California has rather a different make up than the rest of the USA. With an economy which will often rank well within the top 10 countries in the world, and a very different political leaning to much of the rest of America, California has often treated climate change far more seriously than elsewhere in the USA.
Indeed this independence has been something that Trump has desperately tried to stifle. The reason for this is simple:given that California is by far and away the biggest car market in the USA, what California says about car emissions goes-it doesn’t matter if Trump forces the EPA to ignore science. If the car companies have to produce low emission vehicles for California, they’ve then done the research that they might as well produce them for everywhere.
To this end back in September 2019 Trump revoked California’s right to set its own emissions standards. However this doesn’t look likely to have a long-term effect, as a group of automakers have agreed in September 2020 to make cars to come out for New year’s requirements. Ford, BMW, Honda, Volvo, and the Volkswagen Group (which includes VW and Audi), are all on board.
This move by Trump is frankly dumb.The consumers want cars are more efficient because they’re cheaper to run, it is true that the car manufacturers do not want to spend the money on developing more efficient cars, however this is what the rest of the world is demanding-they will have to spend the money anyway. This means that Trump’s move has done nothing for car manufacturers apart from perhaps making American car manufacturers less competitive on the world stage.
It is of course also fairy counter intuitive that the company at the forefront of building electric cars is based in California USA. Tesla is considered a great American success story (certainly by everyone that trump and a number of republicans), who has single-handedly forced the rest of the market to innovate and has demonstrated the fact that electric cars are the future.
This move by California to set an end date for fossil fuel car sales 15 years out, is incredibly sensible. Many countries in Europe have talked about a deadline of 2040 or 2050, but this is too far out. Generally recognized, a car generation is around 7 years long. Therefore California’s requirements will not come in until two more generations of fossil fuel cars have taken place. It is hard for car companies in California to argue, they have invested large amounts of money not only in the next generation of cars but the one after that as well.
Like it or hate it (clearly Donald Trump hates although knows why) the future of Mo’s individual transit is electric. By setting a deadline two generations in the future, California will require other car companies to compete with Tesla within 15 years. It may well be too late, but any sensible companies will start investing billions to try to get there as quickly as possible. With Tesla’s battery day recently, it is clear that without urgent investment from competing companies their supremacy in battery tech will get far more extreme in the next decade- without urgent action the battery moat that Tesla has created, looks likely to become a moat as wide as an ocean.