 |
|
|
|||||
The U.S. government is in full retreat from its efforts to make vehicles more fuel-efficient, which it has been waging, along with state governments, since the 1970s. The latest move came on July 29, 2025, when the Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to rescind its landmark 2009 decision, known as the endangerment finding, that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. If that stands up in court and is not overruled by Congress, it would undo a key part of the long-standing effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. As a scholar of how vehicle emissions contribute to climate change, I know that the science behind the endangerment finding hasnt changed. If anything, the evidence has grown that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and threatening peoples health and safety. Heat waves, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires have only worsened in the decade and a half since the EPAs ruling. Regulations over the years have cut emissions from power generation, leaving transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The scientific community agrees that vehicle emissions are harmful and should be regulated. The public also agrees, and has indicated strong preferences for cars that pollute less, including both more efficient gas-burning vehicles and electric-powered ones. Consumers have also been drawn to electric vehicles thanks to other benefits such as performance, operation cost and innovative technologies. That is why I believe the EPAs move will not stop the public and commercial transition to electric vehicles, but it will make that shift harder, slower and more expensive for everyone. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. [Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images] Putting carmakers in a bind The most recent EPA rule about vehicle emissions was finalized in 2024. It set emissions limits that can realistically only be met by a large-scale shift to electric vehicles. Over the past decade and a half, automakers have been building up their capability to produce electric vehicles to meet these fleet requirements, and a combination of regulations such as Californias zero-emission-vehicle requirements have worked together to ensure customers can get their hands on EVs. The zero-emission-vehicle rules require automakers to produce EVs for the California market, which in turn make it easier for the companies to meet their efficiency and emissions targets from the federal government. These collectively pressure automakers to provide a steady supply of electric vehicles to consumers. The new EPA move would undo the 2024 EPA vehicle-emissions rule and other federal regulations that also limit emissions from vehicles, such as the heavy-duty vehicle emissions rule. The possibility of a regulatory reversal puts automakers into a state of uncertainty. Legal challenges to the EPAs shift are all but guaranteed, and the court process could take years. For companies making decade-long investment decisions, regulatory stability matters more than short-term politics. Disrupting that stability undermines business planning, erodes investor confidence and sends conflicting signals to consumers and suppliers alike. Car manufacturers in the U.S. have invested large sums of money to produce electric vehicles. [Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images] A slower roll The Trump administration has taken other steps to make electric vehicles less attractive to carmakers and consumers. The White House has already suspended key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided tax credits for purchasing EVs and halted a US$5 billion investment in a nationwide network of charging stations. And Congress has retracted the federal waiver that allowed California to set its own, stricter emissions limits. In combination, these policies make it hard to buy and drive electric vehicles: Fewer, or no, financial incentives for consumers make the purchases more expensive, and fewer charging stations make travel planning more challenging. Overturning the EPAs 2009 endangerment finding would remove the legal basis for regulating climate pollution from vehicles altogether. But U.S. consumer interest in electric vehicles has been growing, and automakers have already made massive investments to produce electric vehicles and their associated components in the U.S. such as Hyundais EV factory in Georgia and Volkswagens Battery Engineering Lab in Tennessee. Global markets, especially in Europe and China, are also moving decisively toward electrifying large proportions of the vehicles on the road. This move is helped in no small part due to aggressive regulation by their respective governments. The results speak for themselves: Sales of EVs in both the European Union and China have been growing rapidly. But the pace of change matters. A slower rollout of clean vehicles means more cumulative emissions, more climate damage and more harm to public health. The EPAs proposal seeks to slow the shift to electric vehicles, removing incentives and raising costs even though the market has shown that cleaner vehicles are viable, the public has shown interest, and the science has never been clearer. But even such a major policy change cant stop the momentum of those trends. Alan Jenn is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, at the University of California, Davis. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Trump and the tech industry are continuing their dance of give and take. This time, its Apple doing the appeasing. On Wednesday, August 6, CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple would invest $100 billion toward U.S. manufacturing. The money comes alongside another $500 billion that the iPhone maker pledged in February, all of which is meant to be spent in the next four years. At the time, Apple claimed that it would fund a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Houston, Texas, slated to open in 2026. It also devoted some of the funds to hiring 20,000 new U.S.-based employees, primarily in fields such as AI, machine learning, R&D, silicon engineering, and software development. ‘We took that challenge very seriously’ On Wednesday, Cook alluded to Trumps push for more than that original investment. President Trump shared some kind words about that work, but he also asked us to think about what more we could commit to doing, Cook stated. Mr. President, we took that challenge very seriously. The Oval Office photo-op included an ostentatious moment in which Cook presented Trump with a glass plaque featuring Apples logo, sitting atop a 24-karat-gold base. The gift is, of course, made in America. Apples investors appear pleased with the additional pledge. Shares of the companys stock rose more than 5% throughout Wednesday, closing at $213.25. Shares continued to spike during after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday, reaching over $220. However, the tech companys stock still hasnt fully recovered from the significant tumble it took following Trumps tariff announcements. It hit a low of $169.21 on April 8, less than a week after Trumps Liberation Day and a trade war with China, where about 80% of iPhones are made, the New York Times estimates. That represented a drop of around 35% from its record-high price of about $260 in December.
Category:
E-Commerce
The car looked like nothing else on the road. Its sharp lines, flat planes, and pointy edges made it a head-turning sight, but also a head-scratching business decision. Would anyone actually buy such a weird geometric car? If this sounds like the kind of question one might ask when seeing a Tesla Cybertruck for the first time, it’s actually just a rhyme of history. That head-turner/head-scratcher was the 1968 Alfa Romeo Carabo, an outrageously pointy concept car that radically diverged from the teardrop designs of the day. It was arguably the start of a bold, if short-lived, new chapter in the history of car design: the wedge. The Bertone-designed Alfa Romeo Carabo debuted at the 1968 Paris Motor Show. [Photo: LAT Images/Getty Images] The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles explores this wildly experimental era in car design with The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge, a new exhibition now on display. The exhibition features dozens of cars designed between the late 1960s and mid-80s that used a blocky wedge shape as their defining form factor. They were oddball designs at the time, and most didn’t make it past the concept stage, but they heralded a rebellious era in car design that may just be underway once more. 1977 UrbaCar [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] Case in point: the Cybertruck. “That’s why Franz was involved in the show,” says Jonathan Eisen, a curator at the Petersen museum. The Franz he’s talking about is Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, creator of the Cybertruck, who was called in to cocurate the exhibition. “He’s very enthusiastic about the classic wedge cars.” Like his own design, the wedge cars of the mid-20th century seemed to have come out of nowhere. Eisen says the dominant design approach at the time was either the teardrop-shaped coupes made in France or the bulbous, chrome-laden sedans from American carmakers. But as the main designers behind these cars retired, a new generation came in ready to try something completely different. “They went the opposite way, Eisen says. They did away with all the ornamentation. And instead of smooth, flowing lines they decided that they were going to use sharp edges and flat planes and base the look of the car on the wedge. 1976 Honda Civic Lady concept car [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] Carmakers including Chevrolet, Honda, BMW, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, and Bertoni all dabbled in wedge-shaped car design. One concept car featured in the exhibition, the 1976 Honda Civic Lady, was an angular version of the Civic, one of the most popular compact cars of the era. With a wedge nose and a station wagon tail, it showed off a combination of design and sensibility. Though never intended for production, its DNA lived on for decades. “If you then look at Hondas from the 1980s and even into the 1990s, you could absolutely see that they go back to this one car,” Eisen says. 1979 Aston Martin Bulldog concept car [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] Other cars in the show are far less sensible, like the batwinged 1979 Aston Martin Bulldog concept car and the 1977 UrbaCar, a dune buggy meets bumper car. On the extreme end, the 1971 Lamborghini Countach concept car came to define the sharp and wedgy shape of Lamborghinis for decades. 1975 Lamborghini Countach LP400 [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] These car companies “weren’t afraid to put something out there that maybe isn’t traditionally beautiful, but it’s still unlike anything else on the road and will absolutely draw your attention to it,” Eisen says. “A car doesn’t necessarily have to be pretty to be successful. Te way that SUVs are so popular is proof of that. “ The Cybertruck, on the other hand? Eisen calls it the only true wedge car on the road today, and possibly the start of a more adventurous era in car design, even if its success is questionable. “That car obviously has a very controversial design, and you could even say that it’s been thoroughly rejected by the mass public,” he says. “Maybe people aren’t ready for it yet. But eventually, I think we will see more creativity.” In recent decades, car design has been very safe, and guided by aerodynamics, efficiency, and, above all, marketing, according to Eisen. The heyday of the wedge was less constrained and, arguably, more interesting. “I think it’s worth celebrating the fact that it’s okay to take chances,” Eisen says. The Wedge Revolution is on display through September 2026.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||