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This is yet another indication that people at the highest levels of government simply don't understand or care how free markets work. You don't raise demand fo

This is yet another indication that people at the highest levels of government simply don't understand or care how free markets work. You don't raise demand for anything by mandating increasing levels of production of a product that people won't buy. You do it by incentivizing or subsidizing the development of a product (and in the case of cars, a nationwide infrastructure) that has advantages over those already in the market. The major hurdles with electric cars are cost and range. Cost will come down on its own as battery technology improves. But imagine if these politicians were intelligent and instead used their power to mandate that the industry agree on a standard for interchangeable batteries, that all electric cars sold must conform to the standard, and that all sellers of the gasoline that they hate so much must install equipment to do automated swaps of charged for uncharged batteries. If recharging the car (battery swaps) were faster, cheaper, and more convenient than pumping gas, that would remove an enormous roadblock in the minds of many consumers. Consumer demand for electric cars would skyrocket, gas stations would have a massive new profit center, and as a side effect, politicians would get the environmental benefits they desire far faster than they would under their current plan.

joblessjunkie 11y ago
It's unfair to say that these people don't understand the free market. They understand that the free market will not push us out of gasoline cars and into electric cars until oil becomes very expensive. The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out, thus before the free market is willing. Nobody wants to pay more for their transportation, so at some point someone just has to step in and force the issue. California's laws don't dictate exactly how producers and consumers find their way off gasoline, they simply state that they must, and so leave it to the free market to find that path. Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea, since batteries are likely to change rather quickly in the near future, and this is a time when we want as much competition and innovation (both in technical methods and business methods) as we can muster.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  > Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea But it would be great to standardize something. Imagine a world where my car could only burn Honda Gasoline (TM), whereas your car could only burn Toyota Gasoline (TM).
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    There are cars that run on diesel fuel, cars that run on ethanol, cars that run on gasoline, and cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells. Your suggestion of cars that only burn HondaGas seems fairly implausible, as Honda would need to build a large network of special HondaGas filling stations, and no one would be willing to buy a HondaGas car until the network was complete. It would be massively risky for the company, and they would be pretty unlikely to try it absent some kind of external force. (By contrast, an electric car can charge from widespread, non-proprietary electricity sources, not only specific branded superchargers.) But in any event, I don’t think your world would be so bad in a nascent industry, where formulating a special type of fuel might conceivably lead to a dramatic improvement in efficiency or a dramatic cost reduction, or some other advantage. Sometimes forcing standards helps build a common platform on which people can innovate in other areas, but sometimes forcing standards (or even just having de facto common standards win in the market) holds a whole industry back by precluding better alternative infrastructure. In computing, we have many examples of this: the dominance of the x86 architecture, the C programming languages, UNIX, the mouse and keyboard as basic input devices, HTTP as the main network protocol, the Mac/Windows GUI, MS Office, Photoshop, etc... these behemoths all won over their respective markets then stagnated, in most cases allowing flourishing innovation on top but preventing some amount of innovation at the same level unless and until radically different conditions unseated them.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  > The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out You mean before irreversible ecological disaster? I don't think anyone outside the business of fossil fuel extraction is concerned about us running out of fossil fuels.
Dylan16807 11y ago
Mandating production of something people don't want does not make people buy it, that's true. But mandating production does make research happen, which drives prices down on the thing you want, and makes it closer to marketable. And mandating sales means that the company has to discount it until demand gets high enough. As long as it's still worth it to them overall to do business in the state, that works just fine in the market. This is subsidizing, it's just making the car companies pay for it more directly than a tax. But it works about the same as a tax on non-electric cars that pays for electric car incentives.

joblessjunkie 11y ago

It's unfair to say that these people don't understand the free market. They understand that the free market will not push us out of gasoline cars and into electric cars until oil becomes very expensive. The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out, thus before the free market is willing. Nobody wants to pay more for their transportation, so at some point someone just has to step in and force the issue. California's laws don't dictate exactly how producers and consumers find their way off gasoline, they simply state that they must, and so leave it to the free market to find that path. Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea, since batteries are likely to change rather quickly in the near future, and this is a time when we want as much competition and innovation (both in technical methods and business methods) as we can muster.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea But it would be great to standardize something. Imagine a world where my car could only burn Honda Gasoline (TM), whereas your car could only burn Toyota Gasoline (TM).
- jacobolus 11y ago
  There are cars that run on diesel fuel, cars that run on ethanol, cars that run on gasoline, and cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells. Your suggestion of cars that only burn HondaGas seems fairly implausible, as Honda would need to build a large network of special HondaGas filling stations, and no one would be willing to buy a HondaGas car until the network was complete. It would be massively risky for the company, and they would be pretty unlikely to try it absent some kind of external force. (By contrast, an electric car can charge from widespread, non-proprietary electricity sources, not only specific branded superchargers.) But in any event, I don’t think your world would be so bad in a nascent industry, where formulating a special type of fuel might conceivably lead to a dramatic improvement in efficiency or a dramatic cost reduction, or some other advantage. Sometimes forcing standards helps build a common platform on which people can innovate in other areas, but sometimes forcing standards (or even just having de facto common standards win in the market) holds a whole industry back by precluding better alternative infrastructure. In computing, we have many examples of this: the dominance of the x86 architecture, the C programming languages, UNIX, the mouse and keyboard as basic input devices, HTTP as the main network protocol, the Mac/Windows GUI, MS Office, Photoshop, etc... these behemoths all won over their respective markets then stagnated, in most cases allowing flourishing innovation on top but preventing some amount of innovation at the same level unless and until radically different conditions unseated them.
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
> The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out You mean before irreversible ecological disaster? I don't think anyone outside the business of fossil fuel extraction is concerned about us running out of fossil fuels.

Dylan16807 11y ago

Mandating production of something people don't want does not make people buy it, that's true. But mandating production does make research happen, which drives prices down on the thing you want, and makes it closer to marketable. And mandating sales means that the company has to discount it until demand gets high enough. As long as it's still worth it to them overall to do business in the state, that works just fine in the market. This is subsidizing, it's just making the car companies pay for it more directly than a tax. But it works about the same as a tax on non-electric cars that pays for electric car incentives.