Air Board Votes Tougher Car Emission Standards

California on Friday adopted strict auto emission rules to compel production of a new generation of ultra-clean cars and fuels, toughening the strictest air quality controls in the nation.

The effort is an attempt to grapple with California’s enormous dilemma: some of the worst air pollution in the nation, a population of 30 million people, 22 million vehicles on the road and few mass transit alternatives.

Those statistics also describe a lucrative market for cars and fuels, a force the state Air Resources Board believes will compel industries to come through.

“I think by passing this measure we are making one giant leap for winning the war,” said board member Brian P. Bilbray, a San Diego County supervisor.

The board voted 8 to 0 to adopt the rules, which include requiring electric cars to constitute 2% of annual car sales in the state by 1998, and standards defining cleaner burning gasoline that big oil companies have already begun to introduce.

The board intends to bring about an era of cars running on methanol, natural gas, ethanol and reformulated gasoline. The board left it up to the auto and oil industries to choose technologies.

Despite pressures to do so, the board avoided setting mandatory sales quotas for new fuels. Instead, the rules simply call for them to be made available on a widespread basis.

Other last-minute changes included allowing auto makers more review sessions with the board if design problems arise and greater leeway in the early years of the program in meeting emission standards.

The concessions make the plan “more doable than it would have been otherwise,” said Sam Leonard, director of emissions control for General Motors Corp.

Auto and oil companies already knew the handwriting was on the wall.

Atlantic Richfield Co. has led the way in making less-polluting gasolines, hoping those will be seen as a better option than alternative fuels. GM already had said it will introduce an electric car in California this decade.

Leonard said GM will try to meet the standards by developing cars powered by methanol, ethanol and compressed natural gas.

He has reservations about whether drivers will buy such cars, which may have less power and shorter range, and whether GM can successfully design them.

“I am not saying we can meet these standards,” he said. “They are clearly technology-forcing standards.”

The rules were adopted after two days of hearings that drew the views of many groups. They ranged from suggestions by oil company representatives that market forces be responsible for cleaning up the air to environmentalists’ suggestions that all fossil fuels be phased out.

The new standards are expected to increase pressures nationwide for better anti-pollution measures. New York recently adopted smog standards based on California’s existing rules and seven other Northeast states have pledged to adopt them.

California is the only state with emissions standards independent of federal ones. Previous actions by the anti-smog board led to production of cars with smog-cutting catalytic converters, now standard throughout the nation.

Under the new rules, cars that are 50% to 84% less polluting will be phased in between 1994 and 2003.

Oil companies will have to provide alternative fuels at service stations, beginning in Southern California and then statewide.

What the plan foresees is an initial generation of flexible-fuel vehicles that can use both gasoline and alternative fuels. Those will be transitional, leading ultimately to vehicles running solely on alternative fuels.

“Technologically, what we are asking is very challenging,” said board member Andrew Wortman, a Santa Monica scientific consultant. “But I think that it is feasible and at least should be tried.”

John White of the Sierra Club of California praised the board but implored it to keep the pressure on big business and to challenge any advertising claims that say products will clean up the air.

“We’ve got people with monopolies, very, very powerful vested interests,” White said, and given that, it must be government’s job to bring such factors as public health to counter marketplace pressures.

“That pressure has got to be kept on,” White said.