California and eight other states rolled out a plan pressuring car companies and others to meet ambitious goals for sales of electric vehicles and other environmentally friendly automobiles—part of an effort to maintain tough local regulations while the Trump administration moves to relax nationwide standards for tailpipe emissions.
The plan among the nine states, covering 2018-2021 and unveiled Wednesday, outlines 80 steps that auto makers, dealers, utilities, government officials and charging and fueling companies should take to boost adoption of so-called zero-emission vehicles, predominantly battery-powered automobiles. The states also want further adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, though that technology has received less emphasis from auto makers than electric cars.
The recommendations include increasing advertising promoting environmentally friendly cars, ride-and-drive events and building out a reliable network of charging stations so motorists can travel without worrying they’ll become stranded when their electric cars run out of juice. The recommendations don’t attach dollar figures to suggested investments and are nonbinding, though they are aimed at ensuring compliance with future regulations.
. . . Despite the current market landscape, a key metric behind the states’ plan is an emissions-cutting goal amounting to sales of roughly 12 million zero-emission vehicles by 2030 across the nine states, a dramatic increase of more than 26-fold from current levels. There were only about 461,000 such vehicles on the road in the nine states at the end of 2017, according to registration data.
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