Howdy all, the transportation team at UCS has been on staff retreat this week, so no big blog today, but something actually quite exciting to share. We’ve finally worked out some of our HybridCenter functionality bugs, and have significantly updated the list of hybrid incentives and incentive legislation we’ve found from all around the country.
I think one barometer that something is catching on is whether politicians decided to jump on the bandwagon. Well, there are now hybrid incentives or bills in 31 states (including the District of Columbia) – a huge jump over last year. Here are some basic stats that our wonder-intern Jessica came up with:
6 states have laws allowing hybrids in the HOV lanes (most awaiting federal waiver)
California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Utah, Virginia
6 states are have introduced bills to allow hybrids in HOV lanes
Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York
5 cities have free parking for hybrids and New York State is considering setting up a free parking program
Los Angeles, San Jose, New Haven, Austin, Albuquerque (University of Miami -1/2 price)
12 states have financial incentives ranging from $300 (Maine) to $4,713 (in CO for Honda Insight)
Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington DC, West Virginia
14 states are considering offering financial incentives such as sales tax exemption, purchase and use tax exemption, income tax credit, etc.
Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Wisconsin, Wyoming
2 states have exempted hybrids from emission testing requirements
Maryland, Washington
2 more states are thinking of exempting hybrids from emission testing requirements
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania
7 states that already have some form of hybrid incentive and are considering introducing more
Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington
13 States with no hybrid incentives on the books yet have introduced them to legislatures
Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wyoming, Wisconsin
This is in addition to companies like Topic Entertainment, Timberland, Hyperion, and My Organic Market that all offer financial incentives to employees to purchase hybrid vehicles. Now, not all of these incentives may be the best way to spur the hybrid market (see our cautionary blog on the Hybrid HOV concept, for instance), but the excitement that hybrids are generating around the country and show of strength of their political capital is quite astounding to me. Enjoy digging through the updated list. Next up, getting the many kind folks who contributed to our Who’s Got Hybrids? section up and running. Stay tuned for that next week…
Posted by: ScottN
Hello--
One question, one short comment, and one (very) long comment, if I may.
First, does anybody know the current status of the Federal waiver that would allow carpool-lane (High-Occupancy-Vehicle, or HOV, lane) access for hybrids with a solo occupant? I looked up HR 3 on the Federal bills database at http://thomas.loc.gov/ , but couldn't sort out the legislator-ese to figure out exactly where the bill stands and what chance remains to influence its content.
Second, California also exempts hybrids from its rather strict smog-check requirements. However, this is not an incentive per se; rather, it is because current tailpipe-sniffer tests do not work for hybrids. California smog-check tests are run on a "treadmill," with tailpipe emissions sampled as the engine runs under load. Since the balance between the output of a hybrid's gasoline engine and that of its electric motor will vary depending on battery charge, power demand, etc., the test would give inconsistent results; if a full hybrid's gasoline engine shut off during the test, none of the vehicle's contribution to air pollution would be measured at all! The California Air Resources Board (CARB) hopes to develop tests suitable for hybrids by 2010; in the meantime, from the point of view of a smog check, hybrids have more in common with diesels and 2-strokes, vehicles whose emissions also cannot be measured properly by standard tests, than with battery-electric vehicles (EVs) that are exempt from tailpipe tests because they have no tailpipe emissions! The webpage discussing these requirements is at http://www.smogcheck.ca.gov/StdPage.asp?Body=/smogcheck/hybrid.htm .
Finally, I would like to make an assertion that is _not_ going to be popular here, namely that incentives for hybrids at this point are counterproductive with regard to air quality. Narrowly, I am concerned with the effect of HOV-lane access for hybrids with a solo occupant; more broadly, I am seeing signs that the boom in hybrids, and automakers' overstatement of their benefits for the environment, is dragging down real alternative-fuel vehicles (i.e., those that can run without gasoline or diesel fuel). With regard to HOV-lane access, I understand that Virginia's experiment in allowing hybrids solo-driver HOV access (without waiting for the Federal waiver) has resulted in clogging of HOV lanes, undermining their effectiveness as an incentive to carpool for non-hybrid drivers, as well as directly increasing idle time and pollution. I'm on the other coast, in California, so I haven't seen this personally; here, the state law (pending the Federal waiver) only will "sticker" 75,000 hybrids, to head off this problem. But access stickers will be available to current owners of hybrids as well as to new buyers; at the rate these cars are selling, this means that a very large fraction of the access stickers will not actually "incentivize" any additional hybrid sales! In fact, since eligible vehicles will include the Honda Insight, whose highest-fuel-economy manual-transmission version _still_ does not meet PZEV standards (Partial-credit Zero Emission Vehicle, a vehicle that is clean enough to get partial credit under the watered-down remnants of the state's ZEV rules), some of the vehicles getting solo HOV access will be dirtier than some vehicles excluded, like the 2001 Nissan Sentra CA, which was the first vehicle certified as a PZEV. And, as I noted above, hybrids won't be smog-checked until at least 2010, so they may become dirtier still by then...
This reflects my broader concern, namely that hybrids are not inherently cleaner than ordinary gasoline-engine-only vehicles, but they are being promoted (and given incentives) as if they were. I actually had to persuade the CARB to take down a statement on their http://www.driveclean.ca.gov/ website to the effect that PZEVs are "guaranteed for life to run as clean as the day they were made"--actually, they are warranted for 15 years against outright failure of emission-control components. I won't quibble about the 15 years vs. life, but "as clean as the day they were made" is a serious overstatement that ignores the inescapable degradation of emissions performance by an internal-combustion-engine vehicle, even without component failure, as calibrations drift, catalysts age, etc. CARB calculated in a 2000 study that over their lifetimes, the pollution at a powerplant due to an EV would be 98% less than the pollution emitted by an average 2002 vehicle, and 95% less than that from even the cleanest 2002 gasoline vehicles--this includes PZEVs, hybrid and otherwise. The EV advantage is largely due to the fact that EVs aren't subject to the kind of emissions degradation that is inherent in a gasoline vehicle, hybrid or not. Automakers have worked to obscure this, portraying hybrids as "close enough" to EVs; for example, I've run across numerous statements from Toyota representatives saying that "hybrids are 90% cleaner than ordinary cars," which makes the extra 5% to 8% for an EV look pretty paltry. However, the actual CARB statistic is that PZEVs are 90% cleaner than the average new 2002 car, _when_ _new_; as emissions performance degrades, the advantage of PZEVs is a lot less than this, while the EV goes on undegraded, finishing its life with that advantage of 95% to 98%. I also saw a statement in a brochure for the Ford Escape hybrid saying that it is 99-point-something percent cleaner (I don't have the brochure with me, and I don't remember the exact figure) than "unregulated vehicles." That's probably true, but a totally useless statistic, since "unregulated vehicles" haven't been sold new for forty years! But again, it makes the EV advantage look insignificant in the eyes of the average reader.
I really, really hate to be ragging on hybrids! In fact, when the Insight first came out I rented one ( http://www.evrental.com/ ) and took a columnist at our local paper on a test ride; he quoted me as saying that, although some EV advocates regarded hybrids as a wrong turn, I thought that "let's not let the best be the enemy of the good." But dammit, I never thought that the "good" would become the enemy of the "best"! As I noted above, not all hybrids are PZEVs, and not all PZEVs are hybrids; hybrids are not inherently cleaner than ordinary gasoline vehicles, and to clean the air over the long term in the face of increasing numbers of miles driven, you need EVs or (to a lesser but still significant degree) natural-gas vehicles (NGVs). But as hybrids were introduced, they (and the promise of hydrogen vehicles in the nebulous future) were first used as an excuse to abandon and crush EVs and then, as the American automakers finally got onboard in the 2005 model year, to cut back or cancel NGV offerings. "Hybrids are good enough now, so who needs these icky, inconvenient alternative fuels like natural gas and electricity?" Hybrids seem to be selling quite well without regard to incentives; I would say that they have "graduated" in the marketplace, and it is better to reserve incentives for vehicles that actually need some prodding, of automakers and consumers, for their success, namely NGVs and EVs. Hybrids do have undeniable advantages for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, on a par with NGVs and potentially not far below EVs; but to cut the kind of ordinary pollutants that cause illness _today_ rather than in the future, they are no substitute for real alternative-fuel vehicles.
I could also add that the denigration of NGVs in particular by automakers has some bad implications for hydrogen vehicles down the road, if they ever do try to bring those to market as they promise they will. The NGV refueling infrastructure is better now than they hydrogen refueling infrastructure will be for many years; the vehicles are only a few thousand bucks more expensive than gasoline versions, rather than a few hundred thousand (at least); the fuel is cheaper than gasoline, not more expensive; the range per refueling is well above what hydrogen vehicles can achieve (my personal best in my 1993 Dodge van is 326.1 miles); and the durability and emissions benefits are proven. If automakers find it too hard to make a go of NGVs in the marketplace, what are the odds that they'll scale the much taller mountain of introducing hydrogen vehicles? Honda, alone among automakers, seems to realize this, and are actually broadening the marketing of their Civic GX NGV as a "rehearsal" for hydrogen vehicles. However, getting back to incentives, one big selling point of the GX (in California) is its eligibility for solo access to the HOV lanes; as I pointed out in an email to Honda's head of alternative-fuel vehicles, what will happen to the market for the Civic GX if the Civic hybrid becomes eligible for this perk? He didn't reply.
Some hybrid advocates are holding out hope that they will be the "foot in the door" for electric transportation, in the form of plug-in hybrids that can go 20 miles or more on wall-plug electricity, rather than electricity that was generated onboard by the gasoline engine. Since most driving, like politics, is local, this could be enough to enable most people's daily commuting and errands to be done using electricity rather than gasoline; and EV advocates like myself hope that drivers would eventually notice how seldom they actually needed the gasoline "security blanket," and would consider a full EV for future purchases. I'd say, don't hold your breath; automakers have done a lot of work to persuade people that "plugging in = bad," and I don't see them changing their pitch for plug-in hybrids. In fact, when hybrids first came out, I heard a dealer remark that his biggest obstacle in getting people to consider a hybrid was convincing them that it didn't have to be plugged in--the lobbyists and spin doctors had done their job too well! And if you look at hybrid advertising, every single website I looked at says prominently that "you never have to plug it in" (or in the case of the Civic hybrid, "you never, ever have to plug it in"); can you see them changing their pitch to "well, you _can_ plug it in, though you don't _have_ to, and by the way, despite what we've been saying for the last ten years, that's not actually a bad thing after all"? I don't expect them to change a strategy that's obviously working well for hybrids.
I hope that some "opinion leaders" have had the patience to read this far! Jason Mark of UCS heard me get out-maneuvered in a debate on part of this question by a GM rep at a California Hydrogen Highway meeting in Diamond Bar last fall (in my defense, I was "playing through the pain" with an awful cold!), and I have raised these issues on the letters page of my local paper (the South Bay Daily Breeze, http://www.dailybreeze.com/ ), as well as in that note to Steve Ellis, head of Honda alternative-fuel vehicles, and on my website; but I often wonder if the few of us still sounding warnings about the need for real alternative-fuel vehicles, EVs and NGVs, are having any impact at all.
Clear skies--
--Mark Looper
http://www.altfuels.org/
Posted by: altfuels | July 26, 2005 at 04:32 PM
I am new to the hybrid world. I am considering a RX 400h to replace my wife's existing SUV. The RX 400h gets twice the city mileage and 50% better highway mileage. I found this site to be most informative, but I am having great difficulty understanding what Federal or State (maryland) incentives exist for buying a hybrid. For example, to get the $2200 Federal tax credit, must I wait until after January 1, 2006 to buy the hybrid? If the goal of these incentives is to encourage the purchase of hybrids, they certainly should make it less confusing.
Posted by: Roger | August 28, 2005 at 03:29 PM