If your plan was to make cars more expensive for everyone, then you would do exactly what Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing with his extreme emissions regulations.
“No matter where you live,” Jill Savage of “Blaze News Tonight” comments. “We’re talking about impossible quotas, massive fines for automakers, and even a new gas tax. It’s going to make drivers furious.”
Automotive expert and journalist Lauren Fix isn’t thrilled with the plan, either.
“There’s a lot going on,” she tells Savage and Matthew Peterson. “Right now, California currently has from the California Air Resources Board a mandate that by 2026, 35% of all vehicles sold in the state of California should be all electric.”
“By 2030, all electric,” she continues. “No vehicles will be allowed to be sold in the state that are gasoline powered. That’s going to be a problem, considering the cost of electricity there is the highest in the country.”
But it gets worse.
“Every car sold today, as we speak, has a $20,000 fine on top of it for not meeting the California air resources board,” Fix explains. “So every manufacturer is paying a loss of $20,000 on every car that’s sold.”
Starting the first of the year, California will also be adding a 68-cent tax on every car that’s sold.
“That’ll make it even more expensive. So the idea is to incentivize you to give up your gasoline-powered vehicle, but then you have a car payment, higher insurance rates, and no place to charge,” Fix says, noting that it will not only be California affected.
“It’s going to actually affect the whole country, because car manufacturers are not going to build a car just for the state of California. They’re going to build a car for the entire country,” she explains.
While 17 states, including New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, unsurprisingly side with California — Fix believes Trump can stop them.
“If I had his ear, I would tell him to go after the California Air Resources Board, get them to dissipate, because President Obama gave them even more power. So whatever California says, the entire country is forced to follow it,” Fix says.
“Car manufacturers can’t afford to have billions of dollars in fines. Instead, they’re taking millions of dollars in losses, and we’re all paying for it,” she adds.
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