to date. It was the regulation that would reopen the door to the electric car. It ordered that by 1998 2 percent of all new cars sold in California had to be ZEVs, zero-emission vehicles, and 10 percent by 2003. That meant no emissions at all out of the tailpipe, which was another way of saying no tailpipe and no internal combustion engine.
Major car companies set out to deliver exactly that. Considerable investment went into the effort. Yet it was all but an abject failure. “Who Killed the Electric Car?” is the question a documentary film asks about General Motors’ EV1—Electric Vehicle 1—which was designed to meet CARB’s stringent regulations and on which GM spent a billion dollars. While the film places primary guilt on the auto industry, the answer is something else. As a CARB member put it, “The one real culprit” was “the battery.” Batteries sufficient to provide the range and driving time that people wanted simply did not exist at the time.
Another killer was lack of public acceptance. Several of the car makers leased their EV models to drivers. In addition to leasing, Toyota actually tried to sell an all-electric version of the RAV4, its small SUV. This was in the same period in which it was introducing the Prius. The uptake on the Prius by consumers was many, many times greater than that for the RAV4.
“We kept hearing about pent-up demand for electric vehicles,” recalled one Toyota executive. “Well, it turned out that the initial pent-up demand was about 50 vehicles.”9
Thereafter, despite “gobs and gobs of advertising” and considerable government subsidies, the RAV4 sold at the less than brisk rate of about five vehicles a week. That worked out to a little over 250 vehicles a year, whereas a model needs at least 100,000 sales a year to be anything more than a “niche.” Sufficient numbers of people simply were not interested in buying electric cars, and CARB eventually had to back away, however reluctantly, from this particular order. But only for a time.
THE RETURN OF THE EV
With the opening of the new century, several factors started to converge to give new life to the electric vehicle.
Environmental pollution from auto exhausts has created anguish and been a major topic of public policy in the United States. In the decades since, other urban areas, from Mexico City to Beijing, have come to suffer under similar affliction and have also sought to find relief from air pollution. Moreover, now there was something new: concern about climate change. Although transportation on a global basis is responsible for about 17 percent of CO2 emissions, the absolute volume of emissions is large and could get much larger. Rising oil prices also renewed interest. The electric car held out the prospect of insulating consumers from high prices, and blunting the impact of oil price shocks.
One other development built support. The introduction of hybrids had a major impact on the psychology of motorists. Hybrids served as a kind of mental bridge to electric cars by creating public acceptance of battery-driven vehicles and what they could mean: a much larger role for electricity in transportation.
This convergence propelled the electric car out of the automotive museum and back onto the street. Today, in contrast to a century ago, there are two primary types of electrically powered vehicles. One is a direct lineal descendant of the sort that Thomas Edison sought to get out on the road, a pure batteryoperated electric vehicle: the EV. It operates only on electricity and is charged from an electric socket. But now there is a variant, the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the PHEV. It is an immediate descendant of the hybrid but is much more of an electric vehicle than the Prius-type hybrid. It is “plugged in” to its primary fuel source: electricity. However, after the plug-in hybrid runs for some distance on electricity and the battery runs down, a combustion engine takes over, either recharging the battery or directly providing power to propel the car, or both.
Research and experimentation with plug-in hybrids had been going on for decades, but hardly anyone paid notice. That changed in 2007 when GM unveiled its PHEV Chevy Volt as a sporty concept car at the Detroit Auto Show. Its public debut got so much attention and created such a clamor that GM decided to actually push the Volt into production. Within 12 months the model would come to symbolize the shift in focus from biofuels to EVs.
By the time of the 2008 presidential