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Tesla Presses Its Case On Fuel Standards
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla is preparing their case to leave federal mileage and emissions regulations intact, or make them even more strict. In addition, the company is fighting other car makers from loosening more stringent regulations in California. The WSJ reports: "Tougher regulations could benefit Tesla, while challenging other auto makers that make bigger profits on higher-margin trucks and sport-utility vehicles. Tesla's vice president of development, Dairmuid O'Connell, plans to argue to auto executives and other industry experts attending a conference on the northern tip of Michigan that car companies can meet regulations as currently written. 'We are about to hear a lot of rhetoric that Americans don't want to buy electric vehicles,' Mr. O'Connell said in an interview ahead of a Tuesday presentation in Traverse City, Mich. 'From an empirical standpoint, the [regulations] are very weak, eminently achievable and the only thing missing is the will to put compelling products on the road.'"
They *are* doing them, but there are several manual steps currently. Go to Teslamotorsclub.com if you don't believe it.
For what it's worth, battery swaps are a dead end. Few people need them with Supercharging becoming more ubiquitous by the day . Tesla won't be doing widespread swaps for privately owned cars any time soon, if ever. Maybe for commercial vehicles 5-10 years down the road...
CARB was convinced that Tesla demonstrated the ability to swap batteries, and CARB sets the rules for ZEV credits. Tesla have done exactly what they needed to do in order to meet CARB's bizarre diktats.
Now, can anybody explain to me why battery swapping is worth additional credits in the first place? CARB's mandate is supposed to be cleaner air. Swapping batteries doesn't make the air cleaner. They give three times the ZEV credits for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as they do for battery electric vehicles -- even though both produce the same amount of pollutant emissions: none. Where's the logic?
Oh yeah. . . The logic is that Toyota -- by some measures the largest car company in the world (effectively tied with VW, last I heard) -- unloaded a truckload of cash to lobby CARB board members.
Nobody counts the emissions to produce any other vehicles, so why would we hold electric cars to a different standard? The manufacturing processes are not particularly worse for one than for the other.
In fact, I would bet that the reduced metal machining from not having a solid-block engine under the hood probably saves overall manufacturing emissions, once you factor it all the way back to the metal foundry, refinery, and strip mine. Only the strip mine would be comparable for rare earths that go into batteries. The refinery is much smaller due to smaller volumes and the foundry isn't really necessary at all.
Other than that, you still have to have a metal frame, metal or plastic body panels, a finished interior, glass windows, and rubber for the tires and various other parts. This is identical for any car manufacturing process.
The reason they're pushing to measure emissions is because that's the only meaningful difference between electric and ICE cars.