ANN ARBOR, MI – Inside a secret government lab, behind a high fence and armed guards, a team of engineers has been dissecting the innards of new all-electric vehicles with one singular goal: rewriting the tailpipe pollution rules exhaust to speed up the country’s transition. to electric cars.
As early as next week, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose ambitious greenhouse gas emission standards for cars that are so strict they are designed to ensure that at least half of new vehicles sold in the United States to be all-electric by 2030. , up from just 5.8% today. And the rules could put the nation on track to end new gas car sales as early as 2035.
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States, and scientists say that reducing tailpipe pollution, quickly, is essential to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.
But that would also require overcoming a myriad of technical and logistical challenges: EVs are still too expensive for most consumers, in part because of stuck global supply chains for the materials to build them. Cars also need a national network of millions of easy-to-use fast charging stations.
The work taking place at the EPA’s automotive research lab puts it at the center of one of the most complex balancing acts facing President Biden. It has pledged to fight climate change and gas-burning cars are a major source of global warming pollution. But auto manufacturing is one of the nation’s largest industries, and a rapid shift to electric vehicles, which require less labor to manufacture, has the potential to displace thousands of auto workers, a major constituency for Mr. Biden.
“This is the biggest transformation the auto industry has ever seen, moving from 100 years of tailpipe pollution to electric vehicles, and a whole new way to drive,” said David Haugen, director from the EPA’s National Fuel and Vehicle Emissions Laboratory. .
“Anything can prevent that from happening,” he said, acknowledging the challenges of building charging stations, creating national supply chains and lowering prices. “Any of those things can make adoption a struggle. All the pieces have to be there.”
Test limits
But to do that, EPA lab experts must first determine how much electric vehicle technology will advance in the next decade, to help the agency set the strongest emissions limits yet achievable.
Labor organization and trade union impulses
To this end, government experts in laboratory technology, chemistry, toxicology and law have been working with engineers from the world’s largest car companies. They’ve been taking apart and testing the guts of new and not-yet-on-the-market Tesla, GM, Volkswagen and Nissan to find out which existing technology can go the furthest and fastest; which is the most resistant and durable; and which is equipped with the most affordable technology. According to the researchers, different models have different strengths: no one brand has all the components of an affordable, muscular, family-friendly and powerful electric vehicle.
They’ve driven electric cars on giant treadmills continuously, in 12-hour shifts, to see how many miles they can go on a single charge. They have heated the cars to nearly 100 degrees and then frozen them overnight to assess the battery’s strength. They have done hours and hours of computer simulations.
“Looking at these technologies gives us a lot of confidence that this can happen,” said Mr. There are “This regulation will help all automakers move as quickly as possible so we can address climate change with the urgency it deserves.”
“We’ve never seen anything like what’s coming now”
One factor weighing heavily on the administration is the effect the new tailpipe limits could have on workplaces, such as those at Ford’s century-old Rouge manufacturing complex about 40 miles to the east. from the EPA laboratory.
There, auto workers and their union leaders worry about what the upcoming regulation will mean for their future. They have good reason: electric vehicles require less than half the number of workers to assemble than cars with an internal combustion engine.
“We know we’re going to lose jobs at some point,” Mark DePaoli, vice president of the United Auto Workers Local 600, said in a recent interview at the local’s headquarters near the Ford plant in Dearborn.
To understand what’s at stake, compare the chassis of the Ford F-150 pickup truck, America’s best-selling passenger vehicle, with its all-electric version, both built at the Rouge complex. The gas-powered F-150 is made up of thousands of small metal parts and pieces and is assembled by 4,200 employees at the conventional truck plant. The all-electric Ford F-150 is essentially a giant battery connected to motors and wheels that’s built by about 720 workers next door at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center.
As the transition from gasoline to electric accelerates, one of the approximately 150,000 union auto jobs nationwide that could be lost could belong to Steve Noffke, who has built internal combustion engines for Ford for 25 years.
“I’m not against electric vehicles, don’t get me wrong,” Noffke, 69, said. “If this transition will take place, we understand it; most of us have been through transitions before. But we, as workers, shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
Noffke noted that his industry has seen a lot of disruption to this point. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement sent thousands of auto manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The financial crisis of 2008 pushed car manufacturers to the brink of collapse. Advances in automation continue to replace people with robots.
In Dearborn, the scars of some of that dislocation are still evident in empty factories, an abandoned Payless shoe store, a boarded-up Brown’s Bun Bakery.
But the changes that electric vehicles are bringing about are significantly more jarring, Noffke said. “We’ve never seen anything like what’s coming now,” he said.
Angela Powell, 46, who drives a forklift at Ford’s electric vehicle assembly plant, could emerge as one of the winners of the new automotive landscape.
“Coming from the old building and seeing the new vehicles, the state-of-the-art technology, it’s amazing,” said Ms. Powell, who previously worked on the assembly line at Ford’s conventional truck plant. “Who would have ever thought we’d be here at this point? It’s an exciting time.”
Still, Ms Powell worries about what will happen if the change is not managed well. If the government is trying to effectively end the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, what if consumers don’t buy electric vehicles? What if they’re too expensive, or there aren’t enough charging stations, or supply chain disruptions slow down production?
“If this doesn’t go well, will I have work the next day?” she said
Another concern is that many of the new EV factories and battery plants are opening in southeastern states like Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, where the political culture is historically hostile to organized labor and wages and benefits. they are usually lower than in unionized plants.
“If you go to one of these start-up companies, or even a Ford plant where this is not a union job, you’re going to make big sacrifices financially,” Mr. Noffke.
Mr. Biden, a self-described “car guy,” likes to visit auto factories, including the Ford plant where Ms. Powell works and where Mr. Biden took the F-150 for a spin electric and declared, “This sucker is fast.”
Mr. Biden similarly revels in his relationship with organized labor, calling himself the most unionist of his predecessors. That connection with auto workers helped Mr. Biden carry Michigan in 2020, after the state had endorsed Donald J. Trump in 2016. Workers’ support will be crucial if Mr. Biden runs again— if in 2024.
Now, Mr. Biden is trying to maintain his position with union workers while acting on climate change, an issue he has described as a priority. He has pledged to reduce America’s greenhouse gas pollution by at least 50 percent by 2030.
A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency found that nations would have to stop selling new gasoline cars by 2035 to prevent the average global temperature from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) compared to pre-industrial levels. Beyond that point, scientists say, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, floods, drought, crop failure and species extinction are much more difficult for humanity to handle. The planet has already warmed an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
“There is a vision of the future that is now starting to happen, a future of the auto industry that is electric: battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, fuel cell electric,” Biden said in 2021 when he announced an executive order. calling for federal policies to ensure that half of all new cars sold are fully electric by 2030.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offers up to $7,500 in tax credits for electric vehicle buyers. But incentives alone won’t be enough to meet the president’s climate goals, which is why new EPA regulations are needed, experts said.
“Nothing else guarantees the transition to electric vehicles at the pace we need to address global warming,” said Drew Kodjak, executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research organization.
But despite Mr. Biden’s commitment, a transition to an all-electric future carries political and economic risks.
Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat whose district includes more than a dozen auto assembly plants as well as the EPA’s automotive lab, often mentions Ali Zaidi, a senior climate adviser from the White House, the complexity of the situation.
Mr. Zaidi speaks to Ms. Dingell so often, she appears as simply “DD” on her cell phone.
“I’ve had real heart-to-heart conversations with the president, and he understands what these workers are afraid of,” said Ms. Dingell, a former General Motors executive. “We have to make sure that the fundamentals of politics to be able to achieve something like this, without hurting people.”
Mr. Biden has worked to ensure that only American-made electric vehicles qualify for tax incentives offered by the Inflation Reduction Act, although the requirement that they be assembled by workers was removed unions
In 2022, Mr. Biden signed another law that gave subsidies to companies to make their semiconductor chips for electric vehicles in the United States. And in 2021, he signed an infrastructure bill that includes $7.5 billion to build half a million electric vehicle charging stations along federal highways, even as a January report from S&P Global concluded that the nation would need millions more.
“There’s too much at stake not to get it right,” Ms. Dingell said. “But it’s a very difficult balance.”
