General Motors has officially gone on record that it wants to force the market into electrification through a new mandate by proposing a National Zero Emissions Vehicle (NZEV) program. The framework of the program aims to “support a 50-state solution, promote the success of the U.S. automotive industry and preserve U.S. industrial leadership for years to come.”
The automaker has been the most vocal out of any of them when it comes to zero emissions, signified by the “Zero, Zero, Zero” marching orders. Never mind that Continental tried that first. Below are the official program elements outlined by GM:
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Establish ZEV requirements (by credits) each year, starting at 7 percent in 2021 and increasing 2 percent each year to 15 percent by 2025, then 25 percent by 2030.
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Use of a crediting system modeled on the current ZEV program: credits per vehicle, based on EV range, as well as averaging, banking and trading.
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Requirements after 2025 linked to path toward commercially viable EV battery cell availability at a cost of $70/kWh and adequate EV infrastructure development.
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Establishment of a Zero Emissions Task Force to promote complementary policies.
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Program terminates when 25 percent target is met, or based on a determination that the battery cost or infrastructure targets are not practicable within the timeframe.
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Additional consideration for EVs deployed as autonomous vehicles and in rideshare programs.
In terms of context, General Motors has invested aggressively into electrification, and other zero emission ventures such as fuel cell technology. However, market headwinds consisting of minimal EV adoption rate, shrinking auto sales, and unsustainable vehicle pricing have piled up as a heaping scoop of risk for the automaker, and it could be speculated as to the reason why General Motors stock is currently trading below its IPO price from 2010. This zero-emissions mandate set forth can be seen as a lobbying effort to protect GM’s mounting investments into this space, sprinkled in with heaping spoonfuls of sweet social currency.
That said, a zero-emissions mandate in the United States would fit nicely between the aggressive emissions legislation put forth by both China an various Western European nations. The ZEV mandates would at least create a uniform blueprint for automakers to follow in these developed markets. GM leaders have also openly endorsed forced electrification in these markets, as well.
Proposing a zero-emissions mandate could also be seen as General Motors pandering to its future product rollout, as designated by its ZEV requirements timeline between 2021 and 2030, as it plans to introduce 20 new all-electric vehicles globally by 2023. Automakers who haven’t invested as aggressively in the zero emissions space ahead of time would then be penalized. But not GM – because not only did it begin investments early, but also schemed up regulations to protect them.
Comments
Still very disappointing. Falls extremely short of what’s financially and technologically possible.
I know right… pesky free market getting in the way, letting people make decisions for themselves, scoff. If only they would bow to their overlords who know better…perhaps we can force them.
Deliver the product and let’s skip the mandate!
why do liberals keep coming up with ideas like global warming that makes cars more expensive to buy for the working person who needs a car to get to work ?? my grand kids both have chevy traxs that cost less than $20K so how can they afford a car that costs twice as much ??
>Coming up with ideas like global warming
Wat.
Are you that dense, my guy?
where does it say that the cheapest car you’ll be able to buy will be $40K? you’ll still be able to buy cheap ICE vehicles.
if you buy a ICE car you are still helping to pay for the loss of money that GM will have on the EVs. where do you think that money will come from the money fairy ?? it is added to the price of other vehicles
so in your mind, gm is in the business of selling products at a loss and they are eagerly campaigning for this? that makes a lot of sense.
Hence the Zev credit scheme, go look at Tesla’s Zev credits and how much they figure it’s worth to cash out, my calculator says 5700 per vehicle. Zev credits are a form of subsidy to sure up an otherwise bad bet, or worse than it otherwise would have been.
Idk where that 40k figure came from.
Here’s the question. How do you think the government will force a xx% take up rate by the market if the market doesn’t want it? Think on that.
When your grand kids reach your age they’re going to be mad as hell that pinheads like you declared themselves smarter than scientists.
90+ % of the so called scientists are libs so what do you think they will say ?? if they say there is no global warming who is going to support their research and their lifestyle ?? , my grandkids just came out of college and the are no conservative profs there. I am 85 and in good health and lived thru all that polution from coal stoves in the kitchen and leaded gasoline in cars
the data, liberal too. numbers are liberal. that number 3 … sooooo liberal. the number 5, bleeding heart liberal.
ask your grand kids if they want lead in their water and pollution in the air they breath. tell them it is all fake news because you are 85, grew up with lead pipes and coal soot clouding the air. so that makes it ok.
no it means that there are cases both ways and the earth is not coming to a end unless people make the good lord mad and there is another great flood. do you drive a EV and power up your house with windmills?? if not why not as you need to lead by example. more people die from smoking and drinking than die from polution so lets start with something that we know for sure kills people
1) leave god out of it. if you honor god, you wouldn’t want to treat the earth like a toilet.
2) just like climate change deniers, there are still people arguing the earth is flat.
3) i do not drive an EV. i don’t have solar panels. climate change is a global problem and it is going to require countries to address it. what i do will matter very little.
4) i don’t care if people smoke, drink, or do drugs. those are personal choices. if you want to die from lung cancer, cirrhosis, or an overdose, go for it.
it should also be a personal choice what type of car you drive not being told by govt. I am old enought to remember time magazine with the cover showing the earth covered in ice because the ice age was coming said the scientists.
A magazine cover from 40 years ago proves nothing. Only hard data matters.
When a scientist collects more and more data over time, their understanding of a matter becomes more better, and the evidence they collect corroborates their understanding because it can be peer reviewed.
For example:
If a scientist tells you that eating too much sugar is bad for you based on the dietary health profiles of thousands of people over 50 years of research, would you automatically call him a liberal because you really want to eat a dozen glazed donuts rather than think about the health consequences of doing so?
If a scientist tells you something, AND provides solid evidence that you yourself can track down and read and understand, chances are wouldn’t eat as many donuts. Left/right politics doesn’t even enter into it.
well said.
And let me add, I’ve tried four or five times over two days, if not more, to refute the facts of motorman’s post and fuzzy memory with multiple links. Among them: that there never was a Time magazine cover story on “global cooling” in the 1970s–just a poorly written article; that there was a Newsweek story that was nine paragraphs long in the ’70s… and other facts that the site hasn’t allowed me to post.
I presume my attempts are awaiting moderation because of the links. Yet other posters’ links miraculously show up that attempt, poorly, to refute global warming.
It’s not the first time either. Perhaps my missing posts will show up when the earth freezes over.
hard evidence said that Hillary was going to win also. the libs want to control everything because if they control your thinking they control your vote. it is all about having power to spend your tax money.
Political science is not a science. It’s extended high school social studies. As with every other human science, their results aren’t testable and repeatable, and therefore it isn’t science.
Don’t try to deliberately muddy the water by using non-science as science. Nobody cares how you voted 2 years ago.
Science is apolitical by design, and as such it keeps it free of the left/right political narrative.
You’d do yourself a service if you too were also apolitical in your thinking and your actions. You wouldn’t be worrying yourself sick about every little political news article that’s deliberately written to drive clicks.
the libs are trying to make driving so expensive that people will have to leave the suburbs and move back into the crime infested broken down cities run by the libs. these cites need the tax money to pay off the union voters pensions
And absolutely nothing you typed has anything to do with the natural sciences or how someone conducts scientific research.
I told you to lay off the political garbage. It’s going to make you sick if you cannot see the world in any way but left vs. right.
if you think the libs are pushing global warming because they are worried about your health you are dumber than I thought. it is all about their wealth.
“if you think the libs are pushing global warming because they are worried about your health you are dumber than I thought.”
If you think the finding of the natural sciences are really a political ploy, then I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m not going to resort to one-uppping you by calling you dumber for thinking like that, but I think you have bigger problems than whatever it is a scientist finds out in a lab.
If you are indeed 85 years old, I suggest to spend your time with your grandchildren as best you can. You wouldn’t want to leave them a lasting memory that you spent your last few years heavily mired in left vs. right politics and that you saw EVERYTHING through that kind of a lens.
If that kind of thinking is distorting your worldview and keeps you having normal relations with others because you don’t like their personal political views, then you need professional help.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/25725-green-religion
%100 percent of reason is born of accepting what is apparent vs. what you want to see. %100 of science is observing. If a scientist observes something that isn’t apparent… other scientists will look at the same situation and observe something far closer to the truth.
There are countless people on the planet that ‘believe’ in ‘God’. They abandon was is apparent. What is apparent is that there is no obvious Creator. If there were one we’d all agree on this. Some don’t ‘believe’ in the World Series. Everyone, instead, agrees that the World Series exists. It’s apparent.
You may believe talk of ‘God’ is off-topic, but you presented the notion that most scientists are liberal. I’m not sure such data is immediately apparent but what is obvious is that most scientists do not believe in a creator as various organized religions offer. In the US if you don’t believe in God it’s likely you’re not conservative.
God didn’t cure polio. Scientists did. God didn’t get us to the moon. Science did. Yes, I know, the faith many scientists may have had inspired them to keep working and be ‘faithful’ that their research might lead somewhere, but — again — to be an effective scientist is to observe what is real and spend time proving that it isn’t delusional.
Hence why many scientists KNOW global warming exists.
Your personal experience on these matters is irrelevant. Yup… some people smoked their nuts off and didn’t get lung cancer. WHO CARES? Science exists to eliminate irrelevant anecdotes.
Regarding your collegiate grandkids: college doesn’t exist to indoctrinate you into a political viewpoint. That’s a conservative confusion. A liberal arts college should be designed to teach kids how to think on their own instead of blindly listen to nonsense and regurgitate it.
so gm wants everyone to follow liberal communist socialist california’s lead? et tu gm???
GM can’t even sell the Bolt or Volt in any big numbers. Now they want to tell us what to drive? There is no such thing as a zero emission car. Do they realize how many coal and gas power plants we will need? Wind and solar only make about 2% of the power we use today. I think with there stock tanking its time for some new management!
Before any country adopts a ZEV strategy, they should have auto companies integrate standards so that the charger for a Chevrolet Bolt will work with a Tesla or European/Japanese electric vehicle; it can’t be like notebook computers where every AC adapter is different, additionally the country needs to update it’s power grid to support millions of electric vehicles with local communities building recharging docks on every street because not everyone lives in a home with a garage to recharge their electric vehicle as only after these two things are done can a country can consider adapting a nationwide zero emissions mandate (it’ll be interesting to see the European continent work through these hurdles as they go ZEV in under 10 years).
GM can’t sell Chevy Bolts because Dealers don’t have any on there lots !!!
they are selling lots of pickups and SUVs because that is what buyers want. I wonder how many EV fans own one ?
because to sell them you need to buy all the tools to service them and send your people to school to fix and sell them. this costs the dealership lots of money and if you don’t sell many it is a big money loser for the dealership.
To sell them, GM has to build them and ship them to the dealers. Bolts aren’t coming off the assembly line very fast, and GM is not ramping that build up for some reason.
as soon a a vehicles is shipped to a dealer the dealer has to pay for it and if it does not sell it is a problem for the dealer. my wife was a book keeper at a chevy dealership so I know how this works
If there was a demand for the Chevy Bolt GM would make more of them! The Orion plant is only running one shift. Truck and SUV plants are running around the clock.
General Motors should stay out of national politics and concentrate on technical achievements. Superior products will always find a natural way to market domination.
Exactly!
Ah, this is quite the comment section. George Washington warned us to not form political parties, and we didn’t listen. Look where that got us…
Something can’t be right or wrong just because it’s coming from one side or the other. True things are supported by data and scientific results/evidence of some sort.
With that said, we need to work on where we get the electricity that powers our lives before we make the Auto industry rely on it. Nuclear power plants and coal-powered plants are harmful to the environment, so making more to power electric cars is just counter-intuitive. We need more wind farms and solar farms to produce electricity. All factories need to have their roofs covered in solar panels and should not be allowed to dispose of waste near water sources. The water in my great state of Florida is greener than the trees, which isn’t safe or visually satisfying.
Companies need to find better mining techniques when it comes to the materials used in electric car batteries and motors, as the mining for that stuff can be pretty harmful as well.
I DO NOT want zero-emissions to be required of all cars at any point in my lifetime, at least not in the United States of America. I’m a car enthusiast first, logical person second. But we do need to look out for the place we call home.
Didn’t want to be left behind so they threw money at r&d, now it’s looking like a bad bet so ask the government to step in to sure up the bet.
if they want to sell pickups and SUVs in calif. that make a big profit they must sell a certain number of ZEV and that is not profitable unless they sell the ZEV in all states. govt officials have more to do with what you drive than the engineers at GM
The problem is most auto buyers in the United States do not want EV cars or can not afford them.
As it is now Automakers are being forced into mak8ng them due to global regulations. Yet even if they are moved in volume there is little profit.
When the goverment forced Television to Digital signals it was unpopular at first but as time went on the Televisions got cheaper and larger making the near impossible transition possible. Note the government made the digital move to have more frequencies to sell and make money.
The Gods honest truth is there has always been climate change as it has gone on since the planet was created. The harsh reality it it has grown warmer and colder many times.
No one can prove that it is man made or not beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Even if it is man made the earth always appears to compensate for it or life would have been snuffed oh centuries ago.
Just look to Mt St Helens they said it would never recover for centuries yet today life has returned in abundance.
The truth is science is not always perfect. Just look at the history of wrong theory and evidence we have had to change. We are not always as smart as we think.
Also suspect are the number of people who have turned the green industry into their own good mine as they push false products and promises to vanish with the government funds and investor money.
We are not going to run out of oil anytime soon. The harsh fact are grand children and their great grand children will get along just find if they can survive goverment interventions.
To be honest I fear more governments than I do global cl8mate change. The governments are far more dangerous and unpredictable.
I do not blame GM for asking as they are hpjust trying to survive with all that is being forced upon them in globalization. They can’t make money on products few want or afford. To get the product cheaper it will take more investment and volume. Not easy to do as it is like the chicken and egg.
I do agree the SAE needs to be involved from the start to get everyone on one page for charging. They also need to have the goverment help invest in charging stations to make these EV more practical for travel.
Everyone just needs to step back and let the EV product go at the slow steady growth. If the goverment want more they need to support it. To be honest rebates to buyers is better than the many BS things they fund today.
There are many sources of CO2 emissions, and personal autos make up a relatively small portion of this.
https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/inventoryexplorer/#allsectors/allgas/econsect/all
If all vehicles in the world could magically be converted to electric, I suspect the amount of emissions from electricity utility companies would pretty much make up the difference. Electricity is not emission-free.
I support market-governed forces here. The government has done what it can to incentivize electric cars, but GM should not mandate something that is not feasible. Why not be reasonable?: One division (eg. Cadillac) could have mandated this.
I think they’ll walk this one back just like they walked Cadillac back to Motown.
As an aside, why do we always focus on buying electric vehicles, slowing our economic output, and adding carbon taxes to “fix” climate change? Why don’t we just plant a bazillion trees to help offset carbon emissions? Plant life is a perfect carbon sink and nobody talks about it. The US has plenty of room for new forests. Coupled with decreased use of paper (ie. reduced deforestation), improved fuel economy and energy efficient appliances and lights, overall carbon output could decrease significantly over time. EVs would be a part of this, but not mandated.
“Electricity is not emission-free.”
Except when it’s from hydro, wind, or nuclear.
Yes, nuclear power has no CO2 emissions.
True. Also you omitted other core emission-free sources like tidal and geothermal. If you want to play that game we can qualify it: “Most electricity is not emission-free”.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
My ICE engine also produces zero emissions when the auto-start/stop functionality engages at a red light. Most of the time, however, ICE engines produce emissions.
The point is, electricity is not clean. There are some good articles (one in the economist that I can’t find now) that discusses how increased renewable usage makes nuclear infeasible and increases reliance on fossil fuel sources, as they can be turned on and off quickly to make up for changes in wind and sunshine.
we now have brown outs on the electric grid so what would happen if all these EVs are plugged in every night ?? there was just a big court fight near me by the greens trying to stop a new natural gas fired power plant. I just made a 400 mile round trip to our summer camp to close up for winter. some people do not live like a hermit
“so what would happen if all these EVs are plugged in every night ??”
Off-peak charging is great for power companies. The biggest spikes in power consumption each day is from 6-11am and from 5-10pm. If the generators are working hard for only 2 times a day, why have all that generating equipment sitting around practically idle overnight? The power company gets their money out of having the generating equipment running more often, and therefore leverage their costs better over time instead of only twice a day.
“some people do not live like a hermit”
I don’t want to live like a granola eating hippie either, but I also don’t think that oil will last forever, nor will buying oil from volatile counties that hate our way of life.
If a country can make its own electricity, cleanly and without CO2 emissions, then its energy security will be more secure and predictable.
Hmm…..predictable energy stocks that aren’t petroleum, or centered around unstable middle eastern theocratic dictatorships. That’s something that any investor can get behind, and they most certainly can’t be a hermit to profit from that kind of a future.
there are countries around the world that depend on pumping oil to survive. these counties can lower the price to where electric is too expensive to be used as power for vehicles. we now export energy in all forms from the USA so if we just keep it here we do not need energy from the middle east. the arabs know this are working on what to develop so they do not have to depend on pumping oil to exist.
“there are countries around the world that depend on pumping oil to survive. these counties can lower the price to where electric is too expensive to be used as power for vehicles.”
You are a walking contradiction.
If these countries (who you can’t even be bothered to name) lower the prices of their oil exports, their GDP and GDI will drop. Do you think they’re going to lower their quality of life just to keep oil prices low?
Just because you were raised on the idea that a lower price is better over everything else, doesn’t mean anyone else thinks that way.
But more importantly, you need energy sources that are sustainable. Oil and coal aren’t renewable, whereas hydro electric is.