Fueled by a dated system that does not always respond to market incentives or pressure, costs and surpluses of energy have both grown in California, raising pointed questions about what residents should expect from rates and regulations alike.

“California has a big — and growing — glut of power,” as the Los Angeles Times announced in a detailed report. “The state’s power plants are on track to be able to produce at least 21 percent more electricity than it needs by 2020, based on official estimates. And that doesn’t even count the soaring production of electricity by rooftop solar panels that has added to the surplus.”

“To cover the expense of new plants whose power isn’t needed […] Californians are paying a higher premium to switch on lights or turn on electric stoves. In recent years, the gap between what Californians pay versus the rest of the country has nearly doubled to about 50 percent.”

Growing outrage

The disparity has drawn steady fire from free market analysts. “In an open marketplace, gluts of products or services lead firms to slash their prices dramatically. If, say, car manufacturers produce too many vehicles, they will provide rebates or be stuck with lots full of unsold inventory,” Reason recently observed. “With California’s regulated utility system, by contrast, gluts in electricity actually raise prices for consumers because of the way utilities are paid for their investments. They need only get the approval from the Public Utilities Commission to build new plants and pass on costs to ratepayers.”

The gap between power and cost has grown to nationwide highs. November 2016 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “showed California households paying 17.97 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, or 40.9 percent more than the national average of 12.75 cents,” CNBC reported. “New England states also have high electricity costs. But out West, only Alaska and Hawaii have higher average electricity costs.”

Although controversy has swirled around the prospect of regulators approving new plants amid an energy glut, “experts say growing interest in energy storage — including battery energy storage technology — could have an additional impact on the electricity market in the nation’s most populous state,” CNBC continued. Michael Ferguson, U.S. energy infrastructure group director at S&P Global Ratings, told the network that new battery technology would help by storing surplus energy without having to produce more of it. 

Big plans

In fact, Edison and Tesla recently cut the ribbon on just such a storage system, moving from concept to execution in what utilities officials characterized as unprecedented time. “The facility at the utility’s Mira Loma substation in Ontario contains nearly 400 Tesla PowerPack units on a 1.5-acre site, which can store enough energy to power 2,500 homes for a day or 15,000 homes for four hours,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The utility will use the collection of lithium-ion batteries, which look like big white refrigerators, to gather electricity at night and other off-peak hours so that the electrons can be injected back into the grid when power use jumps.

“Tesla and Edison sealed the deal on the project in September as part of a state-mandated effort to compensate for the hobbled Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility. They fired up the batteries in December.”

Unless the utilities rejigger rates and storage, they could find pressure mounting to scale back their plans for a big outlay for electric transportation investment. “Southern California Edison would spend $19.45 million on six ‘priority review’ pilots and $553.8 million on a five-year charging infrastructure buildout,” according to the plan, UtilityDive noted. “San Diego Gas and Electric wants $18.19 million for six priority review pilots and $225.9 million for residential charging. And Pacific Gas and Electric has proposed $20 million for priority reviews and $233.2 million for two five-year charger buildouts. In all, it comes to $1.07 billion for a wide-ranging list of programs from heavy-duty transport electrification to incentives for Uber and Lyft drivers.”

Uber’s defiance of a California Department of Motor Vehicles’ demand that the pioneering transit company stop testing its self-driving Volvo sport-utility vehicles in San Francisco ended Wednesday when the DMV revoked the vehicles’ registrations, making them illegal to operate on state roads.

The DMV first ordered the Uber tests to end in a Dec. 14 letter. But Uber — which is headquartered in San Francisco — defied the letter and argued that its tests weren’t subject to rules the DMV issued in October. It said those rules were meant to govern testing of fully autonomous vehicles.

Instead, Uber said it was using vehicles with self-driving technology akin to the in-dashboard tech seen in some Tesla models, and that humans were in the vehicles. A human tester’s failure was blamed for the incident last week when an Uber test Volvo was caught on video running a red light in San Francisco.

The company based its claim that the DMV didn’t understand its own rules on language that defined an autonomous vehicle subject to state regulations which said these vehicles did not require “the active physical control or monitoring” of a person. “We can’t in good conscience” accept a bureaucratic sanction based on ignorance, a Google official told reporters in a conference call last Friday.

It’s not clear whether Uber will face further sanctions from the DMV or the state Attorney General’s Office. But the company’s history of slowness or outright refusal to comply with regulatory agencies may work against it, both in decisions made by state officials and in the court of public opinion. Also damaging was Uber officials’ quick concession after complaints from San Francisco bicycle riders that its test vehicles needed better programming in dealing with bicycle lanes that are ubiquitous in the Bay Area.

Obama administration pushed much laxer regulation

The Uber-DMV dispute underlined how different California’s approach to driverless-vehicle regulation is from the federal government. In September, the Obama administration issued recommendations — not hard rules — for regulations of self-driving vehicles. It called for there to be a uniform policy in all states to promote innovation and experimentation with a technology that many hope will reduce pollution and congestion and end up being a trillion-dollar industry.

Four weeks later, the California DMV issued rules that said autonomous vehicle testing could only be done by companies whose testing programs were designed to “constantly ensure the technologies comply with local laws [in California’s] 58 counties and 482 incorporated cities,” according to the San Jose Mercury-News. The DMV rules required that formal permission for testing be granted by any local government whose roads would be part of tests.

As CalWatchdog reported, the California approach to regulating self-driving cars produced sharp blowback from automakers and tech giants.

Uber’s problems in San Francisco have prompted sympathy and perhaps opportunism from new Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. The Associated Press reported that Steinberg invited Uber to shift its testing to Sacramento if it wanted friendlier treatment. “We want Sacramento to be the hotbed for companies seeking to develop driverless car technology,” he told the wire service.

High-flying clean-energy industrialist Elon Musk has doubled down on his production plans in California. Tesla, his auto company, “took a major step toward its ambitious goal of one day building 1 million cars a year by seeking to double the size of its Fremont, Calif., assembly plant,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Under a long-term zoning proposal submitted to Fremont’s Planning Commission, the electric car maker wants to eventually add 4.6 million square feet of space to its factory’s existing 4.5 million square feet.”

Musk “told analysts this spring that the Palo Alto-based automaker hopes to ramp up annual production to 500,000 vehicles in 2018 and build 1 million vehicles by the end of 2020,” the paper added. “The 2018 goal alone is nearly a tenfold increase from the 50,580 vehicles that Tesla produced last year in Fremont. The automaker has forecast this year’s deliveries at 80,000 to 90,000. Quality problems and production delays plagued the plant early this year and threatened sales plans. But the company said last week that those problems are behind it and that it expects to come close to its forecast for 2016.”

Broad deals

Musk has not hesitated to link up with government resources and opportunities in order to advance his business interests. This month, he aligned SpaceX closely to take advantage of President Obama’s call to use private industry to help bring Americans to Mars. “Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station,” Obama announced. “One of those private companies tasked with ferrying astronauts to the ISS and who will essentially return human spaceflight to American soil in late 2018 is SpaceX,” the Observer noted.

And last month, Musk inked a deal to change the way California backstops its energy needs. “Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries,” Bloomberg reported. “Tesla’s contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed,” the site added — “months not years.”

Outracing critics

As Musk has accelerated his increasingly ambitious plans, however, he has attracted a greater share of criticism toward the mechanics of his business operations. “The pressure is now on Tesla for a smooth launch of the relatively affordable Model 3. A quality product pumped out at low cost and high volume is essential to meeting the ambitious goals of the company and its investors, auto analysts say, whereas long delays could threaten the company’s reputation — and survival,” according to the Times.

Meanwhile, wariness has centered separately around SolarCity, a startup run by family members. “The Tesla-SolarCity deal looks so bad on paper that many investors worry it’s simply a bailout of SolarCity, which Musk co-founded and continues to chair,” the MIT Technology Review noted. “While SolarCity dominates the market for leasing, installing, and maintaining solar panels for residences and businesses, it’s racked up more than $2 billion in losses over the past five years. “

“Its business model requires it to raise huge amounts of capital to cover the up-front costs of providing panels for no money down to consumers on multiyear contracts. Since its inception, the company has accumulated more than $3 billion in debt against just $1.5 billion in revenue. Now it is having a harder time convincing people to lend it money.”

What’s more, Musk has had to contend with a rebellion among his own shareholders. “As of earlier this week, seven Tesla stockholders have filed lawsuits against Elon Musk over the proposed acquisition of SolarCity and alleged Musk was in breach of his fiduciary duties for not disclosing the proposed merger properly. Some of these stockholders are asking the judge for an injunction to prevent the merger from going through,” Recode reported. But the two companies have announced the merger is going ahead anyway. “The companies have set the date for their respective shareholders to vote on the $2.6 billion all-stock transaction for Nov. 17.”

Stiffed, as he sees it, by bureaucratic incompetence, Elon Musk took the California Air Resources Board to task for the way it handles zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) credits — at a moment when Musk’s plans for success require a huge leap forward in business expansion.

“The California Air Resources Board is being incredibly weak in its application of ZEV credits,” Musk told those listening in on the company’s latest earnings call, as Bloomberg reported. “The standards are pathetically low. They need to be increased. There’s massive lobbying by the big car companies to prevent CARB from increasing the ZEV credit mandate, which they absolutely damn well should. It’s a crying shame that they haven’t. And as a result, you can barely sell the ZEV credits for pennies on the dollar.”

Musk has enjoyed the benefit of pre-existing policy, which required auto companies falling short of CARB standards to turn to Tesla for help. “California has a Zero Emissions Vehicle Standard that requires a percentage of all auto sales in the state to be zero emission vehicles. There are two ways to meet the standard — either a company has to sell a certain number of emission-free cars, or it has to offset the failure to do so by buying credits from another company that is exceeding the standard,” CNBC explained. “The program has been a source of revenue for Tesla — in 2013, the company made just short of $130 million selling the credits to other car companies, according to CleanTechnica. Then, in the latest quarter, Tesla only ‘recognized an insignificant amount of ZEV credit revenue,’ according to a letter to shareholders.”

Round two

The tiff marked the second time Musk publicly tangled with the CARB on matters of automobile policy. Following the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal, Musk signed an open letter to the Air Resources Board that portrayed the board’s measures as foolish and futile, arguing instead for an approach that would require Volkswagen to make dramatically more emissions-free cars. “For a significant fraction of the non-compliant diesel cars already in the hands of drivers, there is no real solution. Drivers won’t come in for a fix that compromises performance,” the letter read. “Further, solutions which result in net greater CO2 emissions, a regulated pollutant, are inappropriate for CARB to endorse. Retrofitting urea tank systems to small cars is costly and impractical. Some cars may be fixed, but many won’t and will be crushed before they are fixed.”

“A giant sum of money thus will be wasted in attempting to fix cars that cannot all be fixed, and where the fix may be worse than the problem if the cars are crushed well before the end of their useful lives. We, the undersigned, instead encourage the CARB to show leadership in directing VW to ‘cure the air, not the cars’ and reap multiples of what damage has been caused while strongly advancing California’s interests in transitioning to zero emission vehicles.”

Production prep

But Musk’s current frustrations suggested some urgency to settle scores before buckling in for a big production push. Tesla’s plans for extraordinarily rapid growth have promised a substantial increase in activity around its manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, purchased from Toyota after its partner in the property, GM, backed out of its role in the wake of the financial crisis. Musk’s automaker has already “announced plans for a gigantic increase in output when its $35,000 Model 3 enters production,” Green Car Reports noted. “That ex-GM plant had a capacity of half a million cars […]. Six years later, Tesla says it is now building 2,000 electric cars a week at the Fremont plant.”

The room for growth has spurred activity inside and outside its doors. Now, “companies small and large are looking to cluster operations around Tesla’s 5.3 million square foot factory in Fremont to help with production and also with research and development,” the San Francisco Business Journal reported. “Such companies range from a locally grown machine shop making parts for Tesla’s battery packs to a giant Mexican producer of plastic and foam auto parts opening an East Bay factory with 280 jobs.”

The streetwise alternative energy dreams of one California officeholder have been given a tentative green light in Sacramento. If all goes well, the Golden State could roll out a technology that would turn vehicles’ rumblings over freeways into electrical energy.

“The office of L.A.-area Assemblyman Mike Gatto announced recently that the California Energy Commission has agreed to fund multiple piezoelectric pilot projects in the Golden State,” the L.A. Weekly reported. “The program’s schedule, including when ground will be broken, has not been revealed. The commission’s move follows years of research on how this might work on California’s busy freeways — and on whether it will be worth it for taxpayers. […] The state’s analysis concluded that a pilot demonstration of the technology would be the best way to determine if it’s worth our money — if we can actually squeeze some juice from concrete and asphalt.”

International precedent

Risk-averse politicians and policymakers had reason beyond the limitations of the pilot program to be cautiously optimistic. In other leading post-industrial nations, the tech being put to the test has already proven functional. “Gatto had a conversation with a friend who had just returned from Israel raving about a road that produced energy,” as the Fresno Bee noted, through the use of so-called piezoelectric sensors beneath roads and railways. “Gatto learned that engineers in Israel, Italy, and Japan had successfully installed piezoelectric sensors underneath roadways and railways. Those sensors, the size of watch batteries, are in effect the reverse of sonar: a vibration comes in, and an electric pulse goes out. Gatto said scientists estimate the energy generated from a 10-mile stretch of four-lane roadway can power the entire city of Burbank, comparable to Clovis,” the Bee added.

“You embed them right in the roadway and as cars and trucks drive over the roadway, it vibrates the road just a little bit, and these substances get charged from that,” Gatto told ABC 7 News. “It just makes sense in a car culture like ours to use that extra energy that is generated and put it to good use.”

Transforming transportation

Although environmentalist critics could be pressed to raise emissions objections to Gatto’s enthusiasm for so many cars on the road, other ongoing technological advances have begun to raise the prospect of substantially greater zero-emissions vehicles phasing out California gas guzzlers in the years to come. “Tesla’s goal of building 1 million vehicles per year by the end of 2020” — including buses and trucks — “depends on a fast-rising flow of batteries from the Gigafactory,” the company’s vast plant located in Nevada, the San Francisco Chronicle observed:

“The company has accelerated its work on the factory by roughly two years, planning to produce enough batteries in 2018 to supply 35 gigawatt-hours of electricity, the target originally established for 2020. ‘People really need to think of the factory as more important than the product itself, and with far greater potential for innovation,’ Musk said Tuesday at the plant.”

While Musk’s plans to date have focused on solar power’s applications in structures like homes, designers have also begun to turn to the sun’s energy in rethinking the way roads can be used to help power the grid. L.A.’s Michael Maltzan Architecture has proposed a tunnel overlay on a bridge section of the 134 freeway that would incorporate a host of alternate energy features, including emissions traps and rainwater collection. “A field of photovoltaic panels along the top of the tunnel would produce about 6 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually — enough to power 600 homes,” the Los Angeles Times added. “Maltzan proposes that the cost savings made possible by the solar array — an estimated $1 million per year — be similarly fed back into the city, used to boost the budgets of the half-dozen Pasadena Unified School District campuses located within two miles of the freeway bridge.”

“The state Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of the deal Saturday, after a four-day special session in Carson City,” the Associated Press reported. “Lawmakers learned last week that Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting was backing the secretive California-based company, which employs some former Tesla Motors executives, and that Faraday plans to bring 4,500 direct jobs to Nevada.”

High hopes

Four bills cementing the deal headed to Gov. Brian Sandoval — a booster of the plan — who swiftly signed them at a short Capitol ceremony. “The Republican governor said he’s excited about the prospect of young Nevadans getting well-paid jobs at the $1 billion plant in North Las Vegas,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “The factory is expected to employ 4,500 workers and create another 9,000 indirect jobs. Sandoval said Nevada’s proud of its casino and mining industry, but wants to keep up with the industries of the future.”

A package deal

Although Nevada’s package of incentives helped the state’s candidacy, Faraday officials — including former Tesla heavyweights — cautioned that other factors combined to put it ahead of the pack. Dag Reckhorn, the company’s vice president of global manufacturing and ex-manufacturing director for the Tesla Model S, told the Los Angeles Times that “Nevada gave us the best overall deal. It’s still close to the West Coast, we have Highway 15. It’s good for our supply chain — getting parts in and out of the plant.”

Reinforcing Faraday’s reputation for closely-guarded confidentiality, neither Reckhorn nor any other representative let slip any details on California’s losing bid — if any. “Company officials declined to say whether California offered similar incentives or where they were considering building, citing a nondisclosure agreement,” noted the Times. “A spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Business and Economic Development declined to comment.”

Winning on water

But one detail of the delicate negotiations carried out during the Legislature’s special session could hint at what took place behind the scenes. Of the four bills it took to smooth the way for Faraday, fully half involved the company’s access to Nevada water. In what was characterized by Reno Public Radio as a “compromise,” legislators agreed that the state would “supply Faraday with groundwater quickly without tampering with existing water law.” The deal bringing Tesla to northern Nevada — at a site distant from Faraday’s southern Nevada location — wound its way through the Nevada Legislature in half the time as the current raft of agreements, according to the network.

Some lawmakers cautioned against placing too much faith in Faraday’s viability. Expectations have been anchored around promises by the company to field electric cars on American roads by 2020, with construction beginning on the North Las Vegas plant next month, according to Jalopnik.

Photo credit: telematicswire.net

Slowly but surely, driverless — or “self-driving” — cars will make their way onto California streets.

Despite a string of setbacks, and a wave of pervasive fear that automated cars could be hacked, Golden State regulators have determined to move ahead with first-in-the-nation guidelines setting the rules of the road for the ultimate gadgets.

“The state of California hopes to release the world’s first safety regulations for the public use of self-driving cars by the end of the year, officials from the Department of Motor Vehicles said Wednesday,” according to the Sacramento Business Journal. “This is the first timeline officials have offered for the release of safety regulations to govern consumer use of self-driving cars since the agency missed a statutory deadline in January. In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation giving the DMV until the beginning of this year to issue a draft.”

A race against industry

State officials have broadly agreed on the wisdom of moving to catch up with the automotive future. But liability issues have led to disagreements between the public and private sector over what internal information driverless automakers ought to be compelled to share. “Regulators don’t want to be blamed for unnecessarily stalling the arrival of robo-chauffeurs that can see farther, react faster and don’t text, speed or fall asleep,” CBS News noted. “They’ve implored Google and traditional automakers also developing the technology to share safety data, but companies in competition don’t willingly reveal trade secrets.”

The delays threatened to stymie the industry race to field robocars, which has attracted heavy investment and fierce competition among not only the world’s leading automakers but among the tech companies pushing into the transportation market as well. “Back in May of 2014 it sure seemed that DMV experts were working hard to meet the Legislature’s December 31, 2014 deadline,” IEEE Spectrum observed. “They held public hearings, consulted with industry leaders, such as Google, Daimler and General Motors, and even issued some licenses for experimental cars made by those companies and by academics. But such cars can be tested only if a qualified driver sits behind the wheel. California has licensed 98 such test vehicles from 10 companies; 73 of the cars belong to Google.”

Handling technology

Google, however, found itself at the center of the latest driverless controversy. When a Mountain View police officer pulled over a Google Autonomous Vehicle, he discovered there was no driver to ticket. But the issue went beyond that small irony. The driving infraction was a significant one — motoring too slowly. “There was no one at the wheel, but there was a Google operator sitting shotgun who explained to the officer how Google regulates the speed at which its autonomous cars drive,” CBS News reported. “According to California law, a self-driving car can only be operated on roads with speed limits that are at or under 35 mph, and Google caps its cars’ speed at 25 mph.”

The company responded by making the reassuring point that it didn’t want to frighten people by pegging its vehicles at higher speeds. But the episode reinforced concerns that the biggest problem with driverless cars was how human drivers might struggle to adapt to their presence on roads. Drivers, analysts have suggested, are accustomed to using human cues in order to make the constant judgment calls required behind the wheel.

Adding a complicating factor, at least one company has used a simple conceptual loophole to press ahead with self-driving technology, putting it to use in cars built for human drivers. “Tesla’s autopilot technology is still far from fully autonomous driving, but it’s moving in that direction with actual cars on the road,” CNET reported. “Today, Tesla Model S drivers can take their hands off the steering wheel while on the highway — though they’re not supposed to — and can also let the car parallel park itself.”

Speculation has swirled around the debut of another entrant into California’s crowded, cutting-edge automotive industry. The company, known as Faraday Future, “has been hunting for a place to build what it says will be a $1 billion manufacturing plant for a new line of cars,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Four states are contenders and the company says to expect an announcement within weeks.”

Contenders for the site included not only California but Georgia, Nevada and Louisiana, Faraday Future Product Development Chief Nick Sampson said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Sampson is one of a team of former Tesla executives now leading Faraday Future. Like Tesla, Faraday Future is named after an inventor from the 19th century.”

High hopes, low profile

The company has responded to the media spotlight by cultivating an air of mystery from its Gardena headquarters south of Los Angeles — the former home to Nissan’s sales HQ, noted the Journal. Reporters have had to wade through obscure documents to collect details about Faraday’s origins. “Though it won’t confirm the source of its funds, documents filed in California point to a parent company run by a Chinese billionaire who styles himself after Apple’s late Steve Jobs,” the Chronicle observed.

That billionaire has been identified as Jia Yueting, the chairman of Chinese tech company LeTV, short for Leshi Internet Information & Television — one of the largest online video companies in China. “He recently launched a line of smartphones and acquired a 70 percent stake in Yidao Yongche, an Uber-like car service in China,” reported the Los Angeles Times.

In a press conference late last year, Leshi spokesperson Jiang Dongge said the company has “already organized a research and development team based in Silicon Valley about a year ago, with experts poached from traditional car companies including Tesla Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Ford Motor Company working on the forthcoming model. Leshi is also in touch with Google as well as other technology firms based in Silicon Valley,” he claimed, according to Forbes Asia.

Close competition

Although some Californians may bristle at the thought of a Chinese company pouring billions into competition with homegrown Silicon Valley products, analysts have linked up Faraday’s relative secrecy to its interest in foreign, not American, markets. “A lot of the evidence to support Faraday Future’s backing from the Chinese tech conglomerate is of public record. So why all the dodging from Faraday? It may have something to do with the way the company plans to market its vehicles,” Techcrunch speculated. “According to a source familiar with the matter, Faraday Future needs to be seen as a U.S.-based Tesla rival. ‘Chinese people don’t want to buy Chinese products,'” said the source.

But the dizzying costs of launching a high-end electric car company have ensured that any additional player in the marketplace will squeeze relatively more established firms. And Faraday has already been preceded in California by another Chinese concern. “Karma Automotive, formerly Fisker Automotive, which is based in Southern California, has revived its hopes after China’s Wanxiang Group Corp. bought the failed hybrid-electric supercar maker out of bankruptcy in 2014,” the Journal reported. “The company has secured a manufacturing facility in Southern California and is planning to sell a new car in 2016.”

Cross-border competition

For their part, California officials faced a fresh possibility of losing out to neighboring Nevada on big-ticket electric car construction. “If North Las Vegas lands the factory,” Bloomberg noted of Faraday’s future plant, “it would be the second major coup for Nevada as it attempts to diversify its economy and promote itself as a center of electric-car manufacturing. Tesla is building the world’s largest lithium-ion battery factory east of Reno after Gov. Brian Sandoval last year signed off on tax breaks worth as much as $1.3 billion for a plant on which Tesla expects to spend $10 billion over 15 years.”

The move put the self-driving car under development by the tech titan — codename: Project Titan — at the center of a flurry of speculation, opinion and analysis. Citing documents it had obtained, the Guardian reported that Mike Maletic, a senior legal counsel, “had an hour-long meeting on 17 August with the department’s self-driving car experts Bernard Soriano, DMV deputy director, and Stephanie Dougherty, chief of strategic planning, who are co-sponsors of California’s autonomous vehicle regulation project, and Brian Soublet, the department’s deputy director and chief counsel.”

Alongside Google and Uber, that makes three Silicon Valley heavyweights lined up to crank out driverless cars at some point in the future, the Guardian added, noting “Google already has a fleet of robot cars on the streets of California and is planning to have several hundred built in the near future.”

Critical mass

But the competition in driverless cars has already heated up around the world. “According to the California DMV,” Fast Company noted, “their autonomous vehicle program has issued permits for testing to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, and Honda, along with Google and auto component manufacturers Delphi, Bosch, and Cruise Automation.” That program, begun at the start of this year, “is working on ways to guarantee autonomous vehicles are safe, tested, and meet quality and performance benchmarks.”

The race to deploy a robocar has led those companies, plus Toyota, Ford, and GM, to line the Valley’s main thoroughfare with research laboratories. The Central Expressway, reaching roughly from Stanford University to San Jose Mineta International Airport, has become so crowded with competitors that Apple’s penchant for secrecy may be at risk if it takes its cars out for a neighborhood spin. “Although Apple recently bought a 43-acre parcel in North San Jose, it doesn’t have much room in Silicon Valley to test its automotive ideas with the secrecy that usually surrounds its tiny devices,” the San Jose Mercury News surmised. “The question is: Would it be willing to test in public?”

Busy rivals

Traffic in secrecy has run both ways, however. Whatever Apple has under wraps, the Mercury News concluded, “its actions have contributed to a frenzy from rivals — especially in the auto industry — to take ownership of autonomous technology, in-car mapping software, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and dashboard Internet applications that could reshape the way we get around in the decades to come.”

To vault to the top of the pack, however, Apple would likely have to square off against Tesla, which has enjoyed a substantial head start. “In the next few years, Tesla has the potential to become the Apple of electric cars, even if Apple enters the industry,” according to Quartz. “The company will have four models on the streets — the Roadster, the S, the X, and the 3 — by the time Apple or any other competitor is likely to have a single model. Tesla will also have its Gigafactory — a massive production facility in Nevada that can produce up to 500,000 cars a year — up and running. If Tesla can bring down its prices, its cars could become a common sight on roads.” Of course, Tesla has automotive rivals of its own, with Audi, Mercedes and Porsche all poised to deliver electric vehicles in about five years or so.

Meanwhile, few inside the auto industry have thrown in the towel on more traditional vehicles. “When it comes to actually making cars, there is no reason to assume that Apple, with no experience, will suddenly do a better job than General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota, or Hyundai,” GM ex-chairman Bob Lutz told CNBC, predicting that Apple’s labors would become “a giant money pit.”

Underscoring the disruptive effect of the often libertarian sensibility behind auto innovations, the controversy has pitted Republicans against wealthy coastal elites and Democrats against the automakers pushing the industry toward a zero-emissions future.

Republican populism

The problems started with the handsome benefits granted by the Golden State to buyers of lower-emissions vehicles, whatever their earning power. “Hundreds of Californians with household incomes of $500,000 or more have collected state subsidies for buying electric and hybrid cars under a program that is criticized as a taxpayer handout to the wealthy,” the Los Angeles Times reported:

“State regulators, in response, are restricting the subsidies to Californians who earn less than $250,000 or couples taking in less than $500,000. But that standard is also under fire from some lawmakers and anti-tax activists, who ask why subsidies worth up to $5,000 are given to people who can already afford the cars.”

According to some Republicans, the giveaway reflected the willingness of Democrats to shower privileges on the wealthy if their spending habits reflect liberal ethics.

Burgeoning business

But the electric car industry has also come under fire from the other side of the aisle — for taking advantage of pricey state programs designed to subsidize companies with outsized economic potential.

Last year, Tesla raked in $15 million in credits — a hefty share of the $150 million in total divided up among 212 companies — “drawing criticism about whether the electric car manufacturer deserved the money,” according to the Sacramento Business Journal. This year, the Journal noted, legislators signed off on $200 million for the so-called California Competes program, which chooses winners based on “employee wages and the industry’s importance to the California economy,” among other factors.

The economic stakes, already high for Tesla and a recovering California, have recently been ratcheted even higher: Tesla competitor Fisker has inked a deal returning the once-bankrupt luxury electric car company to California shores. Bought up last year by the China’s Wanxiang Group, Fisker “signed an 11-year lease worth an estimated $30 million” in Riverside County’s Moreno Valley,” the Times reported, “giving California its second electric car manufacturing plant after Tesla’s Fremont factory.

What’s more, a low-profile new entrant into the electric car market has announced the possibility of a California headquarters of its own. Gardena’s Faraday Future said “it’s scouting several locations for a new factory, fueling speculation about a state tax-credit race similar to last year’s push for Tesla’s gigafactory,” the Journal reported. “The company hopes to announce a location for a manufacturing plant sometime in the third quarter of 2015, and would bring cars to market in late 2017,” according to a spokesman.

Environmental pressure

Adding to the sense of chaos, the big climate change bills headed to the Assembly have activated opposition from lawmakers who find themselves caught in the ideological crossfire — or opportunistically seeking a quick serving of pork for their constituents. “Some moderate Democrats, charging ‘coastal elitism,’ say the bills will harm the middle-class families they represent in the Central Valley,” the San Jose Mercury News observed; “others are trying to shake down legislative leaders for handouts that benefit their districts.”

The legislation, added the Mercury News, would put gasoline-powered vehicles in the crosshairs — “cutting petroleum use by cars and trucks in half over the next 15 years and slashing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels over the next 35 years.”

The electric car companies, of course, have an interest in seeing standards rise. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, Tesla has pushed to ensure Sacramento’s mileage and emissions regulations could become “even more stringent,” while laboring “to keep other auto makers from loosening regulations in California.”