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posted by takyon on Monday August 03 2015, @07:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-electric dept.

Who's forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it's Mary Nichols. She's run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state's zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing Pres­ident Barack Obama's national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplish­ment in a four-decade career.

Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency's heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regula­tions today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California's famous highways. "If we're going to get our transportation system off petroleum," she says, "we've got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now."

We've seen campaigns to defend smoking and not wearing seatbelts and not getting vaccinated. Is this like that, or is there more to it?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @10:00PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 03 2015, @10:00PM (#217615)

    You know, we abandoned Detroit and nobody really gave a F. I'm not thinking abandoning a couple more cities is going to matter.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:44AM

    by M. Baranczak (1673) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:44AM (#217744)
    Except it's more than "a couple" cities. It's Seattle, Norfolk, New Haven, Boston, Portland, Providence, New York, Baltimore, Anchorage, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Charleston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco. Plus a bunch of smaller towns that I can't be bothered to list here. Plus the rest of the world - which we don't care about, because we're Americans, but I'm just mentioning it for the sake of completeness.