Jeff Plungis of Bloomberg Businessweek pulls the plug on those who are excited about electric cars.
California’s mandatory sales targets for electric and hydrogen-powered cars will go from less than 1 percent today to more than 15 percent by 2025. The targets, the result of legislation passed in 2003, are a means of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.
The same targets will go into effect in nine other states that have chosen to adopt California’s emissions-reduction standards rather than follow laxer federal rules: Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. “Electrification is a needed part of the solution,” says Matt Solomon, transportation director of Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, a nonprofit consortium representing the air quality agencies of eight states.
The trouble is, except for Oregon, none of the states have California’s temperate weather. The batteries used by the greener cars generate electricity from chemical reactions that work less efficiently as temperatures drop. In tests conducted by the American Automobile Association, an electric car that ran for 105 miles at 75F went only 43 miles at 20F—a 60 percent reduction in range.
That’s causing anxiety in places such as Maine, a mostly rural state where people drive long distances for work, shopping, and recreation. “People said don’t worry about it,” says Tom Brown, president of the Maine Automobile Dealers Association of the battery range problem. But, he says, “California is not Maine. They’ve got more people in five city blocks than we do in the whole state.”
