NEWS ANALYSIS : Air Panel Bending Under Pressure : Autos: For the first time in three decades, the state’s groundbreaking smog agency may give in to industry and political forces. It is poised to weaken--or drop--its mandate for electric cars.
Detroit’s auto makers argued that the California Air Resources Board was pushing too hard, too fast. The technology isn’t ready and is too expensive, they said. Consumers will reject the cars. California’s economy will be shattered.
It was a tense time for members of the governor’s air board. Responsible for cleansing California’s grimy skies, they wanted to move decisively, yet feared forcing a promising but unproven smog-control technology on automobiles. Finally, they resisted the immense pressure and went ahead with the tough new pollution standard.
The year was 1970. The technology was the catalytic converter, which revolutionized the battle against smog and is now found on most cars throughout the world.
Today, the Air Resources Board is hearing the same gloom-and-doom refrain from U.S. and Japanese auto manufacturers and the oil industry. But this time, the anti-smog technology they are wrestling with is even more revolutionary, and the board members now suspect they have finally pushed too far in trying to transform Californians’ cars.
In two years, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Mazda and Nissan must begin selling mass-produced electric cars in California showrooms. Mandated sales quotas, set by the air board in 1990, are designed to gradually break America’s addiction to internal combustion engines and gasoline, which are responsible for more than half the Los Angeles region’s smog.
But after months of behind-the-scenes lobbying and negotiating, the Wilson administration’s air board is poised to take a major step toward undoing that pioneering mandate.
Months of tumultuous debate will culminate in Sacramento on Thursday, when the air board’s staff plans to unveil its proposal for weakening, postponing or perhaps even repealing its earlier order. Although the final vote is two or three months away, the board will signal how far it wants to ease the requirements.
Such a decision would mark the first time California’s air agency has backed down after three decades of setting groundbreaking, aggressive limits for auto pollution.
Under the current mandate, 2% of cars offered for sale in California by large manufacturers--or 20,000 cars per year--must be emission-free (electric) beginning with 1998 models, rising to 5% in 2001 and 10% in 2003.
Research on the technology by the air board’s staff and a panel of independent engineers convened by the Wilson administration suggests that the quotas should be eased for the initial two or three years--or perhaps suspended during that period--to let electric-car technology catch up.
But the Wilson administration is facing intense pressure from industry and conservative legislators to ease the mandate even more than the data suggest.
The auto industry has recommended a six-year suspension of the rule, coupled with voluntary offers to produce about 2,000 electric cars between 1998 and 2000. Oil companies, in an intensive effort to preserve the demand for gasoline, are pushing to repeal the entire regulation.
Agency insiders and observers say that the air board has lost its renowned independence and that the strings are now being pulled by Wilson’s office and the oil industry. Air board Chairman John Dunlap testily disputes such charges but will not directly answer whether the governor’s office has ordered the mandate eliminated.
“This is not a political decision, it is a technical decision,” Dunlap snapped at reporters in an uncharacteristic burst of temper last Thursday. “Get your stories right. Quit looking under every rock for a deal, because there isn’t one. Respect the independence of this board.”
Yet some engineers serving on the Wilson administration’s advisory panel are dismayed that the air board is considering a repeal, when highly efficient electric cars are almost ready for consumers. The panel predicts that advanced batteries that give the cars a range comparable to that of gasoline-powered cars will be commercially available as soon as 2000 or 2001.
“This mandate was shaping up to be a brilliant success,” said one of the advisors who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “This program actually worked, with just a little time disparity between 1998 and 2000. Why are they crumbling now?”
In the final days of the George Deukmejian administration, the Air Resources Board decided that California needs zero-emission cars, or else the Los Angeles region will never attain healthful air as population and traffic surge.
But zero exhaust doesn’t mean simply attaching a new gadget to a car engine. In fact, these cars have no engines at all. Success relies not just on inventing an electric car that works, but on ensuring that consumers understand it and actually buy it.
Moving too quickly to force the cars into showrooms could backfire, poisoning the market in the eyes of wary consumers. But backing off too much would halt the growth of a car technology that six years ago was equated with sluggish golf carts yet today is becoming a viable rival of gasoline-powered vehicles.
In just the past two weeks, more than 250 comments and proposals for altering the mandate have flooded the air board.
“They are worried and feeling the pressure of this huge campaign by the oil and auto industries, a lot of which is smoke screen and despicable,” said Bill Van Amburg of Calstart, a consortium of California businesses developing advanced transportation technologies. “On the other hand, they are trying to react to some legitimate concerns about the mandate.”
The California Chamber of Commerce and two dozen conservative state legislators have urged the administration to scrap the mandate and find a cheaper, less intrusive way to clean up exhaust. They worry that all car buyers and taxpayers will be subsidizing an expensive technology that the industry calls unmarketable.
“Having a bunch of bureaucrats with little or no stake and limited knowledge second-guessing the manufacturing community is like having a similar dimwitted group of generalists dictating to a medical doctor which treatment he must use,” Assemblyman Bernie Richter (R-Chico) wrote to the air board.
Yet second-guessing the auto industry is exactly what the air board has done since its creation 28 years ago.
Because of its severe pollution, California is the only state that, under federal law, can set its own auto and fuel standards. Privy to industry trade secrets, the state air board establishes standards based on emerging technologies--the catalytic converter, evaporative controls, air injection systems, unleaded gasoline.
Virtually every regulation was enacted despite glum forecasts by the auto companies, which wound up proving themselves wrong and meeting deadlines without exorbitant price increases.
The result: a 96% decline in exhaust from new cars. A new car in 1960 spewed 104 grams of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides per mile, compared with just 4 grams today.
Everyone involved agrees that the air board’s zero-emission standard has pushed electric car technology beyond what anyone imagined a decade ago.
General Motors, in particular, has invested millions of dollars in the Impact, its sporty, innovative concept car that broke electric car records with its acceleration from zero to 60 mph in eight seconds and its range of 100 miles on a charge. Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and others also are developing electric cars, minivans and pickup trucks.
And in a major turnabout last month, the auto makers acknowledge that they see an important market emerging for the vehicles as soon as 1997. Yet they predict that the cars won’t attract a substantial number of buyers until around 2004, when they can mass-produce more efficient batteries that can take a family from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on a single charge.
“We want to be in the electric vehicle business when the battery technology meets the expectations of our customers, not to meet an arbitrarily set mandate,” said Chrysler’s environmental manager, Reg Modlin.
However, scaling back severely could slow battery development. About 160 California businesses are working on electric car components and their investors are already nervous about the air board’s wavering.
Other states will be affected too. New York and Massachusetts have set laws copying California’s zero-emission regulation, but under federal law they will be nullified if California’s is altered.
Said Massachusetts legislator David Cohen, who authored that state’s law adopting California’s mandate: “This is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
