Just as General Motors prepared to release record profits on Wednesday, the respected Union of Concerned Scientists took issue with the company's plan last week to develop a plan to require electric car sales nationwide. GM is a leader in electric cars and is expected to be the second automaker to reach the 200,000-vehicle limit on tax credits for... GM’s national electric car plan may not be all that, scientist argues
Just as General Motors prepared to release record profits on Wednesday, the respected Union of Concerned Scientists took issue with the company's plan last week to develop a plan to require electric car sales nationwide. GM is a leader in electric cars and is expected to be the second automaker to reach the 200,000-vehicle limit on tax credits for...
As promised, the Trump administration has embarked on regulatory rollbacks across many fronts, some immediate and others taking longer. It remains unclear whether the EPA's plan to loosen carbon-dioxide emission limits for 2022 through 2025 vehicles will survive inevitable court challenges. However, despite shrill rhetoric from environmental...
Over the many months EPA administrator Scott Pruitt signaled his intention to revisit the Obama administration's emission limits for 2022 through 2025 vehicles, California warned that it would not go along with any reductions. The state has been allowed to set its own emission standards for decades, it noted, and it has every intention of sticking...
Despite the sturm und drang around the announcement by embattled EPA chief Scott Pruitt that he will relax emission limits for 2022 through 2025 vehicles, not much will happen immediately. His determination last week that the Obama administration was "incorrect" and that the limits on those vehicles weren't needed kicks off a lengthy process of...
While the name of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is often preceded by "embattled" these days, his agency is now on record as rejecting its own recommendation of just 16 months ago. It concluded in July 2016 that the auto industry had handily met lower carbon-emission limits from 2012 through 2017—at lower cost and with more conventional...
In response to automaker lobbying, the EPA plans to start the process of rolling back emission standards passed under the Obama Administration. Automakers claimed the associated fuel-economy rules were unrealistic given that consumers are flocking to crossover utilities and pickup trucks as gas prices remain low. A new report by the American...
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said yesterday the agency plans to modify rules limiting carbon-dioxide emissions for light-duty vehicles in model years 2022 through 2025. The agency, he said, had reached a determination that the limits put in place in 2012 under the Obama administration were “not appropriate and should be revised." The...
In the U.S., California has long been viewed culturally as the crazy, free-spirited cousin. As Californians like to point out, their state of 40 million people is also the world's sixth-largest economy all by itself. Resolutely progressive, it has regulated vehicle emissions for five decades and worked to get zero-emission vehicles onto its roads...
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt would be controversial even if he hadn't flown to Morocco in December (first-class, on the taxpayer dime) to lobby the country on the benefits of liquified natural gas while living in a condo owned by a lobbyist for the country's largest LNG exporter. He is likely the first EPA head to axe scientists from the...
It happened again. At this week's New York auto show media days, a manufacturer rolled out yet another vehicle that it calls a "crossover" despite that vehicle having neither the ground clearance nor the all-wheel drive to qualify as a light truck. The car in question was the 2019 Hyundai Kona Electric, a 250-mile battery-electric vehicle more...
Roughly half of everyone alive in the U.S. today has never experienced really bad smog. Those over, say, age 45—big-city residents and Angelenos especially—may recall hazy days in which the sun was barely visible, and air that actually tasted metallic. It's a memorable experience, and it's why the future of electric cars increasingly...
Two years ago, the government of India proposed a remarkable and ambitious goal: make every new vehicle coming onto its roads electric by 2030. The plan was largely a response to some of the world's highest levels of hazardous air pollution in its cities, higher in many cases than the legendary foul air in Chinese cities. The world's second-most...
The idea of adding noise-makers to vehicles that are "too quiet" didn't exist until the first hybrid-electric cars hit the market in 2000. Within a few years, however, organizations representing the blind began to raise alarms that cars operating at low speeds solely on electric power couldn't be heard by pedestrians who also couldn't see them...
Last November, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would rescind a rule that banned companies from fitting outdated, older, and dirtier diesel engines into brand-new "glider" chassis-cab trucks. Among the many regulations to limit emissions and other forms of pollution that EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has axed, this one was particularly...