PHOTO: Phoenix Motorcars

GONE IN 600 SECONDS: Phoenix Motorcar’s electric truck can charge in less than 10 minutes.

Proponents of battery EVs, on the other hand, want CARB to give them parity with fuel-cell cars. Technology is an issue for battery EV makers, too. CARB's April review concluded that battery EVs comparable to today's internal combustion vehicles in range and price would not be ready for even small-scale commercialization before 2015. But battery EV proponents say that thanks to today's climate—economic, political, and atmospheric—some consumers are ready to trade range for a car that costs less to run and produces less pollution. CARB Chairwoman Mary Nichols agrees. “People are willing to take a chance on a car that doesn't necessarily do everything the old Taurus used to do,” she says.

Nichols says she is especially bullish about plug-in hybrids—which could be good news for that technology's backers if it translates into new policy. At present, CARB offers to plug-ins less than one quarter of the credits it gives to battery EVs, mostly because there is no guarantee that drivers will plug them in.

Then there's Phoenix, a battery EV developer that likes the ZEV mandate's favoritism for fuel cells. Why? Because the extra credits earned by fuel-cell manufacturers are the same credits Phoenix has requested for its rapid-charging truck. In 2003, when CARB shifted its emphasis to fuel cells, it did so by creating a new category of ZEVs, awarding the extra credits to any ZEV that travels 160 kilometers and refuels in 10 minutes or less.

When CARB wrote those rules, it assumed that only fuel cells would qualify, but Phoenix found a battery capable of the trick: a lithium titanate cell made by Altair Nanotechnologies of Reno, Nev. Charging a lithium battery generally means shifting lithium ions from a lithium metal oxide cathode into a graphite anode. Do that with too much force and lithium ions form a layer of highly energetic (and flammable) lithium metal on the graphite cathode. Altair Nano's battery replaces the graphite with a titanium oxide anode that is much less susceptible to such plating, so the battery can be charged rapidly at very high power. [See “Lithium Batteries Take to the Road,” IEEE Spectrum, September.]

Alan Gotcher, Altair Nano's chief executive, says bonus credits, which were still pending at press time, would be a just reward. “That's what the program was designed for, to bring some innovation to solve a very tough problem,” he says.

Others see Phoenix's potential windfall as a distortion of the mandate. J.B. Straubel, chief technical officer with Tesla, in San Carlos, Calif., is one of many critics. Straubel questions the practicality of rapid charging, because it requires megawatt power levels hard to find beyond electrical substations. And he says rapid charging is merely a loophole in the regulation. “That can change at the stroke of a pen, and I think it will,” he says.

It would hardly be the first time a ZEV rule-change upended entrepreneurs. The board's rollbacks in the 1990s burned start-ups of that era. In Straubel's judgment, the ever-shifting targets diminish the program's impact. He and others expect the auto industry to wiggle out of CARB's quotas once again.

While Straubel stops short of dismissing the program entirely, other critics are less forgiving. “It's a political regulation driving impractical solutions. It's not really relevant to the real world,” says EV battery expert Menahem Anderman, president of Total Battery Consulting, in Oregon House, Calif. Anderman argues that California should shelve the program in favor of broader measures now in the works, including tough fuel-economy standards legislated in 2002 and a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases. These measures would raise the cost of gasoline and gasoline-burning cars, leveling the field somewhat for electric-drive vehicles, he says.

Sperling and other energy policy experts say such broad measures would accelerate the adoption of existing alternatives such as plug-in hybrids, but they could prove insufficient to drive the immense investments needed for new technologies. “The challenge for policy is to somehow address the start-up barriers,” Sperling says. He predicts that, without the ZEV mandate, short-term considerations determine what automakers offer the market. “Companies are going just to pick the easy way,” he says, “and the easy way is not necessarily in the public's interest.”

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