California aims to have 5 million electric cars on the road and 250k charging stations by 2030

Last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown announced a series of new executive orders to push the state to have 5 million electric cars on the road by 2030.

It’s the most ambitious zero-emission goal in the US, but is it enough? 

It’s an update to the state’s goal to have 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles by 2025.

With the goal, the Administration is also proposing a new “eight-year initiative to continue the state’s clean vehicle rebates and spur more infrastructure investments”. The rebate already includes payment of up to $2,500 at the purchase of new electric vehicles and infrastructure investments would represent a $2.5 billion initiative to bring 250,000 vehicle charging stations and 200 hydrogen fueling stations to California by 2025.

The state already leads the country for both electric vehicle adoption and the number of total charging stations.

They claim to have 350,000 “zero-emission vehicles” today and new sales account for approximately 5 percent of all new car sales in California.

Electrek’s Take

I think the last statistic is the most important. California is seeing 2 million new car sales per year and now only 5 percent are electric (and they are counting PHEVs).

Five million EVs by 2030 would mean roughly 30 percent of the state’s total car fleet would be electrified, but it’s not a great metric. You can’t do much about existing vehicles on the road, which is why you want to focus on the adoption rate.

Five percent is not bad in the US, but if California really wants to be the EV leader it once was, it really needs to think bigger – like Norway, which is now at over 50%.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is a great initiative and certainly better than what we are seeing from the federal level, but I think it could be even more ambitious.

They are considering combining the strategy with a goal to reach 100% of new car sales to be electric by 2040. I think they should make that by about 15 years sooner.

If they aim to be at 100% electric in 2025, then they will easily reach their goal of 5 million EVs on the road by 2030.

Anyway, I don’t see how someone in their right mind would want to buy a car that is not electric by 2025.