-member board. "I've found this campaign to be outrageous," said Matthew R. McKinnon, a labor leader who is one of Gov. Gray Davis' appointees to the board.

"It disturbs me to hear delays," said another board member, William F. Friedman, a physician at UCLA.

"It is really time to get on with the business of progress. And progress will be made when we stick it to you to make you do what you need to do," Friedman told a representative from General Motors during the hearing.

Supporters of the electric-car rule said that requiring auto makers to begin mass production would bring down costs and force the development of new technologies that ultimately will expand the range and reduce the cost of smog-free vehicles.

"What we are trying to do is encourage diversity in technologies, give consumers options and stimulate competition in the market," said Michael P. Kenny, executive officer for the air board.

Down the line, the supporters said, the program is a powerful incentive to develop cars powered with fuel cells, which convert hydrogen to electricity and have the potential ultimately to replace the internal combustion engine.

"Zero-emission vehicles have such potential to address so many problems: public health concerns, global climate change, energy diversity," said Alan C. Lloyd, chairman of the air board. "Clean vehicle technology is advancing on a number of fronts. The program is designed to take advantage of those advances."

The board's action offers a blizzard of incentives and strategies to promote at least four basic types of advanced vehicles between 2003 and 2018. Changes are intended to increase consumer confidence, lower the costs of the cars and get lots of them on the highway as soon as possible.

In the beginning of the program, 4,650 full-size electric cars and a like amount of other clean machines must be offered for sale. By 2010, about 22,000 such cars must be made available. The totals increase to 50,000 by 2018. Sport utility vehicles join the program in 2007. Those provisions can be met using full-size battery-powered cars, hybrids, fuel cells, and electric city and neighborhood cars. The six companies required to offer these cars for sale include DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co., General Motors, Honda, Nissan and Toyota.

While those provisions are not as progressive as environmentalists wanted or the air board sought when it reviewed the program last summer, it calls for more clean cars in the long run and offers more opportunity for success in the near term, the board concluded. The zero-emission vehicle mandate has proceeded in fits and starts for 11 years.

In September, the board reaffirmed its support for the rule. But late last year, the board's staff recommended substantially easing it. The staff proposal would have moved the state away from battery-operated cars and toward other alternative fuel vehicles.

But Thursday's decision rejected the staff proposal. The vote ends a final review of the program and means auto makers must begin mass production.

The electric-powered cars and light trucks that will be produced as a result of the rule will come in all shapes and sizes, from freeway-challenged mini-cars that Ford may produce for urban use to a whisper-quiet, battery-powered sport utility vehicle from Toyota and a gasoline-electric hybrid sedan from Honda. Although the full mandate will take effect only in 2003, some new electric cars could be in showrooms by this fall.

But air quality officials concede that battery-powered cars will cost $22,000 more than comparable gasoline-powered models and have only half the range or less. Only batteries can power a practical nonpolluting car today, experts said. In their effort to roll back the mandate, the auto makers gained support from some legislators representing minority communities, who argued that their constituents will not be able to afford advanced technology cars.

Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) told the board to delay its decision to weigh the effects on poor communities. He was joined by Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Los Angeles) and other lawmakers.

Opponents of the rule also argued that electric cars would worsen California's electricity shortages. State officials have dismissed that argument, noting that electric cars refuel at night, when the state has surplus power, and that by the time they hit the state's highways, new power plants now being built will have increased electricity supplies.

Californians already drive the world's cleanest cars--a new car today emits less than one-tenth as much smog-forming gas as a 1960s model. But greater reductions in tailpipe exhaust are still necessary to achieve clean air. Vehicles account for 70% of the smog-forming emissions in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and deep cuts in those emissions are necessary if the region hopes to achieve the federal deadline for healthy air in 2010.

Although a small new fleet of electric cars would not, by itself, make a major dent in smog, supporters of the program, like Ellen Garvey, the executive officer of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, said it is a crucial first step.

"The ZEV program is the linchpin to cleaning up all our cars and most of our trucks," she said at Thursday's hearing. "It's not only a program for drivers, it's a program for breathers."