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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?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinho on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:41PM
If only that daily dose of fusion power came in the form of electromotive force instead of the blackbody radiation signature for 5778 K. Then the people in Tennessee would be using it instead of digging rocks out of the ground and setting them on fire to boil water and spin some magnets. As long as the barrier to entry (read that as "cost") of accessing that daily power broadcast is higher people will keep using the cheap option and they will still be better off driving a 55 mpg diesel VW Bug rather than a Nissan Leaf.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin