GM Is Pushing Hard to Tank California's EV Mandate
wsj.com
wsj.com
In the '70s the US changed emission standards to be quite a bit more strict, as part of the Clean Air Act of 1970. The problem of smog in major cities was getting out of hand.
Also in the '70s there were periods of gas shortages and high prices due to world events that messed up oil markets, such as the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. This led to demand for more efficient cars.
US automakers were slow to respond. The often just retrofitted existing engines with emission control equipment that significantly lowered performance and reliability.
Japanese automakers, who at that time had only a small share of the US market and were not really taken seriously by most consumers, were also dealing with new strict emission standards in Japan. But they responded by quickly designing new engines designed with low emissions and better mileage. And they exported those cars to the US.
By the time US automakers finally started making new design decent low emission cars with better gas mileage instead of badly retrofitting existing designs those Japanese makers had established with the public a reputation for making reliable, efficient, low emissions, and affordable cars.
Some people said the Japanese cars were only affordable because of cheap labor in Japan. (Japan in the '70s was like China is today when it comes to manufacturing). But then the Japanese car companies started manufacturing many models in the US, showing that affordable, high quality, reliable cars that met emission standards and were efficient could be made with US labor.
I wonder if we are going to see the same thing with EVs?
I noted below that I have recently moved from US to Australia
The Chinese cars are taking over here: it’s a product people want at a price they like
GM wants to monetize yesterday’s market, and are just going to fall farther behind.
When these cars eventually come in, EV mandate or not, the US car companies will get crushed
If you can hazard a guess, which make and model is the “Tesla killer” for EVs, if such a car exists.
I frequently suggest to folks in the US (where I’m from) that BYDs in the US would change the competitive landscape, but I can’t reliably point to a make/model or two that they can check out online.
The Seal looks almost exactly like a Model 3 with better range Atto/Sealion are the SUV shapes that barely exist as EVs in US (Equinox maybe)
They basically did the same thing but with foreign motorcycles. Harley lobbied haaaarrddd to get restrictions put on them. Harley got their way and still screwed it up, which left Americans paying more. Harley just declares bankruptcy and starts over cuz their cult of boomers will always buy a new hog with lots of chrome and saddlebags.
Yes, let us stipulate that uniform regulations that disregard the federalist design of the constitution are more convenient and profitable for huge corporations with top flight lobbyists to write the one law to be enforced from sea to shining sea.
How about $100/ton of CO2.
At 30 mpg that's 60 tons of CO2 so $6k.
The fundamental idea is the state doesn't actually want the money. It wants manufactures to stop making cars that emit CO2. If someone already has a car like that perhaps the state can buy it back.
No increased cost for existing owners, but still an incentive to replace the car for a lower emission one
All solutions other than punishing fossil fuel use seem like “I want to feel like I did something, but not actually make any sacrifice” solutions so the public doesn’t revolt. See also plastic recycling.
The standard response here is “well what about poor people?”
And the standard response to that is “if a different fundamental problem is some people are too poor, then give them cash”
Less obfuscation and more transparency is always better.
Putting an excise tax on those cars tilts the decision to buy gas vs electric strongly away from gas. Which is what you want. The other thing is it sends a very strong signal to manufacturers that they need to stop producing them. Remember the cost of carbon taxes isn't something they pay. The consumer most of whom suck at accounting are the ones.
And punishing people that bought a gas car ten years ago is pointless and immoral. Because they already bought it. And they did so in good faith.
They already have cap-and-trade:
* https://www.c2es.org/content/california-cap-and-trade/
* https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/cap-and-trade-progr...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_policy_of_Calif...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_policy_of_Calif...
US consumers are facing hardship directly caused by overtly erratic tariffing. US ICE makers are seeking protections. Consumers will not have smaller vehicles nor the affordable EVs they could use.
The air and water are fine, we never pollute, climate change is a silly leftist slogan, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Also, companies are greedy. They can, and will, just move and leave you high and dry, if you regulate at the source (manufacturing). So you have to not regulate at the source, which is kind of worse. It leads to a lot of tragedy of the commons situations. Maybe Company X is poisoning the water supply and State Y says "no more!". They just move to Texas or some other state that doesn't give a fuck about it's residents and continue poisoning the water supply. State Y will still be affected, maybe they drink from the same water shed. And State Y is also economically harmed, while Texas comes out ahead.
Or contraception?
Neither party dares alienate the UAW or Teamsters, and thousands of automotive employees.
HN needs to reconcile whether they support unions or whether they support EVs. It's a one or the other decision at this point in the US.
Amongst the younger (Gen Z/Gen Alpha) generations, the choice is unions due to idealism (despite havint positive sentiment for EVs). Amongst high earning members of Gen X (which I think seems to represent HN), the choice appears to be EVs.
Especially EVs and PHEVs. This place is awash with them, they are cars people want at the right price.
Yikes. Sounds like if this mandate doesn’t get changed, Californians are staring down the barrel of a huge car buying crunch in ~7yrs, as people realize they only have a few more years to buy a gas vehicle.
I’m a fan of EVs - I think every family should have one or two, but I’d also never want to be without a gas vehicle. Not having the option to buy one under any circumstances is pretty onerous.
The automakers in the US mostly want to fight a war two wars ago. They’re careening towards international irrelevance fast with this crap.
And we’ll either be dominated by the players that saw the truth, or stuck with overpriced protectionist crap.
Which may drive them towards international irrelevance, but if they have to sacrifice one market or the other, that seems like the easier one to choose to lose.
So we completely missed the entire thing. They were a never very big part of the market. And now people are saying we should transition to the thing that we should have been transitioning off of.
California didn’t mandate EV only tomorrow. No sane person has mandated EV only in the US that soon.
The chose 10 years from now.
People vastly underestimate how much progress we can make in a relatively short time without massive individual improvements. People always think the future is much further out than it actually is, but when we look back it seems like things happened in a snap. Because we always underestimate ourselves.
Every time infrastructure gets better, it enables more EVs. Every time battery technology gets better, it enables more EVs.
It’s doable. Other countries are showing it can be done. If we get 5 or 7 years from now and find out we need to extend the deadlines some they can do that.
Having the federal government come in and force a state to stick their head back in the sand until the political winds change doesn’t help anyone.
Remember: states rights if we’re out of power, federalism if we’re not.
I'm sorry MBCook but this is Murica. We're different. We don't have to do it that commie way because we can do it with the sturs and strips. /s
It was one thing to mandate emissions when it was just a question of a cleaner gas car. We are retooling with evs effectively. I think the legislature bit off more than they can chew with this unless they start heavily subsidizing this industry themselves maybe even making a public ev company. Hard to do in times of austerity when everything that presently exists is in need of money let alone new expensive ideas.
This was true maybe even as recently as 5 years ago, but it certainly isn’t true now.
Tesla, at the top end, hasn’t been an attractive luxury proposition at least since the Hyundai Genesis & Mercedes EVs started rolling out. They had a shot at capturing the mid- to low-end market, but it looks like they’re in the process of blowing that as well.
> Hard to do in times of austerity [..]
The average American’s lifestyle is hardly austere — it _is_ precarious for very many (most?), but I don’t think that’s the same thing.
You can now get refurb EVs (e.g. a Hyundai Ionia) with <50k miles for <$15k, and that’s in a not-inexpensive part of the US (northeast).
Over the course of the next 10 years that used market is going to only grow, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that a battery swap will be less costly than the sorts of overhauls high-mileage gasoline cars require so there _will_ be a solid used market.
Yay the free market, hey?
The Chinese Government backed up their mandate with money. Lots of money, allocated well, over a long period of time. In the absence of that sustained political will, I think this initiative would have succumbed the infighting and finger-pointing that the article above describes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_industry_in_C...
And those low earners will keep driving their shit boxes.
What got me to give up my ‘98 emission hog wasn’t electric because they were too expensive. It was a rebate for taking old cars off the road and a cheap combustion civic. Ban those civics and I’d still be driving something horrendous for the environment.
Chargers also need to get much, much faster; 15 minutes for 80% might be fine if you're at a charging station that doesn't get that much traffic, but think of somewhere like the Costco gas stations. Imagine accommodating that many people charging for 15 minutes at a time instead of 3-5 minutes at a time. Not everyone can afford to spend that much time on charging their car.
There's also the fun bit about how charging an EV in some places is more expensive per mile than an ICE car, though that does often depends on the time of day you charge and what the exact price of gas is.
You also don't need to have every parking spot to have an outlet, that is not the status quo; if 50% of vehicles charge at single/multi-family homes and 50% charge 2-3x a week at a fast charger for 15 minutes; then that's the best chance for local gas stations to stay in business (local stations are going to struggle if the 20% rate of EV purchases and everybody has a non gas station outlet continues)
I think there are too many edge cases to outright ban ICE cars so soon. That's why I say that there needs to be a push to also improve infrastructure, including forcing older infrastructure to also be improved. It can be done, but with the scope of the problem, it will not be nearly as soon as the proposed bans would have taken effect. It would also take probably an impossible amount of political will. You'd have to grab the proverbial third rail and hang on long enough to make things happen before it fries you, but fry you it will.
Anecdotally, I lived in a condo in Atlanta (not traditionally known for its car independence) for 10 years, extremely convenient to the metro or walking a mile to work; it was often that I didn't drive my car for 1-2 weeks at a time and a concern that gas in my vehicle was 2 months old.
In that, very real scenario, I would have required a 200 mile range car to be charged about once a month - or prior to and after a major trip - something that off site handles well + super chargers, and to your and my points, readily available central charging at gas stations.
How do you do so without making the party that passes such legislation politically toxic for a generation? Heck, 49 Dems broke ranks and voted in favor of repealing California's waiver in the House.
Plug-in Hybrids and EVs require significantly less parts and have fairly automated manufacturing processes, so thousands of voters will lose jobs.
This is why you see the UAW and Teamsters leadership back the incumbent admin.
PHEVs definitely do not require fewer parts - they’re more complex to build, maintain, and repair. You take an ICE vehicle annd add a big battery, a motor, a complex way of interfacing that motor with the existing drivetrain, and additional computers to manage it all.
They’re free to change it at any time.
It’s not the federal government’s job to mess with it just because it doesn’t align with head-in-the-sand worldview on electric vehicles.
California didn’t mandate anything for any other state. The fact the automakers don’t want to bother to implement “the winning strategy” for every other state of pretending EVs suck either indicates it’s a terrible strategy or they think there is a benefit to their bottom line to follow demand.
How horrible!
The reality is the legislation was to push industry and it seems industries response was ‘nah dawg we’ll just lobby our way out of this one’
My point is that if you want to shift the whole state from gas to electric vehicles, there's a smart way and a dumb way. California is picking the dumb way.
Yes.
The point is you shouldn’t trivialize the problem and need to account for second order effects. If you want to mandate EVs, fine, but now you have to solve the problem of reduced infrastructure funding when it’s already below sustainment levels. That doesn’t sound very smart, and you can’t just hand wave the problem away. Other people in the thread have pointed out it’s “dumb” to levy an EV tax without understanding they are related.
I don’t know if you’re being obtuse or discussing in bad-faith, but I’ll make the relevance explicit:
>"If we want people to move to EVs..."
…then we need to understand and address the positive and negative externalities. Those include the tax revenue lost from gasoline taxes.
It took a while to find numbers, but it seems like ~$80B in total gas taxes in a year is probably close. Meanwhile state and local governments (alone) spend over $200B on road maintenance and construction while the federal government spent about $60B on the interstates.
$80B is a lot, but if gas taxes covered even just car infrastructure it'd be an extra $1 a gallon already. Even without EVs. In case anyone was under the misapprehension that roads are budget neutral. Frustrating (to get more off track) that other transit is expected to somehow be profitable when roads are subsidized so heavily. I wish it wasn't so critical for our supply chain, EV trucks probably works a lot better between a train terminal and final destination than it does hauling across I-40.
Sources:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/use-of-gasoline...
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-03/D...
That's a great take. Thanks.
We have the tools to do better, and a lot of these roads are going to be a giant maintenance burden that communities literally cannot afford. So you end up with bridges collapsing and roads going without any repairs for years. This is a huge problem that gets worse the more we build roads instead of building alternatives.
But yes, I agree with you that the reason it's subsidized is because of things like supporting USPS delivery and commuting being economically mandatory. And because voters mostly drive cars and are used to not paying for their roads.
I don't like that design, I am 100% certain that we are clever enough to do better, but I do recognize it is the sunk-cost prison we are stuck in.
Of course, the actual counterargument is that transit moving people around -- largely to work and shop -- is also contributing to the economy. So why would you charge a fare at all?
I mean I wouldn't mind a corvette if they didn't cost 80 fucking thousand dollars.
20 years ago this would upset me a lot.
Now I am resigned to the fact 2 or 3 generations from now people will live through a time that will make the mongol invasions look like a tea party ran by three 7 year old girls :(
No stopping Climate Change now
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/byd-ai...
https://www.iea.org/news/more-than-1-in-4-cars-sold-worldwid...
https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-renewable-energy
Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change.
"Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change."
The majority of Boomers are liberal - the demographic shift you perceive is not going to work out the way you think it will. Gen-Z is increasingly leaning right, especially males.
Most people just want a 2018 era car (there's diminishing returns for vehicle technology at this point and average vehicle selling price trajectory, Post-Covid, is unsustainable) at a decent price - something with a six cylinder engine that can be easy serviced / repaired.
America doesn't have competition. You're prices aren't going to get cheaper. Meanwhile in China internal competition in battery chemistry and packs has massively dropped costs.
It's sad when the groups we call commies have a more open market than us.
Unfortunately we're going to wake up to that too late.
America is a farm - the US consumer is the product. The only thing that has gotten cheaper over the last few decades are consumer goods from Asia. The US auto industry is more or less an oligopoly - none of the OEMS, outside of Tesla, are seriously interested in competing on price.
If American auto companies aren’t interested in building affordable EVs, why are we harming US consumers by preventing them from buying imported EVs? Because, as you said, farming profits for US legacy auto. I want to buy high quality, affordable Chinese products. I don’t want to buy lower quality US products solely because of cronyism and ideology to protect their profits using trade policy.
https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/05/13/g-s1-66...
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-tariffs-ma...
The U.S. has moved to service jobs because they tend to have the highest margins and capitalism is going to do what capitalism does. That is, unless specific guardrails are enacted to protect other societal interests.
Do you think this admin would put the necessary guardrails on public private partnership manufacturing supply chain infra to prevent it from being strip mined or otherwise extracted for profit and not be available when needed? I do not, but I do support treating such manufacturing supply chains as critical national security interests. Maybe we’ll get another shot in a few years when competent folks are in control, but maybe not.
Americans are cosplaying, they are not serious in this regard. If they were, they would be filling these jobs they say are so desperately needed, and manufacturers would pay whatever market clearing wage is required to fill said jobs. If they wanted good paying jobs today, they’d unionize. Way easier than waiting for manufacturing to come back (which will take years, if at all) and maybe have a shot at one of the few manufacturing jobs that are created.
China delivers results because they have the will to, Americans just want status and vibes.
(Purpose of the system is what it does, watch what people do not what they say, etc)
https://www.plantengineering.com/manufacturers-grapple-with-...
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/13/immigration-economy-jobs-gr...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Illegal labor to boot. Huge percentages of construction jobs in the US are (or were) filled by illegal immigrants getting paid low wages. It's not clear how those will be filled in the short term.
At least not a meaningful amount of people.
I now have a great office job but I grew up farming, ranching, doing construction, roofing, worked at dairies so I've seen first hand who is working these jobs.
It's not white Americans. This is something some people just can't understand. They just don't seem to grasp that the folks doing these jobs are either temporary labor brought in from other countries or illegal immigrants. The reason is because there isn't enough domestic labor willing to do these jobs.
>At least not a meaningful amount of people.
I would say this is true, or generally true, if the pay for the trades stays where it is. If plumbers start making $80k+ out of school, and master plumbers start making $200k+, etc. many would leave their inside jobs for construction.
Americans are not going to leave AC and a nice office for $18 an hour.
Think farms, dairy, meat packing, etc. Entry level positions that americans will not go anywhere near.
You really are missing the forest for the trees with respect to cheap stuff from Asia and completely gutting our capacity to manufacturer from a national security standpoint, and totally ignore what effect the gutting has had on manufacturing in the other 50% of the Country living outside of metro areas.
It's nerd-sperging - "I want cheap shit but I don't want to think about the externalities like hundreds of thousands of people that live outside of metro areas overdosing on opioids because their way of a middle class life has been destroyed or national security, because I discounted / ignore them because I life in a perfect world where I just type on a keyboard all day and get paid more than 95% of Americans and I want a perfect EV."
Yeah I'm sure the Chinese will sell you cruise missiles when the time comes.
> Yeah I'm sure the Chinese will sell you cruise missiles when the time comes.
I support cultivating domestic high tech, high throughput manufacturing capacity, just with as few humans required as possible.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/03/clean-energy-gene...
https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/its-conservative-states-t...
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25042572/e2-clean-eco...
You don't know what you're talking about.
Half of the American consumers have _ZERO_ interest in EVs. Period. They don't want them. 77 Million of them voted for Trump. The other half are split between coastal tech bros that already have EVs, Boomers that buy PHEVs / EVs, and normal families that might be interested in EVs but after hearing the tradeoffs, decided to buy a Honda or Toyota because they're reasonably priced and reliable. From a OEM Product Planning standpoint trying to juggle the investment between ICE and EV (if you aren't Tesla) - this is the worst of all worlds. Tesla claims the vast majority of the EV marketplace and there isn't enough volume/interest to justify the billion+ investment in EV programs to pick up the scraps. No one has made money on EVs in the US except Tesla. That will continue to be true.
Oh, and whatever happened to the supposed massively deflationary pricing that was supposed to come to batteries? Turns out when you cordon off China from the supply chain and source materials from Australia and South America, you've completely lost any ability to continue to reduce battery prices.
This isn't China - you cannot mandate consumer preferences, although I'm sure you'd love to.
I've talked to a lot of people about their cars and car choices over the years, and that's not what people want. You can look up some surveys too, although quite a few results are obviously from one survey, you can dig a bit deeper and find older survey results or segmented surveys. What people don't really mention: engine, maintenance, servicing. I think for most people those things aren't that big of a deal, modern cars have satisfactory performance and longevity when compared to cars pre-2000. What people say they want: heated seats and steering wheels, places to charge their phone(!), car play or android auto(!), space and safety for kids and dogs, something that looks nice.
I don't think price is a mentioned factor because right now it seems like you pay more for pretty arbitrary stuff.
I want what you want, with a manual transmission for preference. It's just not what most people want.
Most of the people who will suffer have done nothing wrong.