It makes sense to me: they're forcing the automakers to subsidize the R&D of electric vehicles from their profits on ICE vehicles, which seems like a normal thing for a business to do when it benefits the business.
Since conventional automakers don't seem to be willing to aggressively pursue EVs on their own, this seems like a reasonable approach.
Or, put another way, the consumers who continue to buy ICE cars, and in doing so create pollution, are helping to pay for the EVs that other people are buying.
I never knew that. I thought it was upcoming competition from Tesla and the "writing on the wall" so to speak... I didn't know that legislation was manipulating the product output mix of Big Auto...
Yes it goes way back to California Emissions. California has legislated to drag auto manufacturers kicking and screaming to the contrary position for many years. I think it's unlikely engine efficiency, and battery technology would be as progressed as it is now without that.
There is such a thing as government failure, just as there's such a thing as market failure. The problem with both is that perfect information, and hence perfect markets don't exist. The role of a regulator is to try to get close to a perfect market (like truth in lending laws, anti-fraud laws, compulsory minimum warranty, lemon laws, competition law, etc.) in order to bring about a free market that can actually mostly let people (markets) determine outcome rather than it being a planned economy. Of course it doesn't always work for a litany of reasons, mainly because it's a difficult problem.
People were buying Hondas, Toyotas and Datsuns in the '70s. Part of that was mileage, some of it was price, part of it was ... a sort of rebellion. There was interest.
The US automakers were just downright bellicose. No real surprise; they're huge organizations and turning a thing that large takes forever. This was so profound that Roger Smith of all people started the recently defunct Saturn marque. GM remains cast in the same shape today.
Outside of electronic engine control and the stupefyingly dumb leaded gasoline, most EPA style "improvements" made cars less efficient and would have been unnecessary for properly tuned vehicles. I suppose it's lost for all time now, but Robert Pease had a great story about his Beetle not registering any emissions and his trouble with that ( an aircooled Beetle has a high enough exhaust gas temperature to theoretically emit no carbon monoxide ).
Regulation is extremely difficult - I think of it in terms of Brian Kernighan's "debugging is twice as hard" maxim but with a higher multiplier.
I think if you want clean air, $10 a gallon gasoline is a good start. This will be very disruptive. I have never seen proof, but I have heard many times one reason Reagan was popular was because gas prices dropped during his tenure.
The sad part is that we mostly use cars to subsidize land use patterns that could be taxed. Commuting is the least efficient thing ever devised.
> I think if you want clean air, $10 a gallon gasoline is a good start. This will be very disruptive.
It's interesting to think about how, due to the price inelasticity of gasoline, every penny in price increase results in a certain number of bankruptcies. My pet economic theory is that the gas price spike in the summer of 2008 is what tipped over the first domino in the global financial crisis. That was just a $2-3 per gallon spike. You're seriously advocating a $7+ dollar spike? If by disruptive, you mean collapse of society, sure. That would be very disruptive.
I don't think $10 gasoline would cause a ..."zombie apocalypse" level perturbation, but it would doubtless be bad.
I, perhaps surprisingly, agree wholeheartedly with your pet theory.
I have also read more than one (monetarist) economist who holds your pet theory, with a few modifications - the oil price spike was interpreted by the Fed as inflation so they did nothing to ease the money supply, worsening ( or some say starting) the whole shebang.
I agree that high priced gasoline, fees for parking and road use, and changes to zoning and land use policy would be great, but perhaps we still also want some regulation of car emissions?
Do you have a link explaining how EPA improvements made cars less efficient?
Spark control was much more primitive, carbureted engines just were not good candidates for all the complexity of hoses and such, gas of varying quality would clog catalytic converters... the technologies were just in an intermediate state. There were all "add parts" improvements.
Japanese cars could be better but frequently were even much more complex.
They might meet EPA off the lot, new, but after five years... I had a 1979 Buick Regal (normally aspirated, 3.8 L V6 ) that was getting like 8 MPG when I sold it in 1993 or so. No mechanic in three states could find anything wrong.
I guess I’m not understanding your original point... it seems like cars have gotten much better than they used to be. Are you saying in a counterfactual world without the EPA, they would be even better still? Or are you saying that those improvements were inevitable and cars would be equally good but cheaper without the EPA regulations? Or are you saying that regulations are better now than they were in the 80s? Or ...
It seems to me that an alternate explanation could be that it took auto makers 10–20 years to figure out how to build good compliant cars, with their first tries sucking, but once the regulatory regime had been stable for a while they figured out how to make big improvements. In a counterfactual world without those requirements they might be much more polluting today. [I dunno, I’m not at all an expert in this subject, I’m just speculating.]
At any rate, as someone who grew up in the 90s in southern CA, I’m very thankful that emissions of cars made in the 80s/90s were much better than cars 20 years prior; cleaner cars were a big part of the radical drop in air pollution throughout the area.
It's the "it took 10-20 years" thing. Really, the advance of digital technology made it all work out in the end - trying to do all that stuff in the mechanical domain was charming but it took more talent than was readily available and raised the price of cars. Digital just means a different class of engineer could address the problem and the replicability of digital helped. A generation had to exit the workforce and be replaced for it to actually work.
My more central point is that they didn't have to be polluting at all, using older technology. Properly tuned engines didn't pollute much.
Most if not all issues addressed were really down to proper maintenance. The "people who aren't there" in the modern software that runs cars do that for you now. As hard as it may be to believe, people were more or less expected to do their own maintenance on cars. Of course they didn't. But that is just how I was raised.
Again, we use cars to rejigger location in real estate. It's the use of a technology to solve something that is ultimately a governance problem. I suspect land rent taxes would be more efficient.
Since conventional automakers don't seem to be willing to aggressively pursue EVs on their own, this seems like a reasonable approach.
Or, put another way, the consumers who continue to buy ICE cars, and in doing so create pollution, are helping to pay for the EVs that other people are buying.