The Electric Car Mandate Is a Choice Washington Makes for Your Driveway

Nobody has ever been dragged out of a showroom and forced to buy a gasoline truck. That is the first thing to understand about the argument over electric cars, because the sales pitch for a mandate quietly assumes the opposite: that without a rule, nobody would ever choose the product, and so somebody must choose for them.

Let me define terms before the shouting starts. An electric vehicle is a car that runs on a battery, and a perfectly fine one for plenty of drivers. A mandate is a rule that says what the seller may offer, not what the buyer may want. This post is not against the first. It is against the second. The claim is simple: when the government writes a calendar for the end of the gasoline car, it replaces millions of family decisions with a single government decision, and it does so at a cost the sponsors of the rule do not have to pay out of their own driveways.

What the rule actually says

In September 2020 the governor of California signed an executive order directing the state's air regulator to write rules so that every new passenger car and light truck sold in the state would be zero-emission by 2035. In August 2022 the California Air Resources Board adopted the rule that did it, called Advanced Clean Cars II. It sets a rising schedule of required zero-emission sales share for each manufacturer across the model years leading to 2035, when the requirement reaches one hundred percent of new light-duty vehicles sold. A limited allowance for plug-in hybrids exists in the early years. After 2035, a dealer in California may sell a used gasoline car, but a new one is off the menu.

Notice what kind of rule this is. It does not tax gasoline, and it does not subsidize batteries. It does not say that a family that wants to try an electric car must be given the chance. It says that after a date certain, the other option does not exist. A tax lets you decide whether the thing is worth the price. A mandate takes the question away.

How one state's rule became a national story

California is not a national legislature, and ordinarily its rules end at its border. The reason this one did not is the Clean Air Act. When Congress wrote the modern version of the act, it generally barred states from setting their own vehicle emission standards, so that carmakers would face one national rulebook instead of fifty. Section 209 of the act then carved out a waiver for states that already had vehicle pollution rules on the books before the federal law arrived, and in practice that has meant California. California may ask the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver, and if it gets one, its standards apply inside its borders.

Section 177 of the act does the rest. It lets other states adopt standards identical to California's in place of the federal ones. The result is a structure Madison would have recognized with some alarm: one state's regulator writes the rule, a federal agency blesses it, and a block of other states follows along without their own legislatures ever voting on the underlying policy in the way a statute would require. Carmakers, who cannot sensibly build one fleet for a dozen states and another for the rest, end up building to the strictest standard in the country. Sacramento sets the national fleet and nobody in Ohio gets a vote.

In 2025 Congress used the Congressional Review Act, the statute that lets both chambers overturn a federal agency rule with a simple majority and the President's signature, to disapprove the waivers that had been granted for California's newest vehicle rules. California went to court, and the legal fight turned on a question worth a column of its own: whether a waiver is a rule that the Review Act can reach. I will not pretend to know how that litigation ends. You should check the current docket before you trust anyone's confident prediction, mine included. What matters for this argument is the principle underneath. Whoever wins the case, the structure remains a standing invitation for one state to write national policy through a federal side door. Conservatives should object to that structure whichever party holds the pen.

The premises

Here is the argument, numbered, so you can mark where you disagree.

1. The buyer knows his own life better than the regulator does. A car is not a symbol. It is a tool bought for a particular job, in a particular place, at a particular price.
2. Needs differ, and they differ in ways a single standard cannot track. A commuter with a garage and a short drive is a different customer from a rancher with a gooseneck trailer.
3. A mandate removes the option, and removing options is a cost even when the option removed is a worse one. Some families would choose the electric car anyway. Many would not. The ones who would not are the ones who bear the cost.
4. Supporting costs fall outside the sticker price. Chargers, grid upgrades, home wiring and the minerals behind the battery all cost something.
5. Therefore the right tool is persuasion and price, not prohibition. If the product is good enough, people will buy it. If it is not, the mandate is not fixing a market failure. It is overruling the market's verdict.

None of those premises says that electric cars are bad. They say that the decision belongs to the person who writes the check.

Rural driving, towing and the cold

Start with where the political class tends to live: places with short trips, dense charging, and a second car in the family. For those households an electric car is a fine answer, and the free market is already serving them.

Now picture a family in rural Wyoming. That is a hypothetical, but the facts it uses are plain. The nearest town with a full grocery store is an hour away. The nearest dealer is farther. The family's truck pulls a stock trailer in the fall and a boat in the summer, and winter temperatures sit well below zero for weeks at a time.

Three things matter for that family. First, towing. Pulling a heavy trailer uses a great deal more energy per mile than driving without one, and with a battery that means a much shorter distance between stops. Gasoline and diesel carry far more energy in a gallon than a battery carries in the same weight, and a stop to refuel takes minutes. Second, cold. Batteries lose usable range in low temperatures, because the chemistry slows and the cabin must be heated from the same store of energy. How much range is lost depends on the car and the temperature, and I will not hand you a percentage I cannot source. Anyone who owns an electric car in the north knows the effect is real. Third, distance between chargers. A fast charger in a town of four hundred people is a business that has to pencil out, and for much of the rural map it has not yet.

The point is not that rural drivers can never own electric cars. Some will, and gladly, as the technology improves. The point is that the people with the hardest jobs for their vehicles are the ones a mandate treats the same as a downtown commuter. A rule that writes the same answer for both is a rule written by someone who has not hauled a trailer in January.

The supply chain nobody puts in the brochure

The brochure shows a silent car gliding past a wind turbine. It does not show the mine.

A lithium-ion battery depends on lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, in different mixes depending on the chemistry. Those minerals have to be dug up, and then they have to be refined, and the refining step is where the strategic problem lives. I have written elsewhere about China Refines the Minerals Behind Every Battery, and America Let It Happen, and the short version is that the country that handles the refining holds a lever over everyone who needs the product. A mandate that forces tens of millions of American vehicles onto that supply chain by a fixed date turns a commercial dependency into a legislated one.

That is a strange policy for a country that spent half a century trying not to depend on a few foreign oil producers. The argument for energy independence, which conservatives made for decades, was that a nation should not hand a rival a throttle on its economy. Substituting a different rival and a different throttle does not make the logic go away. If the mandate's sponsors answer that domestic mining and refining will expand, they are conceding the point: the supply chain is not ready, and the date was chosen first.

And there is a second tradeoff that deserves honesty. The same people who object to new mines in the American West often champion the mandate that requires the minerals. You cannot demand ten million batteries and forbid the pit. Either the country mines and refines at home, under American labor and environmental law, or it imports the product made under rules that no American would accept. A policy that picks the second and calls it virtue should be asked about it plainly.

The strongest case for the mandate

Fairness demands the best version of the other side, stated in words its defenders would accept.

The best case: Vehicles are among the largest sources of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Individual buyers have no reason to pay for the pollution they do not suffer personally, so the market underprices clean cars. Automakers will not invest at scale in a vehicle with uncertain demand, and the charging network will not be built without cars to use it. A firm date solves that coordination problem: it tells the carmaker, the utility and the charger company to build at the same time. The cost of the batteries is falling, and electric cars cost less to fuel and maintain. Without a firm deadline, the transition will drift, and the country will fall behind countries that moved faster.

That is a serious argument. Here is the answer, in order.

First, the pollution claim is the strongest part of the case, and it is the part that the market and older rules have already handled. The air has become much cleaner over fifty years of tailpipe standards, as the numbers in The Air Got Cleaner While the Economy Grew, and the Numbers Show How show. Tailpipe rules on conventional pollutants worked. The mandate is justified mainly by carbon dioxide, which is a global matter, and I will take up what a single country's cuts buy in Grant the Warming, Then Ask What Each Climate Policy Actually Buys.

Second, the coordination argument proves too much. Governments can tell builders what to build by date, or they can lower barriers and let builders compete. The charging network is already growing without a ban on gasoline cars, because there are customers. If the cars are as good as the mandate's defenders say, a ban is not necessary. If the cars are not yet as good for some drivers, a ban asks those drivers to pay for the gap.

Third, if costs are falling, wait. A product that is getting cheaper and better does not need a prohibition on its competitor. The prohibition is a bet that the technology will not be ready on the market's schedule. If it will be, the rule is harmless. If it will not, the rule is harmful. The mandate only matters in the world where the customers do not want what it forces them to buy.

Fourth, the "other countries are ahead" line misreads the contest. The prize is not who passes the strictest rule first. It is who builds the best product at the lowest price. A country that wins that contest through innovation does not need a decree, and a country that wins it by decree has won something much smaller.

Fifth, a deadline is not free. A fixed date means a fixed bill for the electric grid, which must supply a great deal more electricity, and utility rates are already a political fight in many states. If you want to see how that fight plays out in a public hearing, read the Your Power Bill Is Going Up, So Here Is How to Speak at the Rate Case. Ask a mandate's sponsors who pays for the new generation and the new wires, and watch how fast the conversation turns to something else.

What the Founders would have asked

The constitutionalist's question is not "is this car a good idea?" It is "who decided, and under what authority?"

The Constitution begins its grant of legislative power in Article I, Section 1 with the words "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." That is the sentence that makes the whole project of self-government work. The people who make the laws are elected, can be removed, and must stand before the voters. A regulatory arrangement in which a state board writes a national standard, a federal agency nods, and other states opt in by reference is a long way from that sentence. It may be lawful under the Clean Air Act as written, and the courts will say whether it is. But a conservative asks a prior question: whether a policy that remakes the single biggest purchase most families make, after a house, ought to be decided by a statute that members of Congress had to vote on, in the open, with their names attached.

The Supreme Court gave a version of that instinct force in 2022 in West Virginia v. EPA, holding that when an agency claims the power to make decisions of vast economic and political significance, it must point to clear authority from Congress. The doctrine is sometimes called the major questions doctrine. A rule that reshapes the American car market is a textbook candidate for that kind of question, and the lesson of the case is that big decisions belong to the people's representatives. If Americans truly want the gasoline car phased out, there is a constitutional way to say so: pass a bill, take the vote, and own the result in the next election. The mandate's friends have rarely been eager to do that, which tells you something about how popular they think the idea is when somebody has to sign his name to it.

There is also Madison's point in Federalist No. 51 that ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The checks work when each branch and each level of government guards its own turf. Letting a single state set the rules for others, by waiver, is a leak in that structure. Texans and Iowans may or may not love electric cars. Under the design of the Constitution, they are entitled to be asked.

What a sensible policy looks like

A conservative position on electric cars should not be "no". It should be "yes, by choice."

• Remove the barriers that make any energy source harder to build. Permitting for chargers, transmission and domestic mines should not take a decade. The same red tape that blocks a pipeline blocks a power line, and I have argued as much in We Raised the Empire State Building in About a Year, So Why Not a Power Line.
• End the cross-subsidy tangle. If electric cars are good products, they will sell without a government thumb on the scale. If a tax credit for a particular product is on offer, it should be temporary, and Congress should say so and mean it. The history of energy credits suggests that temporary is a word with a short life span, as the account of The Wind Tax Credit Was Temporary in 1992 and Kept Coming Back for Decades shows.
• Fix the fuel-economy rules that distorted the market. The corporate fuel economy system is its own mandate by another name, and it pushed automakers toward bigger vehicles in ways the sponsors never intended, a story told in How Fuel Economy Rules Killed the Small Pickup and Supersized the SUV.
• Let the buyer decide. A driver in Phoenix and a driver in Fairbanks should each be free to pick the car that works. The government's job is to keep the road safe and the air clean by measured standards, not to pick winners.

The case in brief

1. A mandate is not a tax or a subsidy. It removes the option, and the families who would have chosen differently pay the cost.
2. California's Advanced Clean Cars II rule, adopted in 2022, sets zero-emission sales shares rising to one hundred percent of new light vehicles in 2035, and the Clean Air Act waiver structure lets one state's rule reach others.
3. Towing, cold weather and long rural distances are real tradeoffs that one standard cannot sort out, and the battery supply chain adds a dependency that conservatives spent fifty years arguing against.
4. The best case for the mandate rests on coordination and pollution, and the market and older rules have answered both without a ban.
5. A change this large belongs in a statute that members of Congress vote on in the open.

What you can do: look up how your own state treats California's vehicle rules, and call your state legislator's office to ask whether it was decided by a vote or by a regulator.