Committee Vote on Electric Car Mandate Rebuffs Auto Industry : Environment: Critics say Californians won’t buy vehicles. Assembly panel rejects pork barrel argument.

An auto industry-backed effort to suspend California’s mandate requiring car makers to build thousands of electric cars beginning in the 1998 model year was rebuffed Monday by the Assembly Transportation Committee.

On a 7-2 vote, the panel rejected arguments that the zero-emissions vehicle program is becoming a huge pork barrel project and will be a disaster because Californians won’t buy what critics predict will be overpriced, underpowered autos.

Several of the committee’s 16 members left before the vote on the anti-mandate bill, so the matter will be taken up again. But the vote clearly represented the sentiment of the committee.

In any event, the auto industry’s main push to delay the electric car deadline is expected in May, when the California Air Resources Board, which set up the zero-emissions program, undertakes a biennial review of the plan.

Among those opposing the bill--which would have suspended the 1998 deadline until auto battery technology meets specific criteria--was Jacqueline Schafer, Gov. Pete Wilson’s new appointee as ARB chairwoman.

“The ARB’s existing review process can make whatever adjustments might be necessary” to the electric car mandate, Schafer said, contending that the board’s regulations already allow auto makers great flexibility. “It’s much too early to pull the plug on electric vehicles, as this bill would do.”

Schafer said she and California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary James Strock will visit Detroit this week to review the state of battery technology with the U.S. Auto Battery Consortium, a Big Three/federal government battery research project.

The auto industry and the bill’s sponsor, freshman Assemblyman Bernie Richter (R-Chico), contend that a breakthrough in battery technology is needed if electric cars are to be acceptable to large numbers of consumers.

With the 1998 model year, 2% of all new vehicles sold in the state must have no emissions--in effect, a requirement to make available perhaps 35,000 electric cars. The minimum climbs to 10% of new vehicles in 2003.

Citing what he said were more than $800 million in state and federal subsidies for various California alternative-fuel programs, Richter said supporters of the electric vehicle deadline are “feeding at the public trough.”

But supporters of the mandate portrayed the electric vehicle mandate as a means of jump-starting a new California industry.