1998 Electric Car Deadline Backed : Pollution: State air board’s staff rebuts contention by the auto industry that technology is not far enough along. The board will take up the matter next month.

Laying the groundwork for a contentious vote next month, the staff of the California Air Resources Board recommended Thursday that the state go forward with its mandate for mass-produced electric cars beginning in 1998.

The Air Resources Board meets May 12 and 13 in Los Angeles to decide whether automotive technology has advanced enough to uphold a standard that requires major car companies to begin selling thousands of electric vehicles in California every year.

While the U.S. auto industry contends that batteries will remain too unrefined and costly to meet the deadline, the ARB staff insists that several advanced technologies can be ready for commercial production by then. Thursday’s recommendation to the board echoes technical findings that the ARB issued in March.

Under the state’s standard, 2% of vehicles sold by each major manufacturer in California each year must be emission-free beginning in 1998. That amounts to 20,000 to 25,000 cars. The volume increases to 5% in 2001 and 10% in 2003. Companies violating the standard could lose their certification to sell cars in California.

As the deadline approaches, auto makers--particularly Detroit’s Big Three--have been putting increasing pressure on California to grant delays. At a five-hour workshop in March, U.S. car makers said they could not be ready until at least mid-2001.

ARB officials said Thursday, however, that the timetable can be met.

Electric vehicles “are more possible than ever before,” James Boyd, the ARB’s executive officer, said Thursday. If the mandate is weakened, auto makers will not be aggressive in bringing cleaner-burning cars to California, the staff said in its report.

“Tremendous technological progress has been made over the last few years,” the ARB report says, “and . . . the mandate is the reason that much of this development has taken place.”

The ARB must review its zero-emission mandates every two years. Next month’s decision is pivotal, because it is the last realistic chance the auto companies will have to delay the standards before they must make major investments in manufacturing plants. If they fail, the industry’s only other option is to persuade Congress to intervene.

ARB members, led by Gov. Pete Wilson’s newly appointed chairwoman, Jacqueline Schafer, so far have showed strong support for the mandate.

ARB staff members say it is not technology that is impeding electric cars but the reluctance of U.S. car makers to invest adequately. The car companies, however, say they are worried they will have to rush to market with a product that is not viable for consumers.

A reasonably priced, high-energy battery is considered crucial to the success of electric vehicles. Without it, cars must be frequently recharged. Today’s lead-acid battery packs can power a car for about 100 miles, while more advanced prototypes have a range of more than 200 miles.

“EVs (electric vehicles) have three problems: cost, range and infrastructure,” John Williams, a General Motors engineer who represents a consortium of the Big Three auto makers and battery producers, told the ARB last month.

The companies need more time, Williams said, mainly because high-energy batteries are available only as expensive, hand-crafted prototypes. Getting them ready for affordable, high-volume manufacture will take about seven years, Williams said.

“The low-cost batteries have low energy and the high-energy ones have high costs,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is get today’s $40,000 battery down to $6,000.”

Williams said the companies expect to have an advanced, well tested battery pack prototype in 1996, a production plant starting up in 1998 and enough batteries to meet the mandate in mid-2001.

Even then, Williams warned, “it is a high-risk” venture, since the rest of the car still must be attractive to consumers.

Battery manufacturers, however, are more optimistic than the U.S. car makers.

“We’re completely confident that we can meet all the goals by 1998, including the cost. . . . We have no intention of waiting until 1998 to produce these batteries,” Michael Fetcenko, vice president of technology for Michigan-based Ovonic Battery Co., recently told the staff.

Ovonic’s advanced nickel-metal-hydride batteries, he said, are “already in high-volume production” for laptop computers, and in a road test in GM’s Impact electric car, one ran 250 miles without a recharge.

Bringing the cost down for cars, he said, “is achievable within three to four years”--several years sooner than GM’s Williams predicted.

Little is publicly known about how far Japanese auto makers have progressed, because they have been much quieter than their American counterparts. The ARB staff, however, says it considered confidential information from Japanese companies in its recommendation.

The ARB concedes that cost will be a problem, but only initially. In the first few years, electric cars will cost $5,000 to $10,000 more than a gasoline-fueled car, but the ARB maintains that as more vehicles are produced, prices will become comparable.

The operating costs will be virtually the same--6.3 to 9 cents per mile for an electric car compared with 7.7 cents per mile for a conventional Ford Escort, according to the ARB report.

The oil industry has argued that using cleaner-burning gasoline and alternative fuels such as methanol and natural gas is a more practical and economical way to clean California’s air.

But the ARB staff maintains that zero-emission cars are perhaps the only way to eliminate enough exhaust to achieve health standards.