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California Zero Emissions Vehicle Battle Over
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California Zero Emissions Vehicle Battle Over
By Jim Burt in TheCarConnection.Com's 8-15-03 Edition
The thirteen-year feud over electric cars and clean air in California appears to be over for now. Automakers and California environmental officials have agreed to drop lawsuits in favor of putting hundreds of thousands of ultra-clean gas-engine cars on the road in a few years, along with gas-electric hybrid-power and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
An announcement of the resolution is scheduled today. The California Air Resources Board, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Isuzu and some Califorina auto dealers plan to say that several lawsuits blocking California's low-emission-vehicle rules have been dropped. They also plan to say that CARB's clean-air regulations that were to have begun this year will go into effect in 2005.
Environmental groups applaud the dropping of the lawsuits. Both the Union of Concerned Scientists and The Sierra Club are expected to endorse the settlement. The suits goes back to September of 1990, when California decreed that 2 percent of all vehicles that the large car companies sold in the state had to be Zero-Emission Vehicles (ZEVs), rising to 10 percent this year.
At the time, battery-power vehicles were the only way to comply. GM, Ford and Chrysler even took to giving away electric golf carts and low-speed electrics like TH!NK Neighbor and Chrysler's GEM vehicles to housing communities and colleges to meet the regulation. Automakers, seeing no future for battery-power electrics for highway driving, eventually blocked the rule.
California will now allow automakers to meet state clean-air regulations via low-pollution cars they are manufacturing, or plan to, and from eventual sales of fuel-cell vehicles.
*By Jim Burt in TheCarConnection.Com's 8-15-03 Edition