California will soon reach the “forced” part of its forced transition to electric vehicles, shattering Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s façade of California being the state of ultimate “freedom.” That is if the state chooses to continue to push forward with this forced transition despite not being prepared for the consequences.
The California New Car Dealers Association released new data that show that California may have hit peak voluntary electric vehicle usage. According to that data, there was just a 1% increase in the sale of electric vehicles in 2024, one year after a 46% increase. The total number of new cars sold in California stayed flat at 1.75 million, with EVs making up about one-fourth of that.
That isn’t good enough for California Democrats, who wish to force Californians into buying electric vehicles by 2035. Automakers have a deadline coming up in 2026 requiring that 35% of the new cars they sell be EVs, and there is only one major automaker on pace to hit it: Tesla, which only sells EVs in the first place. That means that every other automaker selling new cars in California will either be hit with a $20,000 fine for each gas-powered car over that 35% target they sell or, more likely, will restrict their own car sales so people can’t buy gas-powered cars so they can hit that target.
This is going to cause a few problems. For one, Californians will be forcibly limited in their choices of new cars because Democrats like Newsom think they should be able to choose what kind of cars people are allowed to buy. This will, of course, lead to an increase in prices for California car buyers, thanks to both the smaller supply of cars available to purchase and the fact that they would be subsidizing the production of EVs that people don’t want to buy. The kicker, according to the president of the CNCDA, is that nearby Nevada and Arizona would be flooded with gas-powered cars that manufacturers would no longer be able to sell in California.
In other words, California is restricting the choices of its own residents to make little change in the global climate, given that manufacturers will still sell their gas-powered cars in nearby states (which will likely cheaper than before). This means more Californians will choose to stay in their gas-powered cars longer rather than buy new, more expensive EVs they don’t want.
Aside from depriving Californians of the freedom to choose what they want to drive, the rushed EV transition continues to be a burden for car manufacturers. General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen are all losing money on EVs, with Ford’s electric vehicles division losing $3.7 billion from January to September last year. California’s EV mandate will widen those losses, as car manufacturers looking to meet the mandated sale targets won’t be able to subsidize EV production through the sales of gas-powered cars in those states.
As a result, car manufacturers may end up being forced to buy “compliance credits” (as Axios called them) to reduce the fines that come from selling too many gas-powered cars. The majority of those credits are owned by Tesla, and they will only cost more for manufacturers like Ford to buy as the state’s mandated restrictions keep kicking in. As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out, between the “compliance credits,” state subsidies, and tax credits, “The industry would likely collapse without taxpayers. It may collapse even with them.”
California has other problems stemming from this mandate aside from the financial mess of manufacturers being forced to make cars people don’t want to buy. For one, the forced transition to electric vehicles leads to its own environmental hazards. The Environmental Protection Agency and Los Angeles firefighters have had to tread carefully in cleaning up the aftermath of the fires that devastated the city, thanks in part to the wealth of lithium-ion batteries left behind in charred EVs. According to the co-chair of the Environmental Protection Agency Lithium Ion Battery Emergency Response Task Force, “when you have thousands of batteries packed tightly together, one operating at that temperature will damage ones next to it, and so on.”
When a battery-storage plant in Monterey County caught fire in January, more than 1,000 people had to be evacuated from the area, and local schools were closed. Preliminary test results of the topsoil in the county found toxic metals from the burnt batteries up to 46 miles away from the plant. As a local supervisor said of the plant’s fire, which destroyed most of its 100,000 batteries, “We are right now in a place where government does not have the knowledge to regulate this technology and industry does not have the know-how to control it.”
Then there is the problem of California’s energy grid, which is currently trying to prove that it can even operate at some periods of the day on solely renewable energy. The big recent milestone the grid hit last year was a 100-day stretch where, for at least some portion of the day, the grid was powered by 100% renewable energy. That is considered cause for celebration, especially since the state once again avoided rolling blackouts over the summer.
Of course, there are a multitude of problems with this, not least of which is that 36% of California’s electricity still comes from natural gas. Another 9% comes from nuclear energy from the last nuclear plant in the state, which state Democrats wanted to close up until they realized wind and solar couldn’t shoulder the load for the grid as they planned. All of this comes before the rest of the state’s drivers are forced into EVs that will rely on the grid to charge, increasing the demand for energy.
Under its current set-up, an average May day saw renewable energy sources meet energy demand from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., though it did not meet demand in the morning and night hours. During the heat wave that hit on the Fourth of July, renewables didn’t meet demand even at peak solar hours. Again, that all comes before the entire state’s population of drivers will be relying on the grid to make sure they can use their cars.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In all, the biggest problem California’s climate regime has is that it must force change before technology and demand naturally bring change about. Most drivers simply do not want an electric vehicle right now, and that is reflected both in consumer decision-making and in the losses that car manufacturers are suffering. The only demand for widespread electric vehicles is the demand by the government. And neither the manufacturers nor the state’s energy grid are prepared for the transition.
California’s forced transition to electric vehicles is bad for manufacturers, bad for drivers, and bad for the environment. It’s a reckless plunge into a future that no one in the state is ready for, evidenced by consumer choices and the restrictions on those choices that Newsom and California Democrats are imposing on the population.