Last year, a newspaper reporter from the San Francisco Bay Area called Dan Sperling, head of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, for a comment about the future of electric cars in California.
To the horror of oil companies and auto-makers, California air pollution officials had launched a plan in 1990 to put 1 million new nonpolluting cars on the road within 20 years. Initially, only electric cars would meet that zero-exhaust tailpipe emission standard.
Now, state officials were nearing the end of a year of public review. Air resources agency staff had drafted alternatives to soften the first-phase electric cars quotas. The reporter knew Sperling as one of the world's leading experts on alternative transportation fuels. He looked to Sperling as a credible academic source to assess oil and auto industry claims that the public was not ready for electric cars and that electric cars were not ready for the market.
Since 1990, Sperling and his UC Davis colleagues and students had shown in study after study that electric cars are a good thing for California--the state with the worst air quality in the country. Even when the belching smokestacks from power plants are included in the calculations, electric cars in California could substantially reduce both unhealthy urban ozone pollution and greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. In addition, a series of UC Davis reports showed that the potential market for electric cars appeared to far exceed doomsayer market estimates--many people liked and would use an electric car as a second household vehicle.
But despite the strong case for electric cars built by UC Davis research, Sperling told the reporter that the state should reduce the plan's early requirements. He recommended that the state stick with the 1998 deadline for introducing electric vehicles, so as to "keep the [auto] industry's feet to the fire," but that the state should consider lowering the 1998 requirement from the current 1 in 50 to 1 in 200 cars sold. That would give auto companies more time "so that they would be less likely to dump a bunch of lemons on consumers and poison the market for electric vehicles for years," he said.
To the dismay of environmentalists, the California Air Resources Board this year
indeed softened the sales requirements for 1998. But it did stick to the 1998 deadline for requiring the biggest automakers to begin selling electric cars, and it retained the more important sales requirement for 2003 and beyond--10 percent of all cars in the state must have zero emissions.
"I don't think any adopted emission standards for motor vehicles have ever been implemented on schedule," Sperling shrugs. "The ZEV rule did what was intended. It overcame the start-up barriers to electric-vehicle technology. Every major car company in the world and thousands of smaller companies are now investing in alternatives to the internal combustion engine."
Reporters, public officials, environmentalists and corporate managers seek out Sperling for his ability to synthesize many different aspects of a complex problem. "That means taking pure research findings, such as market research, engineering analysis and economic analysis," he says, "and interpreting them in the context of the political process and corporate and regulatory behavior and articulating them in terms of conventional wisdom."
Even as revised, the zero-emission rules are a milestone. The state agency sets global trends with its innovative air-quality regulations. Earlier rules regarding low tailpipe emissions have been incorporated into the federal Clean Air Act. Northeast states have adopted zero-emission vehicle plans. The agency can claim responsibility for car emission improvements ranging from catalytic converters to reformulated gas.
Because of the California rules for non-polluting cars, the 1990s may be remembered as a crossroads in the history of transportation as the world turns toward electric-based car technologies. Sperling is widely credited as one of a handful of individuals most responsible for sustaining the highly contentious "zero-emission vehicle" mandate.
It is also the decade when transportation studies at UC Davis revved up to regional, national and international renown, in part because of the leading role the institute plays in research and education regarding the economic, environmental and technological future of vehicles.
Photo by Neil Michel/Axiom.
