Amendment Would Tighten ZEV Mandate

California’s air quality regulators, responding to growing concerns about possible lengthy delays in the introduction of full-service electric vehicles under the state’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, have moved to restrict auto makers’ use of credits for early introduction of small, low-speed neighborhood electric carts.

Under the ZEV Mandate as currently written, auto makers can leverage relatively inexpensive neighborhood electric vehicles by introducing them in 2002, when each one will earn four credits that can be banked for use in offsetting ZEV requirements in future years.

Neighborhood electric vehicles, or NEVs, typically have a range of less than 30 miles per charge and, given their top speeds of 25 mph, are barred from streets with speed limits in excess of 35 mph. Most look a lot like oversize golf carts, although all are more crash-worthy and mechanically far more sophisticated.

Under one scenario, a company that pushed thousands of neighborhood electrics into the state next year could earn enough credits to relieve it of having to produce any other type of zero-emission vehicle for a decade or more.

But an amendment to the mandate posted on the California Air Resources Board’s Web site last week would prohibit auto makers from using the early introduction credits to eliminate all other ZEV requirements after 2005.

The amendment would allow auto makers to use accumulated credits to offset no more than 75% of their entire ZEV requirement in the 2006 model year and no more than 50% in 2007 and beyond.

“We have heard of concerns about someone flooding the market with NEVs to avoid production of full-service” electric vehicles, said Mike Kenny, the air board’s executive officer.

(Here, “full service” means a vehicle that would run at freeway speeds for reasonable distances while carrying several people and some cargo.)

Every major manufacturer that sells new passenger cars and light trucks in California has filed a plan for complying with the ZEV Mandate. None, Kenny said, has indicated that it intends to do so simply by stuffing the market with neighborhood electric vehicles.

Nevertheless, rumors have persisted that DaimlerChrysler, which owns a neighborhood electric vehicle manufacturer, Global Electric Motorcars of Fargo, N.D., is planning to dump 14,000 of the cart-type vehicles into the market next year.

That massive early introduction would permit DaimlerChrysler to collect credits for 56,000 ZEVs and relieve it of further ZEV requirements in California until 2010 or later.

The German-American auto maker could even sell some of its accumulated ZEV credits to other companies because the rules permit buying, selling and trading. Any company that pushed a large number of neighborhood electrics into the state next year could generate substantial revenue from selling credits while enabling other auto makers to escape their ZEV requirements, critics charge.

Ken Montler, Global Electric Motorcars’ president, said it won’t happen--that the rumor of a plot to circumvent the mandate has no basis.

When DaimlerChrysler acquired Global Electric last year, Montler said, its board of directors gave him three criteria: “They told me to respond to the ZEV Mandate, to build a sustaining business and to be profitable.”

“If I flood the market next year, I will destroy it. And if I destroy it, then I can’t have a sustaining business or a profitable one,” he said.

He said Global Electric sells about 7,000 neighborhood vehicles a year nationally. They are used largely in planned communities, in senior citizen complexes and on college and business campuses. Other customers include agencies that use the vehicles for traffic police or meter readers. The city of Anaheim is even using Global Electric vehicles in a pilot shared-vehicle program to help commuters get from train stations to workplaces.

That’s all well and good, proponents of clean cars say, but not as a substitute for building more costly--but ultimately more beneficial--full-service electric vehicles that owners will be able to use as replacements for today’s gasoline-powered cars and trucks.