It’s been a weird and confusing few weeks for the auto industry—especially for those who hoped to see more batteries on the road in the coming decade.
Just this month: Ford announced a retrenchment in its EV business, canceling some battery-powered vehicle plans and delaying others; the European Commission proposed to backtrack its goal to transition fully to zero-emission cars by 2035; the US government said it would loosen rules that would have required automakers to ratchet up the fuel economy of their fleets. BloombergNEF projects 14 million fewer EVs will be sold in the US by 2030 than last year—a 20 percent drop.
What has not changed, it seems, is California’s interest in shifting to cleaner transportation. “The state is doubling down on our zero-emission vehicle deployment, providing market certainty, and continuing to lead on clean transportation regardless of policy reversals elsewhere or shifts by automakers,” Anthony Martinez, a spokesperson for Governor Gavin Newsom, wrote in a statement to WIRED. He said the governor’s “commitment to accelerating California’s clean transportation transition hasn’t changed.”
In 2020, Newsom became one of the first lawmakers in the world to commit to full electrification when he signed an executive order directing state agencies to create rules that would ban the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035. Those rules eventually aimed to ratchet up the share of battery-electric vehicles, with an ultimate goal of a mix of pure EVs and plug-in hybrids. (The PHEVs could only account for about 20 percent of sales.) Several other states, including Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, and Washington, pledged to do the same.
Earlier this year, the GOP-led Congress revoked, through legislation, several of California’s state-specific environmental rules, which it has been historically allowed to set because of the rules written into the Clean Air Act. The state responded with a lawsuit, which is still being argued. Meanwhile, Newsom signed another executive order directing state agencies to further the state’s electrification goals in other ways.
Now auto industry experts and players say the state’s determination to push through policy and market changes to meet its now half-decade-old goal may be overly ambitious.
“Getting to 100 percent might be challenging,” says Stephanie Valdez Streaty, the director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “There are a lot of headwinds.”
A coalition of California business groups have argued that the state’s goals even for next year—a requirement that 35 percent of model year 2026 vehicles sold are zero-emission—aren’t realistic, and that California should push back its goals for zero-emission new car sales. (Enforcement of the rules is paused while the larger battle with US Congress plays out.) Zero-emission cars accounted for 21 percent of the overall annual state new car sales as of the fall, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, well below the 35 percent goal. “The timeline needed to be adjusted,” says the group’s president, Brian Maas.
