Battle Over Electric Car Deadline Is Heating Up : Autos: Car makers say they won’t be able to sell the required 20,000 vehicles in ’98. Proponents claim demand is there.
Will Californians buy electric cars?
Wednesday in El Monte, major auto makers said no. They said market research predicts that they won’t be able to sell anywhere near the roughly 20,000 electric vehicles they will be required to sell the first year of a 1998 state mandate.
Electric car proponents said yes. They said a survey by UC Davis researchers found more than enough potential buyers.
The multimillion-dollar marketing question was the focus of often passionate debate at a hearing of the California Air Resources Board.
The board has mandated that the first mass-produced electric vehicles in modern times be offered in California showrooms in less than three years, which gives the Big Three auto makers barely enough time to set up their assembly lines. Auto makers in particular treated the hearing as a last-ditch opportunity to get the board to postpone or amend its deadline for the 1998 model year.
Actor Ed Begley Jr. and singer Jackson Browne, meanwhile, made strong pleas to the auto makers to meet the deadline. So did several ordinary drivers who had spent weeks using the GM Impact electric prototype for commuting and recreation.
“There is just no reason I would not buy that car,” Moonyean Kistler of Whittier told the hearing. Kistler liked both the Impact’s performance and its electric fuel. “I didn’t smell gasoline or get it on my hands for two weeks. . . . I could carpet my garage floor. That’s important to women,” Kistler testified.
Auto makers and other opponents had a more skeptical view of the market, however.
Mike Miller, president of the California Motor Car Dealers Assn., which represents the 1,400 new-car dealers in the state, said he too “loves the Impact . . . but that car’s not going to be there [in the early marketplace]; what they tried was the top of the line.”
Miller called for rolling back the mandate until a better battery can be developed, warning that otherwise most drivers will only be able to afford much lower-performance cars, which could “ruin” the long-term market for electric vehicles.
The mandate is an element of the board’s plan to help the state meet federal Clean Air Act requirements. Auto makers that fail to meet the mandate would face a fine of $5,000 for each car short of the goal.
J. David Power, president of J.D. Power & Associates, released a white paper also urging a relaxing of the mandate, citing his company’s 35 years of experience surveying automotive consumers. “Mass marketing of electric vehicles in 1998 is doomed to failure,” Power said.
Robert C. Purcell, GM executive director for electric vehicles, said the company has performed nearly 20 customer surveys since 1990, interviewing 18,000 customers and potential Impact test drivers in that time. GM, he said, now estimates the total California market for electrics in 1998 at only 3,500 vehicles. For the Impact to have broad market appeal, he said, it would have to sell for $10,000 to $12,000--less than half GM’s most recent estimate.
A Toyota executive said that after four years of market research, the Japanese auto maker, which is also covered by the ARB mandate, estimates that the 1998 market potential is “very optimistically” no more than 5,800 vehicles.
But the ARB-sponsored study by the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis found a substantial potential market for electric vehicles. The detailed interviews of 485 households found that 7% to 15% of California car consumers--at least 2 1/2 times the number required by the 1998 mandate--would be interested in buying even low-performance electric vehicles, even if they cost substantially more than gasoline-powered cars.
“You can’t look at the market in the traditional way that automotive companies have,” said Daniel Sperling, director of the institute. “Electric vehicles are going to cut across the market in a different way.”
The institute, which has studied alternative-fuel vehicles for the past decade, has identified what it calls a new market segment, what it terms the potential hybrid household--a family with two or more cars, all bought new, and with at least one of the cars being less than full size. These families would plan use of their various vehicles as if the household had a small fleet, using the appropriate vehicle for the appropriate task, Sperling said.
Board member Lynne T. Edgerton said that without a special board meeting, the next time the ARB could meet to amend the mandate would be at its scheduled meeting in September.
