Cruise vehicles are based on electric Chevy Bolts without any legal requirement.
© 2018 Bloomberg Finance LP
A new bill proposed in the California Legislature from Senator Min requires that all self-driving vehicles on public roads be zero-emission (tailpipe) starting in 2025. First blush suggests it is just speeding up the 2035 timeline for all vehicles to go electric by making the requirement earlier for these highly advanced vehicles. In fact, the idea is deeply flawed.
Almost all pilot robocars have been electric or hybrid already. That’s because it’s easier to adapt these cars to self-driving, and because the builders have wanted to be low emissions. There is no strict technical need for this, however. Waymo’s fleet is mostly Pacifica hybrid minivans, though they also have all-electric Jaguars. They would have to junk all the minivans in under 4 years. While they can afford that, the truth is the industry have not been bad actors here. They don’t need a law to force them to act well. Cruise and Nuro, who already are all-electric, even have expressed support for the law as it only restricts competitor’s plans.
Indeed, robotaxi fleets are strongly motivated to be electric simply because it’s cheaper. Energy and maintenance of electric cars is much cheaper than gasoline. If you’re not doing long-haul highway, but you are doing all-day operations in the city, electric is already the right choice. No law is needed nor should you write a law to “solve” a problem that’s not actually happening. That’s grandstanding, not good policy.
In truth, it’s bad policy. While electric is a better choice most of the time, there are instances where, for now, it isn’t. If you limit the popularity of robotaxi services compared to other, non-autonomous services, you actually hurt the environment as well as those services.
To understand why, consider how people buy cars today. They visit car dealers and ask, “what car do I want for my life?” They don’t buy the best car for what they do most of the time, which is often commute. They buy the car they see as being their car for all the trips they will take. Because of this, SUVs and pickups are the top selling cars, even though most people use them for ordinary trips around town almost all the time.
In the robotaxi world, people no longer need to buy the car for all their needs. They can summon a special car when they have special needs. They pick the car for the next trip, not the next five years. So when commuting, a small electric car is ideal. But when they want to go skiing with friends in the mountains, they can call up a SUV, and probably even a gas-powered SUV if those mountains don’t have easy electric charging. You don’t want to force them into a manually driven car just to make this trip that gasoline is better for, and you don’t want to limit the growing robotaxi companies.
Some great electric SUVs and pickups are coming soon from companies like Tesla and Rivian, but they are expensive vehicles with big batteries in order to move that much weight on long trips. By 2025 their numbers will still be modest, and the price will still be expensive. You don’t want to lock the lower income folks out of autonomy, not when it’s saving lives. But a few years later, the lower cost vehicles will arrive, and the charging infrastructure will arrive, and you won’t need a law to make people choose electric.
The right answer, for both robocars and regular cars, is to price the externalities of both gasoline and electricity into their cost, not for the government to pick the power trains of vehicles. Politically, raising the price of gasoline and fossil electricity has seemed a non-starter, so this is difficult, but so is regulation of the power train.
In the Automotive OEM world, designing a new car is a long process. 2025 models are already well into their design cycle. A law with this short a time horizon would upend that cycle. On the other hand, novel vehicles, especially robocars, are more flexible and could survive it, but even for them it would be a costly burden. This law doesn’t just require new vehicles to be electric as the 2035 target does, it would take a hybrid from 2022 or 2024 off the road. Waymo and others don’t wish to burn gasoline, but they should also pick the best choices for today. We’ll get our electric world pretty soon.
