California: Beyond cars?

Abstract

Despite—or because of—California’s vaunted love affair with the automobile, the state could become a leader in the development of new, climate change–friendly transport. Electric cars, hybrid vehicles, plug-in electric hybrids, robotic cars, vehicles powered by natural gas or other fuels, car sharing, bike sharing, and the matching of unused vehicle space with potential passengers are just some of the ideas on the near horizon in the Golden State.

California has long been famous—or infamous—as a pioneer of the automobile-saturated lifestyle. By 1927, there was already one car for every three people in Los Angeles, while only one for nine in Chicago, and one for every 400 in Berlin. There were many reasons for this reliance on cars, but clearly it was partly due to the fact that folks from the Midwest arrived in cars, and partly to a sprawling real estate market that undermined the existing rail system. To finance these suburban developments, the assets of Pacific Electric Railway, which served the greater Los Angeles area, were consistently raided, rather than being reinvested in rail. These patterns favored auto-dependent infill between the rail lines (Bottles, 1991). In an accident of geology, the Los Angeles Basin sits atop several giant oil fields, whose bobbing pumps riddled the hills next to Hollywood, providing ample fuel for its cars and trucks.

Altogether, these factors meant that after World War II, a grid of boulevards and crosscutting freeways arose, connecting more than 100 towns and cities in the Los Angeles region and allowing for a highly decentralized lifestyle. Hollywood figured prominently in promoting this new way of life; cars provided action and glamour in movie chase scenes and represented freedom, romance, and wealth. Walking neighborhoods died as jobs, friends, and family spread ever wider. The new rites of passage were the acquisitions of a driver’s license and a car. Sidewalks became a no-man’s land, an unused ribbon along the edge of parking lots encircling new malls and employment centers. Junior colleges morphed into commuter colleges. Movies, meals, and even sermons were delivered to Californians sitting in their cars. Cars expanded lifestyles to a wide web of recreation that included beaches, deserts, mountains, and lakes.

Despite the auto’s hegemonic role, California looks like it could play a pivotal role in the development of new, climate change-friendly transport systems, especially when it comes to personal mobility. In recent years, several things have lined up to make this happen: California’s enduring commitment to cars and roads for transport, the size of its vehicle sector, and its inability to fund and site public transit pushed the state and its air quality regulators up the steep trail of regulating tailpipe emissions. Persistence has paid off and many goals have been reached.

Lawmakers can build on this regulatory experience in meeting new energy-efficiency and greenhouse-gas reduction goals. And because the region’s notoriously polluted air will be exacerbated by climate change, the increased health risk alone has meant that California’s citizens have a great interest and enthusiasm in reducing carbon emissions. In addition, California’s wealth, combined with a high-technology industry renowned for “thinking out of the box,” means that radical new solutions find an eager hearing in the Golden State. A willingness to embrace change has long been the state’s hallmark; as Mark Twain wrote over a century ago:

California [has] a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring … and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.” (Twain, 1872)

Air pollution and Zero Emission Vehicles

While geology played a role in kick-starting Southern California’s love affair with the automobile, geology also contributed to the region’s potent stew of polluted air. Dramatic, snow-capped mountains ring many of California’s cities and towns, and these mountain ranges tend to trap air in the regions’ valleys, in a process known as inversion.

When cars and industry release hydrocarbons, particles, and other emissions, these materials get trapped in this meteorological inversion; when this combination reacts with sunlight, it often results in photochemical smog. The problem of smog in Los Angeles was far worse than in most other cities, due to the size and frequency of its inversions and the massive number of vehicles involved. Often, it was bad enough to cause a public health crisis in Los Angeles as well as in towns of the central valley.

Smog and its attendant health concerns were key influences in the development of the Clean Air Act. The act itself was signed in 1970 by a president—Richard Nixon—whose hometown of Whittier, California, had some of the dirtiest air in the region.

The act contained a provision that gave California the authority to regulate tailpipe emissions on its own. Consequently, the California Air Resources Board was able by 2010 to squeeze tailpipe emissions down to one percent of what a typical car’s exhaust had been in 1970 (Sperling and Gordon, 2009). Regulators were emboldened by this success to push even further.

For a variety of reasons, including the rising costs of labor in California, automakers that had assembled cars in the state after the war closed these factories. But the closings turned out to have a silver lining, because they weakened the influence of Detroit’s carmakers over regulators and legislators. In addition, Californians developed a taste for smaller, more fuel-efficient, international cars, especially those made by the Japanese. Ironically, the all-electric Tesla sports car is made in a former General Motors factory in Fremont, California, that had closed its doors in 2010.

These factors also led to an interest in electric vehicles. In the 1980s, visionary aeronautics engineer Paul MacCready (who also built the first human-powered airplane to cross the English Channel) put together a “skunk-works” team of electrical engineers at General Motors/Hughes, where they developed the Impact—an ultra-light, fast, advanced, alternating-current propulsion vehicle that used lead-acid batteries to drive about 100 miles before needing to be recharged. Famously, GM’s Roger Smith bragged about the vehicle on Earth Day in 1990, which encouraged a group of California Air Resources Board engineers, impressed with the Impact’s zippy performance, to formulate a mandate for a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV).

The mandate required the six major vehicle manufacturers to sell two percent of their vehicles as ZEVs by 1998, increasing to five percent by 2001 and 10 percent in 2003 (Collantes, 2006). These requirements led to a decade of raucous debates and hearings, followed by a trial rollout of electric vehicles in the late 1990s. But a general release was postponed at the end of the decade due to automakers’ arguments that the batteries were not capable, California drivers not willing, and the cars not profitable. GM scrapped its EV1, taking the cars back from their devoted owners—who in revenge inspired a movie called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” ¹

This experience seeded a grassroots movement among electrical engineers and a cadre of consumers—some in the Hollywood set—dedicated to the idea that the ZEV was possible. Innovation was afoot. Additionally, some carmakers continued to bring out alternatives; Toyota and Honda sold the first hybrid vehicles, starting in Japan and then California. (Hybrids have drivetrains that combine gasoline-powered internal combustion components with electric drive components but cannot plug into the electrical power grid.) Independently of each other, German automaker Daimler and US maker GM moved toward hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the next solution.

And finally, a complex technology known as the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) was pursued by University of California, Davis mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Andy Frank. As the name suggests, plug-in hybrids allow owners to recharge their vehicles by simply plugging into a wall outlet or a dedicated charger. The battery of a non-plug-in hybrid is charged by the electric motor acting as a generator, either when the gas engine is running or when the brake is applied. These approaches are used by plug-in hybrids as well, but the owner of a plug-in now had the additional option of easier, relatively faster charging by just plugging a cord into an everyday wall socket. ²

Plug-in hybrid vehicle technology got an added boost in 2004, when backyard electrical engineers in California and elsewhere hacked the engine codes of the Toyota Prius, installed much larger lithium batteries in the tire space, and added a charge port that allowed drivers to plug into an outlet. This greatly extended the range the car could go on a single charge. These homemade, “aftermarket” creations were reasonably reliable, giving rise to a new set of passionate, grassroots advocates in California.

Finally, while the major automakers had bowed out of electric vehicles, new designs for battery-operated electrics were still being developed by others less encumbered by convention, such as engineers working in their spare time, academics, students, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. Often, they built upon one another’s improvements; for example, a company called AC Propulsion Systems in San Dimas encouraged another in Northern California—Tesla Motors—to build a high-end, performance-oriented roadster.

The Tesla case is particularly interesting, because breaking into the car business is not easy; the capital expenses are huge. The Koreans have done it, but with the backing of the national government. Tesla is still in the early, make-or-break years, producing thousands rather than millions of vehicles, but if there ever were a company to prove the naysayers wrong, this would be the one, with growing ranks of loyal buyers and investors.

Tesla Motors is led by Elon Musk—a modern-day combination of Howard Hughes and Henry Ford—who was a wunderkind of the Internet world, having previously helped develop PayPal, among other successful online ventures. Musk was now moving into the world of automotive technology, about which he knew little or nothing. But he also didn’t know what could not be done.

The company, named after pioneering early-20th-century physicist Nikola Tesla, was one of the first to combine several innovations at once, such as all-electric power trains, lithium-ion batteries, and a souped-up home charger that allowed the car’s owners to fully recharge their vehicle in less than three hours, as opposed to the standard eight-hour overnight charge. Their very large, high-energy batteries doubled the range of electric vehicles. (The company is also building a network of free “supercharger” stations across the country, which, Tesla claims, means that “[r]oad trippers can stop for a quick meal and have [the S sedan, Tesla’s second model,] charged when they’re done.” ³ ) Borrowing a page from the introduction of the smartphone, Musk’s team also worked on the vehicle’s overall look and feel, transforming a dowdy-looking technology into something sleek, polished, and sexy. Tesla Motors ultimately made electric vehicles seem more like rocket ships than golf carts.

Solving climate and transport

Another factor that puts California at the forefront of green vehicles is the state’s sensitivity to climate change. It has more than 38 million citizens and a huge farming industry located in what in many places is essentially desert, making the state dependent on the mountains’ winter snowpack and ancient aquifers. Worryingly, analyses of tree-ring growth of its prehistoric forests show that the region has a record of serious drought, increasing the chances that climate-forcing gases would strain California’s luck.

In response to these risks, California has taken big strides to create a web of climate initiatives. Laws and regulations are in place to dramatically reduce the production of climate-changing gases, with a target of 80 percent reduction by 2050. Fortunately, California has a relatively diversified, clean, and efficient power industry, consisting of hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and natural gas, and it has set new goals for even greater use of renewable power. Transportation, however, accounts for more than 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, most of that coming from passenger vehicles—making them an essential target for achieving this carbon reduction goal.

Taking on congestion

Californians live in far-flung suburbs and often must drive considerable distances to commute, shop, or visit friends.

The California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, concluded in the 1980s that it would be unable to keep up with demand for freeway lanes. In fact, many researchers began to think that new freeways would only worsen the situation, by encouraging more drivers to take to the road. Simply put, Caltrans could not build its way out: There were few potential corridors left, and communities protested being cut in half by a new freeway. For example, Los Angeles’ Century Freeway, first proposed in 1960 and not opened until 1993, filled to capacity in just a few years.

Consequently, the general trend among policy makers in California since the 1980s has shifted to optimizing the existing system of roads, and even raising density of development (Ewing and Cervero, 2010). New emphasis has been put on developing alternative modes of transit, including walking and biking, which had been previously limited to the poor and other people without cars. Additional answers may lie in information technologies that optimize the existing car, road, and parking system; car-sharing arrangements for dense areas; and developing transportation systems that integrate cars, car sharing, transit systems, and bike sharing.

Information giant Google—located just down the street from Tesla—is well aware of these possibilities and has been developing automated cars using its extensive mapping database combined with environmental sensors onboard the vehicles. Such cars will enable drivers to phone, text, and otherwise do what they are already doing from their cars—but much more safely—while moving about. Given that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2008) says that human error is responsible for nearly 93 percent of all accidents, the introduction of automated cars will probably improve safety. The networking of vehicles could also help reduce the distance between vehicles on highways, thereby increasing capacity.

There are efforts afoot in California to transform automobile ownership, parking systems, taxi services, and mass transit, all backed by venture capitalists. One area of entrepreneurial focus that has shown some early success involves Internet-based, transportation-oriented applications for smartphones, with dozens of new companies emerging, including the now-famous Uber and Lyft ride-sharing programs. These and other such applications match unused parking spaces, cars, and extra seats in cars, trucks, and scooters with drivers and passengers in real time. Ground zero for many of these new services has been San Francisco and Silicon Valley, with its armies of electrical engineers, social media gurus, and young people willing to try out the new solutions their techy neighbors are creating.

A strong market for innovations

California’s Gov. Jerry Brown has set a goal of 1.5 million Zero Emission Vehicles on its roads by 2025; meeting that goal will require a lot of willing buyers. Determining how many of these buyers exist, and the nature of their needs and interests, has been much of my lifework; I have long assessed markets for a variety of transportation technologies that could lead to sustainability, both in California and abroad. An early influence on my interest in electric vehicles came from the time when we had more than 200 households from the Pasadena area participate in test-drives at the Rose Bowl in the early 1990s of various personal transportation technologies, including vehicles powered by compressed natural gas, methanol, and batteries, along with some prototype plug-in hybrids. The experience of driving these early, primitive versions of battery-operated electric vehicles drew consistently positive responses, despite their diminutive size and reduced range. I’ve seen this kind of response several times in similar comparative experiments, which could bode well for the possibility that the state will meet the governor’s goal.

Another indicator that the goal is reachable: California contains a large market of car buyers. In 2014, 1.7 million Californians bought new cars, and there are reasons to think numbers of them may be ready to make the shift to low-emission cars. Surveys show that many of them have been trapped by traffic congestion and subjected to dirty air and are familiar with the success of regulations such as the control of tailpipe emissions. Californians are also very familiar with climate issues, having been through some severe droughts. At the same time, unfortunately, they also are likely to have never carpooled with their neighbors, despite the presence of High Occupancy Vehicle lanes on many California freeways, and they have probably never used mass transit (unless they live in San Francisco, the densest and most transit-oriented city in the state).

When my colleagues and I at UC Davis interviewed members of several dozen Los Angeles households who agreed to lease BMW MINI E electric vehicles in 2007, however, we discovered a diverse group. Among them were many political conservatives who nevertheless supported electric technology as the next step in cleaning the air for their children and family members with pulmonary challenges. Along with the expected environmentalists, and anti-oil company folks, we also discovered that electric-vehicle enthusiasts included a large number of just plain car lovers. Throughout the state, we found a sizable market of people with a background in technology-oriented industries; their sensibilities and income lead them to be early adopters or first buyers of electric vehicles. Moreover, many of these people are also putting photovoltaic solar panels on their roofs, shooting for personal energy autonomy.

Evolution of a new system

A new system of mobility is likely to emerge in California over the next two decades, one that produces much less carbon and integrates efficient cars, walking, mass transit, and other technologies into a network of services available in real time. Internet-based services may for the first time make it possible to live in much of California without owning a car, instead sharing cars or rides as needed.

However, the transition will not happen overnight. Some parts of the system of automotive innovation move notoriously slowly; for example, a complete turnover of vehicles in California takes a couple of decades. ⁴ Batteries are important to the transition to electric vehicles, and currently they cost too much. Lithium batteries took two decades to reach the efficiency and price levels they now exhibit and will probably take two more decades to become affordable for the under $30,000 half of the new-car market. Automated cars will have to compete on the road with non-automated cars for a long time. For these reasons, innovation in personal transportation will need a web of regulations and incentives to compete with existing transportation systems, until niches are discovered where the financial playing field tilts in favor of the technologies of the future.

Whether these changes in California’s transportation system will serve as a model for the rest of the world to follow remains to be seen. California’s auto market is certainly big enough to be the tail that wags the dog—more than 12 percent of all US sales happened in the Golden State. (And the figures run even higher for hybrid electric vehicles and plug-ins—California’s sales account for 25 to 40 percent of US sales in those categories.) California is seeking partners in its quest to achieve a low-carbon transportation future; the places in the United States that come close to California’s electric vehicle sales percentages are the state of Hawaii and the cities of Portland and Seattle. Other countries with affluent populations and green energy goals are also pitching in. Norway and the Netherlands have jumped in with both feet, providing strong incentives to kick-start the low-emissions auto market. Fifteen percent of all automobiles sold in Norway are plug-in hybrids. Bigger players, like Japan, China, and Germany, are still testing the water, deciding whether they want to join a California-born effort of “magnificent dash and daring” that could revolutionize transportation around the globe.