> this is national virtue signaling and there's no way that ICE cars are going away.
Germany is planning to ban new ICE sales by 2030. Japan and South Korea, 2035. You can keep saying "they are not going away," but the truth is that they are going away, whether California bans them or not. Sooner or later, there will be no BMW, no Toyota, and no Hyundai that's running on gas. You may be able to buy a Ford a bit longer, but in a world where your potential ICE car market is dwindling year by year, production of an ICE vehicle will increasingly look like... "virtue signaling." Companies won't be able to make money from that, so they'll stop.
So, in the grand scheme of things, California is not in a position to make an independent decision anyway. But I'd say California is still right in making these decisions now, even from a purely economical point of view, because when the whole industry shifts you want your country to be on the right side of it.
Germany is planning to ban new ICE sales by 2030. Japan and South Korea, 2035. You can keep saying "they are not going away," but the truth is that they are going away, whether California bans them or not. Sooner or later, there will be no BMW, no Toyota, and no Hyundai that's running on gas. You may be able to buy a Ford a bit longer, but in a world where your potential ICE car market is dwindling year by year, production of an ICE vehicle will increasingly look like... "virtue signaling." Companies won't be able to make money from that, so they'll stop.
So, in the grand scheme of things, California is not in a position to make an independent decision anyway. But I'd say California is still right in making these decisions now, even from a purely economical point of view, because when the whole industry shifts you want your country to be on the right side of it.