More evidence that California car regs are not smart

Kenneth Green:

Key Points:

• California has led the modern crusade for vehicle electrification
• Experience suggests that even with modern technology, electric cars are not capable of satisfying consumer desires
• Subsidies given to promote electric car adoption are wasteful, regressive, and unethical
• California regulators should let markets, not planners, determine the course of vehicle electrification

Introduction

Environmentalists have long wished for the electrification of passenger vehicles. As Professor Vaclav Smil points out in Energy Myths and Realities, both Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford labored mightily to make that happen:¹

Few people believed more strongly in the eventual dominance of electric cars than Thomas Edison, the inventor of the modern electric system. This conviction brought about one of the most consequential pairings in the history of technology. Henry Ford was hired as the chief engineer at Detroit Edison Illuminating Company…

Edison would, in fact, spend more than 10 years trying to develop a battery that could compete with a gasoline engine. Alas, he didn’t find one. That did not dampen enthusiasm for electric cars, however.
As Robert Bryce points out in Power Hungry  “All-electric cars are The Next Big Thing. And they always will be.”² Bryce goes on to chronicle the 100+ year search for the all-electric car that can compete, on a level playing field, with internal-combustion engines, and finds a long history of failure. A few examples of the false starts that litters the history of electric cars is illustrative:

1911: The New York Times declares that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter and “much more economical.”

1915: The Washington Post writes that “prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they are within reach of the average family.”

1979: The Washington Post reports that General Motors has found “a breakthrough in batteries” that “now makes electric cars commercially practical.” The new zinc-nickel oxide batteries will provide the “100-mile range that General Motors executives believe is necessary to successfully sell electric vehicles to the public.”

But the long history of failure involving electric cars has never dimmed the enthusiasm of environmental regulators, particularly in California, which mandated the adoption of all-electric cars in California back in 1990, under the guise of a “Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate.³ While ostensibly a performance standard based on vehicle emissions, there were no vehicles other than all-electric cars that could satisfy the ZEV mandate at the time: it was a de facto electric car standard from the beginning.

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There is much more.

Green explains the added cost including insurance for these vehicles and the failure of technology to match the ambitious goals of the control freak regulators of California.  The state suffers under a plague of liberalism and an ineffective Republican opposition.  The result is a state that is being dragged into an economic abyss.