State Takes Sharp Turn on Emissions
California set out boldly 12 years ago to fill the highways with smog-free, electric cars, but today air quality officials are quietly admitting failure and embarking on a new strategy to cut tailpipe emissions.
The planned rollout date for the zero-emission vehicle is at hand. But the arrival of fully functional and affordable electric cars is nowhere in sight, as vacant battery-charging parking spaces at shopping centers attest.
As early as January, the state Air Resources Board is expected to overhaul its regulations, moving away from electric cars and emphasizing promising new technologies instead. These include extraordinarily clean gasoline engines and hybrid cars powered by a combination of batteries and a small combustion engine.
The new technologies, which were not anticipated when the electric-vehicle program began in 1990, are just now beginning to come into their own.
“We put a lot of faith in battery electric vehicles to meet the [zero-emission vehicle] mandate but, in spite of significant efforts, batteries have inherent limitations,” said Alan C. Lloyd, chairman of the state air board.
“We’re not giving up on the goal of the zero-emission vehicle, but we have to be realistic. No matter how you cut it, it is disappointing,” Lloyd said.
Despite the failure to produce electric cars, the progress on other fronts has buoyed hopes that ultra-clean, if not battery-powered, cars are on the horizon. That is good news. Without dramatically cleaner cars, trucks and vans, smog centers such as Los Angeles, Bakersfield and San Bernardino will have little hope for healthy, blue skies. Vehicles release about two-thirds of all smog-forming pollutants across California, creating a pall linked to bronchitis, asthma and cancer.
The battery car never lived up to expectations because conventional lead-acid batteries don’t produce enough power to make electric cars perform like vehicles with gasoline engines. More advanced batteries that improve performance still cost too much.
“The battery electric car is not going to be viable any time soon. It is dead on arrival,” said Greg Dana, vice president of environmental affairs for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents 12 of the world’s biggest automakers.
Other technologies, however, are advancing rapidly. Some, including hybrids and ultra-clean gasoline cars, are approaching near-zero levels of emission. For air quality officials, it is an unforeseen twist.
“Have technology-forcing regulations paid off? Absolutely. Did it pay off in the way we had hoped? No,” Lloyd said. “If you keep pushing technology and technology-forcing standards, you don’t always know what will accrue, what the side benefits are. There have been side benefits, and there will be more benefits that would not have accrued without our push.”
Standards effective with the 2004 model year require that the cleanest new cars emit only one-twentieth the amount of smog-forming material as is released by cars on the road today. Recent tests at UC Riverside on 24 of those next-generation gasoline cars showed they exceed even the most stringent California standard, a result considered impossible several years ago.
One Honda Accord, specially equipped with a sealed fuel tank and exhaust traps, produced virtually no air pollution, said James M. Lents, director of the Environmental Policy, Atmospheric Processes and Modeling Laboratory at UC Riverside.
“The air coming into the [car’s] intake was more polluted than what was coming out of the tailpipe,” Lents said.
“We can build some mighty clean gasoline cars today, a lot better than people have argued could be built. It is possible today to build gasoline vehicles that come close to zero pollution. The technology has gone so far.”
Hybrid cars are proliferating too. About 15,000 hybrids, led by the Toyota Prius and Honda’s Insight and Civic, are on California highways, officials estimate. Toyota Motor Corp. plans to produce 300,000 worldwide in two years, while the Big Three auto makers have plans for hybrid vehicles beginning in 2004.
The hybrids are powered by batteries in support of small gasoline engines. They cost about $4,000 more than conventional models. The electric vehicle plan contains incentives for their production.
Even though electric vehicles themselves have been a failure, the requirement to build zero-emission vehicles “has been a huge success,” said Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. “I define that in terms of accelerating the development and commercialization of clean and efficient technologies.
“It’s moving auto technology forward in a way that is desirable along almost every dimension.”
The mandate is also credited for rapid advances in fuel-cell cars. About 30 fuel-cell vehicles are undergoing road tests across California today. Toyota announced in July that it plans to market 20 fuel-cell / hybrid vehicles by the end of this year. Fuel cells generate electricity using hydrogen and produce no emissions.
William Clay Ford Jr., chairman and chief executive of Ford Motor Co., has predicted that fuel cells could replace the internal combustion engine, and Rick Wagoner, GM’s chief executive, has described fuel cells as “the holy grail” automakers seek.
But while the technology has been progressing, the state’s regulatory program has been stalled. The most recent setback came in June, when a federal judge issued an injunction prohibiting California from proceeding with key provisions of the electric-vehicle program, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by two automakers.
“The entire program is in temporary disarray,” said Roland Hwang, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
When the zero-emission vehicle program began, the goal was for 10% of the cars of the 2003 model year that are sold in California to produce no tailpipe emissions. It was an attempt by California to revolutionize auto designs nationwide, because 1.8 million new cars are sold in the state annually, more than in any other state. Soon afterward, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont adopted similar regulations.
From the start, however, the mandate for zero-emission vehicles met unyielding resistance from automakers in Detroit and Japan. The Air Resources Board relaxed the law last year to require that just 2% of new cars sold in California be electric-powered and added a complicated formula that allowed automakers to comply by providing as few as 4,400 electric vehicles by 2003 and 24,500 by 2015.
Today, only 2,000 battery-powered vehicles, including sedans, coupes, light trucks and vans, are on the road in California.
They include General Motors’ EV1, Honda’s EV Plus and the electric Ford Ranger pickup, according to the Air Resources Board. They were built years ago and went out of production and most automakers have no plans to build more. Toyota still produces an electric car, a RAV4, capable of carrying several passengers and cargo, but it costs $42,000, has a top speed of 79 mph and can travel only about 100 miles between charges. Toyota is not sure it will produce them after next year.
Instead, automakers are building so-called neighborhood electric vehicles and city cars to comply with the law. They are small, but street-legal, battery-powered two-seaters. Some have a top speed of 25 mph and their niche seems restricted to short-hop deliveries at college campuses, medical centers, film studios and planned communities.
“It’s a glorified golf cart,” Sperling said.
Ford built about 5,000 Think neighborhood vehicles before it announced last month that it is ceasing production because of a lack of demand.
Some of that demand is being satisfied by General Motors, which is giving away many of its 5,000 Club Cars, an electric cart with a motor smaller than those in many residential lawnmowers. DaimlerChrysler Corp. remains bullish about its mini Global Electric Motorcars, or GEMs; about 1,800 are operating in California and more are on the way. There are plans to incorporate them into the 13,000-unit Playa Vista development and other communities.
“The full-size electric vehicles are not appealing to the public. They are not full-function,” said Reg Modlin, director of environmental and energy planning for DaimlerChrysler. “It wasn’t the right way to start the program.”
