Dive Brief:
- Eight states have announced new initiatives designed to boost the numbers of electric and "clean" vehicles on the road to 3.3 million by 2025.
- The plan will use a mixture of regulation and customer-focused incentives to push electric, hybrid, and hydrogen fuel cell car sales. The announcement does not go into detail on how individual states would achieve this.
- California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont together announced the Zero Emissions Vehicles (ZEV) Action Plan. The eight states agreed to launch the collaborative effort in late 2013.
Dive Insight:
This is an ambitious plan. Currently, only a couple of hundred thousand hydrogen fuel cell, electric, or hybrid cars are driving on the roads, with half of those already in the eight states. A lack of services, high costs, and a lack of incentives to buy such cars are why they aren't in wide use.
Electric vehicles are also produced at a loss for some car manufacturers, with the Fiat 500e plug-in model losing parent company Fiat Chrysler $14,000 per car, according to the company. The plans include provisions to improve services, like charging stations, across the country, making electric cars more practical.
This may still not be enough to help the industry. A recent Morgan Stanley report found that for zero emissions vehicles, except for those made by Tesla motors, a projected 5-10% market share was out of reach. The report said that even managing a 1% market share "would be respectable."