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California’s Air Resources Board is starting to realize that it might have made a mistake by projecting a 15.4 percent market share for zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) by 2025. The state, which pioneered incentivizing automakers to sell electric vehicles, is being outpaced by countries, like Norway and the Netherlands, exploring the idea of ZEVs having a 100 percent market share within the same timeframe.

Furthermore, because of Tesla, which only sells ZEVs, and the popularity of a few plug-in hybrid models, like the Volt, ZEV credits have flooded the market and now automakers would only need to achieve a 6 percent ZEV market share in the state and compensate with credits bought from other automakers in order to comply with CARB’s mandate without being fined.
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On Thursday, California’s Air Resources Board had a meeting and status update on the state’s ‘Zero Emission Vehicle’ (ZEV) program where industry actors expressed their views on the clean vehicle market and the ZEV credit mandate. During a presentation to the board, Tesla’s Vice President of Business Development Diarmuid O’Connell argued that lobbying efforts from automakers effectively delayed fuel economy in the U.S. by about 20 years.

He added that the automotive industry used similar lobbying tactics to delay the commercialization of Zero Emission Vehicles. He said the effort delayed the state of California’s initial 1998 goal of 2% market penetration by 16 years – Zero Emission vehicles only reached 2% of the market in 2014.
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