BJ Birtwell strode across the concourse of his Electrify Expo with a look of satisfaction this past weekend, watching thousands of families stream past rows of prototype and production electric cars, bikes and scooters on the waterfront in Alameda.
The proliferation of consumer options and the popularity of battery-electric car technology, he insisted, meant it might be time for state and federal regulators to stop trying to nudge people into zero-emission vehicles in service of global climate and clean-air goals.
“We now live in a day and age where EVs can live on their own merit,” said Birtwell, the festival’s founder and CEO. “The government just needs to get the hell out of the way.”
Many environmental groups are pressing California, the nation’s leading electric vehicle market, to fill the vacuum created by the federal government’s dramatic retreat from support for energy-efficient transportation. They advocate adding billions of dollars in new public funding for rebates, charger infrastructure and support programs. Major public investments, they say, can help the state transition away from gasoline cars and trucks to make less-polluting rides the default consumer choice.
But for Birtwell, the future is already here: Manufacturers are producing more models with better range, performance and features every year, bringing EVs to the cusp of price parity with their gasoline counterparts. What’s needed now, he said, is for public officials to stop meddling and emphasizing that electric cars are the environmental choice, because for car buyers of some political persuasions, that language is a turnoff. EVs are just better products at this point, he said, and they are only improving every model year.
It was hard for festival attendees to find fault with that assessment while standing in line for test-drives of midprice sedans, like the new Volvo EX30, that could accelerate to 60 mph in less than four seconds.
Consumers’ appetite for these products is important to gauge at a time when leaders in Sacramento begin a multibillion-dollar debate about how much money to put into building up both supply and demand for carbon-free mobility.
Regulators at the California Air Resources Board last week released a report offering a menu of proposals to Gov. Gavin Newsom that included subsidies for electric chargers, as well as streamlined permits and vehicle purchase rebates. The goal is to help offset the loss of federal EV credits that Republicans in Congress and the White House canceled in their July budget bill, and to counter other legal moves by the Trump administration that undercut California’s ability to transition away from petroleum-powered cars by setting its own fuel-efficiency standards.
But the policy recommendations left key details unresolved — including how to pay for these new programs — leaving the hard work of turning policies into laws and regulations to the governor and the Legislature in the coming months. That will be a particularly hard task in an era of steep budget shortfalls.
Adrian Martinez, director of the Right to Zero campaign at the environmental law organization Earthjustice, wrote in an Aug. 19 blog post that he was “frankly underwhelmed” by the report led by the California Air Resources Board. The board, which has taken more aggressive stances in the past, came off as hesitant to Martinez: “This doesn’t quite feel like the CARB of the last decade,” he wrote. “The state needs to be ready for the great rebuild that will need to happen in the next federal administration.”
Ethan Lipman, director of commercial energy solutions at charging-equipment maker Autel, was part of onstage conversations about the energy transition at the Electrify Expo. He said the real transportation bottleneck is infrastructure. Rolling out chargers in dense neighborhoods remains a technical and permitting challenge for many companies, he said, and without a robust network of charging stations many urban drivers will not find EVs viable. When visiting job sites, he drives a hybrid car because he doesn’t want to get stranded while installing electrical equipment for future EVs to use in remote locations. “That’s the challenge we’re up against,” he said.
But the state has limited resources, and perspectives differ on the best way to reduce transportation emissions. Some environmental policy critics say states and localities can put the money to better use in other ways if they want to clean up the pollution and climate toll of transportation. In a 2020 academic paper, Jason Henderson, a professor in the School of the Environment at San Francisco State University, warned that an aggressively pro-EV policy risks locking in “automobility” rather than replacing it with even greener options. Mass electrification, he wrote, could deepen inequality by keeping personal cars the dominant mode, consuming scarce urban space better devoted to buses, bikes and pedestrians.
The value of reducing overall car use powered by any technology is not lost on the Clean Rides Network — a coalition including the Sierra Club of California, Clean Air Council, Greenlining Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, Evergreen Collaborative and other prominent environmental groups. In addition to promoting EVs, California must use all policy tools available to reduce vehicle miles traveled. “That requires committing to sustainable funding for public transit operations, more housing near transit, and infrastructure that supports safe walking and biking,” the groups wrote in a letter to regulators in the lead-up to the state’s report. “It also means prioritizing highway maintenance over new highway expansion.”
In a press event last week, Liane Randolph, chair of the Air Resources Board, said more still needed to be done to help consumers make the leap to electric transportation. She added that California still has the ability to phase out the sale of gasoline cars by 2035, the state’s official policy, but new tools need to be developed.
“The world is accelerating forward toward cleaner vehicle technologies,” Randolph said, “and is going to watch the U.S. fade into the rearview mirror because this administration is choosing to quit the race.”
At the Alameda fairgrounds, parents waited in long lines with their children, ready to get hands-on with everything from pickup trucks to e-bikes. Birtwell said these firsthand encounters — not subsidies or mandates — will ultimately propel the EV transition.
The Public Press interviewed Birtwell at the Electrify Expo to learn more about the EV transition. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Do you think government incentives for greener cars have helped or hurt the EV market?
A: The biggest drawback to broader EV adoption, which is what most people want, especially on the left side of politics and legislation, was politicizing EVs to begin with. After you sell to the early adopters, there’s a little bit of a lag. And that’s exactly where we find ourselves today. And I think that time frame would have been shortened if we didn’t make buying an EV about the climate. If we made EVs more about a practical decision, especially nowadays, where these cars are actually very practical. In fact, they’re much more practical today than they were four or five years ago when it was a one-horse race. Today, they charge faster, they go farther, and they cost less, certainly, than they did in the past.
Q: What happens now that the $7,500 federal credit for new-EV purchases is expiring?
A: Actually, a lot of people didn’t qualify for that rebate to begin with. And in many cases, a lot of people who were shopping for EVs didn’t even know that a rebate existed. And I know that that’s wild to think about, because sometimes when you’re in the industry or you’re writing about the industry, you know a lot about what’s happening. But when you’re a mainstream shopper and EVs have just come on your radar and you just started to think about them last night, you may not know about that rebate. The only caveat to that is there is more awareness right now around the EV rebate ending on Sept. 30, and so I am starting to see a little bit more of a rush into people who were not aware of that rebate, who now have become aware of it and are in the market for a car and want to take advantage of that rebate. We have two events that happen before that rebate ends and we feel we can see the rush. I think once this rebate goes away, I have a feeling that the manufacturers and different states are going to step in to fill a void that the feds are going to leave out. And so I’m not too concerned about it.
Q: At your Expo, do people really change their minds on the spot?
A: Thousands, thousands all the time. That is the biggest takeaway we get, is the light-switch moment that people have when they’re in line. They’re waiting in the sun, and they got kids pulling on their pant leg — they want to go to the kids’ zone, they want to go ride an e-bike — and Mom and Dad are waiting in the line to go drive. And they’re like, “Fine, we’ll do this.” And then they get out of the car and there’s smiles for miles. We are surrounded by shoppers, and we listen to shoppers and we know that the experiences in these cars are what create the light-switch moment. That’s the importance of Electrify Expo and why we’ve scaled so quickly as a festival over the past, basically, four years. And I think it shows, also, the popularity of our festival and how we’ve really outgrown and outpaced auto shows that are in the same markets as ours but have seemed to fatigue out. And here we are growing a million, million-and-a-half square feet everywhere we go.