Clean, Secure, Electric: Our EV Agenda for Kamala Harris

After the campaign, there's still lots of work to be done on electric vehicles

By Levi Tillemann, PhD and Matt McGovern, JD

The Biden Administration has made enormous progress securing supply chains, laying the foundations for a new American automotive industrial policy, and nudging America toward a zero emission mobility future. At the same time, slower growth in the light duty vehicle EV segment, continued challenges in other key market segments (e.g. heavy duty vehicles), and unsatisfactory performance of America’s public charging infrastructure are undeniable. We are just getting started on the road to zero emissions and there will be rough patches along the way. But to keep the EV revolution from stalling, America needs to learn lessons fast and adapt accordingly.

That's why we wrote this electrification agenda. It presents a series of policy strategies that can help America solve many of the fundamental challenges plaguing its EV ecosystem.?

We are putting forward these ideas because a forward-looking agenda for electric vehicles is largely absent from the presidential contest. During the Harris-Trump debate, there wasn't a single word from Harris on electric vehicles. EVs are similarly omitted from VP Harris’s issues page “A New Way Forward.” (She does call out climate change, generic automotive manufacturing, nuclear energy and even quantum computing. But no EVs.)

Why?

Just a few years ago, EVs would have been an applause line with bipartisan support. But the Harris team has been admirably disciplined when it comes to giving swing voters what they want.? And, right now, what swing voters want is not EVs.?

Yet, someone should be thinking (and talking) about a Harris administration EV strategy -- because America needs more EVs, better EVs and better charging. So, in the immortal words of Admiral David Farragut “Damn the torpedoes!” Full steam ahead. And into our fourth and final installment of this series on EVs and the 2024 election. (We have decided to skip the foreign policy installment.)?

Previous installments in this series included:

1. California Rules: Advanced Clean Cars II and the Section 177 States
2. Biden, You're Fired?: Trump Administration Executive Branch Priorities for Electric Vehicles, and
3. Red Wave: How A Republican Congress Could Gut Federal EV Policy

As with our other analysis, this agenda is not intended to be overtly partisan. However, Donald Trump’s antagonistic policy positions toward EVs and climate action mean that he is not our intended audience. We are implicitly writing for a Harris-Walz Administration.?

Our EV policy bucket list

In America, EVs have achieved one of two major milestones: they are here to stay. But they still fall far short of the second, more critical milestone: dominating America’s automotive market. EVs need to overtake gasoline and diesel powered vehicles as the primary mode of transportation if they are going to help us meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For that to happen, a lot of progress still has to be made -- and that progress is going to be policy driven.

We are dividing our wishlist for the next generation of EV policy into four big policy buckets:

1. Improving America’s charging network
2. Adopting performance based incentives
3. Creating a circular economy?
4. Delivering solutions for fleets (esp. medium and heavy duty EVs)

Given the interconnected nature of the energy and mobility systems, many of these “buckets” overlap – and there are certainly additional opportunities for improvement beyond the policies we mention (we welcome suggestions and discussion in the comments section). But we believe that these policies cover the fundamental prerequisites for rapid decarbonization and a sustainable EV mobility system.

In addition to the proposals in our "policy buckets," we’ll also talk a little about how the Harris administration could message some of these ideas without causing unnecessary political and electoral backlash (HINT: personal energy independence and security).

Feeling blue, not green

Let’s start with the challenges we face. The last four years have been a mixed bag for EVs. On the one hand, global EV markets have seen enormous growth. In recent months, China has sometimes sold more than 50% electric vehicles. That’s astounding. It means that on an annualized basis, China’s EV market is or will soon be larger than the entire U.S. automotive market.?

That’s the good news.?

But the industry has also produced a deluge of headlines which range from lukewarm to catastrophic. These include cold weather charging fiascoes, the anemic rollout of Biden’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, tanking EV sales and finally announcements that major OEMs plan to cut investments in electric cars.?

In the past 12-months, European EV sales have been essentially flat and North American EV sales have seen only modest growth.? An avalanche of low cost Chinese EVs threatens to overwhelm U.S., Japanese, Korean and European EV manufacturers, potentially hollowing out the West’s automotive manufacturing industry.

So that’s troubling.?

At the same time, Americans are less and less sure that they want to buy EVs. The number of Americans who say they are “likely” or “very likely” to buy an electric car fell by almost 25% from 2023 to 2024. In other words, Americans are progressively less convinced that EVs are an adequate replacement for ICE vehicles.

Even with these misgivings, really cheap EVs might be able to lure American consumers into the zero emissions market. Unfortunately, American automakers aren’t able to produce really low cost EVs. The massive scale achieved by Chinese manufacturers has led to previously unimaginable reductions in battery costs over the past five years. So much so that in China, EVs are actually the cheapest vehicle you can purchase – with many models in the low $10,000s. (In the U.S. the average transaction price for a new EV was over $56,000.)?

Even if America weren’t losing the EV race to China, there would be additional challenges to overcome. EVs have their own set of environmental downsides. For instance, EVs are catalyzing massive growth in environmentally destructive extractive industries such as mining and refining. There are also safety challenges associated with EV fires and automotive weight gain. These have not been fully addressed – not in the U.S., and certainly not in China.?

Then there’s charging . . . that unreliable, overpriced, chicken/eggy, often infuriating sine qua non of electromobility. EV charging continues to struggle as both a consumer experience and a business proposition.?

Growing pains are not shocking

Again, some of these growing pains are inevitable (today’s problems generally come from yesterday’s solutions). But the sooner they are addressed the better.

The policy agenda we propose for Kamala Harris will go a long way towards resolving all of these challenges. We will mostly avoid in-depth analysis of solutions, instead linking to other sources that spell out relevant arguments in detail.?

Broadly speaking, there are four major axes along which improvements need to be made:

• Environmental
• User experience?
• System-wide costs, and?
• Business model viability?

The solutions highlighted by this analysis each move us towards a better spot along one or more of these axes. We rank these variables for major solutions on a scale from zero (very bad) to ten (excellent) with five as a neutral rating.?

These problems won't fix themselves with existing technology, policy or business practices. Which means that if the administration is serious about decarbonization, it must embrace new technologies, innovative policy approaches and have the audacity to fundamentally reimagine our energy and transportation ecosystem.??

New, better charging systems

To up its EV charging game, America needs to learn from the pros – and that means China. Chinese EV production and charging networks dwarf those in America. China sells over half of the world’s EVs (compared to America’s 10%). But China's lead in charging infrastructure is even more commanding. China maintains over 80% of the global EV charging network–America has just about 4%.?U.S. charging networks aren’t just sparse, they’re unreliable. A 2022 JD Power survey found an alarming charge session failure rate of 20%.?

A decade ago, China’s EV industry and charging network were both a mess. But China's economic planners borrowed heavily from best practices in Japan and the U.S. to improve the economics, technology, and, most importantly, policy underlying the country's EV ecosystem. The student has become the teacher and China has decisively surpassed America in the race to build the car of the future. Now, America now needs to return the favor.?

J3400 unified charging standard

This starts with a unified charging standard - something which China has had for almost a decade.

By 2015, China had already fleshed out what its chargers would look like. But in America three major charging standards were competing to dominate the U.S. EV market: Japan’s CHAdeMO standard; Tesla’s NACS, or North American Charging Standard; and the Combined Charging Standard, or CCS. By the mid-2010s Tesla was the dominant player in the U.S. EV market and had established a substantial lead over other charging networks in terms of coverage, user experience and reliability. However, European and other American manufacturers favored the CCS charger design and so did most federal and state governments. Buoyed by government support, charging networks primarily dedicated to vehicles equipped with CCS charging ports proliferated (e.g. Electrify America, EVGo, ChargePoint, etc.).?

Government backing for CCS chargers peaked in 2021 when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) effectively blocked Tesla’s NACS charging network from receiving federal infrastructure funds. (The IIJA was a not-so-subtle effort to boost non-Tesla charging networks.) Then in May 2023, frustrated by slow, unreliable CCS charging networks, Ford CEO Jim Farley announced that his company would 1) change over to Tesla's NACS standard 2) gain access to Tesla’s charging network and 3) provide NACS adaptors for CCS vehicles to existing Ford EV owners free of charge. This was the first in a string of automotive defections to NACS including: BMW Group, Fisker, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai Motor Group, Jaguar Land Rover, Lucid Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, and Ford.

Theoretically, America is now on its way to adopting a unified “North American Charging System” codified as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J3400 standard.? The move towards a uniform standard addresses a major concern among potential EV buyers, with nearly 80% of US adults citing a lack of charging infrastructure as a primary reason for not purchasing an electric vehicle.?

Nonetheless, some environmental groups, consumer advocates and even lawmakers are working to ensure continued utilization of legacy standards such as CCS and CHAdeMO. This effort to grandfather in early EV adopters is deeply misguided. They can rely on adaptors that can interface with NACs chargers. America needs to move past the era of charging standard wars.

Adopting uniform charging standards across vehicle platforms in the U.S. will ultimately accelerate and simplify the deployment of EV infrastructure. The NACS standard is fast (with speeds up to 250 kW), its cables are lighter and more user-friendly than CCS, and it uses automated billing enabled by vehicle-to-charger communication. This eliminates the time-consuming and often faulty process of navigating a mobile app or swiping a credit card to pay at a charging station. The J3400 standard also includes some elements consciously aimed at “future proofing” the EV charging ecosystem. For instance, detachable charging cables would allow for a variety of charging ports to be utilized in the event that an OEM decides not to utilize the current NACS format.?

Faster is better?

As part of the expansion in charging infrastructure, China also revisited a technology debate that was considered settled more than a decade ago in the U.S: the debate between battery swapping and tethered charging. Today battery swapping has risen to the top of China’s EV policy agenda. That’s because battery swapping addresses many of the fundamental challenges to wide-scale electrification. It allows drivers to change out an empty battery for a fully charged one in minutes and also lowers up-front costs for EV purchasers as they don't buy the battery. The approach is fast, low-friction and reduces strain on the grid compared to fast charging.?

One Chinese company, Nio has already sold over 600,000 battery swap-enabled EVs. Today roughly 50% of new electric trucks sold in China can battery swap. We estimate that there are roughly a million battery swapping BEVs in China today (not including ultra light EVs such as bicycles or neighborhood EVs which also battery swap). For context, that’s about equivalent to every electric vehicle ever sold in America up until the year 2020.?

Other countries have started to take notice. In Japan a rich set of subsidies for battery swapping fleet vehicles was announced in July. And U.S. experts have started to understand the benefits of the approach. In 2022, California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Plan, or ZIP, stated that “[b]attery swap technology may become a good solution for those without access to home charging or long-distance travelers that need a quick recharge.” And in 2023, the California Energy Commission awarded Ample (where the authors currently work) a $15 million grant to manufacture swappable battery modules, in Brisbane, California.

There are other technologies that also deserve a look (wireless charging has some attractive features.) But battery swapping is the clear winner in terms of obvious utility, system benefits and global deployment.

America needs to keep building out its EV charging system. And that means improving its existing charging networks, exploring new technologies and embracing technologies that have already succeeded in other global EV markets -- particularly China.?

Performance based standards – no more widgets, no more carve outs, no more bridges to nowhere

In the mid-2000s, the term “bridge to nowhere” became a favored pejorative for wasteful government projects and programs. The actual bridge in question was a proposed $398 million Gravina Island Bridge connecting the mainland to Ketchikan, Alaska. With 50 residents, Gravina Island stood to reap a $7 million per capita infrastructure windfall. Thus the outrage.

The math, imagery and pork barrel politics were all evocative, but perhaps not quite evocative enough. Because the underlying argument against bridges to nowhere clearly didn't stick. Policymakers still love big, dubious infrastructure projects. So what is the philosophical antidote to nowhere bridges? “Technology neutral,” performance-based government spending.

Unfortunately, in the real-world, these two policy principles seem to appeal far more to technocrats and academics than to politicians and interest groups. Yet well designed performance-based incentives can be enormously effective.

They often lead to effective yet unexpected results. In the case of Ketchikan, Alaska, the bridge was ultimately cancelled. Residents stuck to a ferry boat that could get the job done at much lower cost. As we design clean energy policy to address climate change, we too need to think about which "bridges to nowhere" can be replaced or cancelled. This starts with better charging subsidies.

Charging subsidies done right

Over the past decade and a half, the U.S. federal government and California state government have both spent lavishly on supporting the buildout of EV chargers. But now that EVs account for almost 10% of U.S. vehicle sales, we need to start thinking about how to economically turn those chargers and EVs into carbon reduction machines -- not merely technocuriosities. That starts with increasing their utilization rates -- especially as compared to internal combustion engine vehicles. One way to do that is to reward customers when they charge electric vehicles rather than rewarding developers when they build a charging station. Broadly speaking, the more we charge electric vehicles, the more chargers are used, and the more emissions reductions will be achieved.?

The IIJA and IRA could each be improved in this regard. The IIJA is a case study in the dangers of playing god through central planning. In the beginning, the IIJA dictated to states exactly what kind of chargers to build (CCS), where to build them (within 1 mile of specifically designated roads, mostly highways, every 50 miles), and essentially covered the bill for charger construction and 5 years of operation. A thoughtful student of clean energy policy can see that those incentives are not a recipe for a self-sustaining industry. In addition to its painfully slow rollout, IIJA planning was catastrophically wrongfooted by the industry’s wholesale defection from CCS to Tesla’s North American Charging System (NACS, now the J3400 charging standard). IIJA chargers have been wildly expensive (a “minimally compliant” charger costs between $500-750k) and almost no one is happy with the program.?

The IRA is significantly better, in that it doesn’t tell people how they need to charge their cars. Instead, it contains a technology neutral incentive (the 30C tax credit) worth up to 30% the cost of a “clean refueling” installation. The problem here is that the more money you spend, the more money you get -- which creates an incentive for fudged accounting. Theoretically, there is a cap at $100k, but “favorable” rulemakings have increased that cap dramatically by allowing builders to break up EV charging systems into multiple “properties” and collect more cash for inefficiently designed projects.??

A better, performance-based solution would be to pay companies (or even customers!) an incentive for every kilowatt hour dispensed into an electric vehicle. Start that incentive high in early years to encourage growth, and then taper it in later years according to a predictable timetable once the charging field has found its footing. Funding clean miles rather than equipment would also provide a strong incentive for providers to maintain and upgrade charging equipment, because they would only be paid when they provide electric miles.

Good intentions, bad results

A similar example of this is America’s obsession with subsidizing electric vehicles. Criticizing EV subsidies sounds heretical to most EV advocates. But it shouldn’t. What we really want to be subsidizing is clean mobility (for people and cargo), not electric cars. The practical outcome of our current approach has been huge federal incentives for EV monstrosities like the Hummer and the Rivian -- not to speak of high-performance Teslas. The 9000 lb Hummer EV can do 0-60 in 3.3 seconds and costs $100,000. And yet a leased electric Hummer is eligible for a $7500 federal tax credit through the IRA’s 45W tax credit. (We’ll talk more about this issue in our section on circular economy)?

These problems are compounded by the fact that American EVs spend most of their time sitting around, uselessly parked in a driveway. Generally when EVs are driven, they use a tiny fraction of their massive, installed battery packs. (We’ll discuss this more in the section on circular economy.) That’s a waste. It’s a very inefficient use of batteries – batteries that are themselves enormously environmentally destructive to produce.?

Fixing IRA

The Harris-Waltz Administration should take some time to make good, better – specifically, the IRA. Let us be clear: We are big fans of the IRA. In our opinion the Inflation Reduction Act is the most important law Congress has ever passed to address climate change. It is helping the US transition away from costly fossil fuels, and in general it's packed with smart policy that encourages domestic manufacturing of clean technologies. For the most part, the IRA accomplishes these goals in a technology-neutral and businesses-model neutral manner, by providing credits for manufacturing clean technologies or producing clean energy.

But even the IRA has some vestigial elements that ought to be improved. One example of IRA performance-based standards that don’t quite make the grade is the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit. That’s because 45X credits are limited to businesses that sell clean energy products rather than leasing them. This disincentivizes certain circular economy based business models which rely on rental and leasing.? As part of its drive toward performance-based standards, Congress should amend the 45X tax credit to make leasing eligible, so that companies that manufacture EV batteries, lease them and reuse them at the end of their practical automotive lifecycle are eligible for the same 45X credits available to companies that manufacture and sell EV batteries.?

End the hydrogen highway to nowhere

When it comes to poorly spent government dollars targeting a specific technology approach, nothing looms quite as large as the billions poured into hydrogen cars. This spending should be redirected towards performance-based programs for other clean energy technologies. It could even be used to promote technologies with the same user and system benefits as hydrogen (e.g. fast refueling and capable of storing energy). These subsidies could include hydrogen itself. But only if hydrogen outcompetes other technologies on a tech-neutral, level playing field.?

For well over a decade, it’s been clear that EVs can and will fulfill most of the use cases envisioned for hydrogen powered vehicles. However, a giant lobbying effort by the hydrogen industry (made up of players from the automotive industry, oil and gas companies, and specific technology providers with financial interests at stake) have sustained massive funding for hydrogen research, hydrogen vehicles, hydrogen production and hydrogen fueling stations.?

Deployment numbers for hydrogen powered vehicles underscore the futility of this effort. Over 1.4 million EVs were sold in the US in 2023, which is an increase of 50% compared to 2022 sales. But only 2,978 hydrogen powered vehicles were sold in the US in 2023. And 2024 began with a quarterly drop in sales of hydrogen powered vehicles of 70%. In fact, globally there have been more Ferraris sold in recent years than fuel cell cars. Just as importantly, hydrogen itself is a greenhouse gas. It’s also notoriously difficult to keep from leaking. So hydrogen leakage holds forth the prospect of canceling out the "climate solution's" own benefits.?

Hydrogen’s shortcomings as a ground transportation fuel are rooted in its physical characteristics. As Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Leibrich put it “It’s the physics, stupid.” This means hydrogen’s flaws cannot be overcome with subsidies, and they will not change with the learning curve that comes from additional deployments, unlike many clean technologies. For example, a ship carrying hydrogen would have to make 2.5 trips to deliver the same amount of energy as a ship carrying LNG, and each trip would be more expensive because the hydrogen gas would have to be chilled to an even colder temperature than an LNG ship.?

Other technologies are as fast as hydrogen and capable of providing storage for renewable energy and grid services. Indeed, a 2023 peer-reviewed study comparing the systemic costs of decarbonization for ground transportation (between conventional EV charging, battery swapping, and hydrogen) found that hydrogen was the most expensive.?

Getting what we pay for

There are smart examples of performance-based incentives for clean energy all around the world America can learn from. For instance, the city of Nanjing in China is working to promote battery swapping, so they reward companies with a 0.15 CNY/kwh subsidy for swapping. Research published by the World Economic Forum has suggested that a similar approach could be pursued for charging EVs. Performance-based incentives for lightweighting EVs and other cars could make our roads dramatically safer. And these incentives could be supercharged by market-based policy mechanisms.??

Performance-based incentives could be helped along by promoting pay-as-you-go business models for everything from cars, to transportation, to battery use, to insurance. Performance-based incentives (or disincentives) could also be used to encourage ride share and taxi drivers to maximize the percentage of the time they are actually carrying customers, rather than driving long distances to find or pick up customers.

The cost of the clean energy transition is so enormous that it’s absolutely critical we get the best bang for our policy buck. The Harris Administration should urge their Congressional allies to stop incentivizing big, expensive and, often, environmentally destructive capital expenditures and start thinking about how to maximize utilization of precious clean energy assets while reducing emissions.

Cradle to cradle: an automotive circular economy

All of this is closely related to the concept of circular economy. Circular economy is a sustainability framework that has become very popular in Europe, but is not well understood in the United States. The general thrust of circular economy policies is to do more with less by eliminating waste in all forms. This starts with sourcing sustainable materials, economizing on their use through superior design, utilizing the resulting products in a more efficient way and then recycling them at end of life.

In December 2020, the World Economic Forum published a series of reports on circular economy in the automotive industry. One of these Raising Ambitions: A new roadmap for the automotive circular economy lays out a five-level taxonomy outlining different "levels" of circularity. Within this framework, higher levels of circularity are achieved by optimizing along four variables.

Understanding EVs through the lens of circular economy is important because building EVs is environmentally destructive. EVs come off the assembly line with a relatively large carbon footprint compared to a standard internal combustion engine vehicle. EVs utilize an outsize proportion of steel, aluminum and rubber and carry a prodigious, resource-intensive battery wherever they go. But while an EV starts at a disadvantage, it can buy back those extra emissions over its lifetime by running on clean electricity instead of oil (see Figure 8).?

Still it takes a while for EVs to buy down their resource footprint. A recent study published in Nature estimated that currently a driver has to put 28,068 miles on an EV before their EV will beat the emissions of an equivalent gasoline or diesel powered car. McKinsey research estimates that by 2040, 60% of lifecycle vehicular emissions will be from materials.?

It is imperative that we shrink this environmental footprint. Fortunately, there are a number of practical ways on offer. For instance, if you double the number of miles an EV is good for without increasing the quantity of materials used to build or run it, you effectively cut the material footprint in half (on a per mile basis). Similarly, if you are able to double the number of people or amount of cargo carried by a vehicle, you again cut the materials footprint in half (on a person mile or cargo mile basis). Think about it this way: in principle it’s better to build one EV that runs 1 million miles on clean electricity, than a million EVs that each travel 1 mile on clean electricity.

Certain parts of U.S. policy are already pushing in this direction. The Inflation Reduction Act has a number of incentives that may be dedicated to battery recycling on a selective basis and recycled battery content is encouraged by domestic sourcing requirements. However, there is no comprehensive framework for either battery recycling or circular economy in the IRA. And, aside from pushing for the transition to electric cars and clean electricity, there’s probably nothing more environmentally important from the EV space than adopting a comprehensive policy framework on circular economy.?

One more plug . . . for battery swapping

Within the context of a circular economy battery swapping provides some compelling advantages. Battery pack range can be shortened because swapping is so much faster than charging. Battery pack size can also be adjusted depending on range needs for a specific use case, or even a particular day. Consumers pay for battery packs as they use them -- which incentivizes them to use less battery pack when possible. And battery health is continuously monitored. Batteries can be quickly removed and the uniform form factor makes it easy to transition batteries into second life applications for energy storage. Even before their second life, batteries can be used as a grid asset to store renewable energy, charge when there is excess power available and export energy as necessary. Swappable batteries have fewer losses than standard onsite storage because they don't need to charge and discharge in order to charge a car (they charge once and swap). And unlike standard vehicle to grid concepts, swapping stations are always grid connected with a significant power available.

The upside to downsizing

Another obvious way to increase the “circularity” and reduce the environmental footprint of vehicles is through making them lighter and smaller. That would be relatively straightforward to do using existing law. This is evidenced by NHTSA’s recently proposed standards for reducing the risk of pedestrian head injury: “The proposed standard would establish test procedures simulating a head-to-hood impact and performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury. NHTSA estimates the new standard would save 67 lives a year.” Safety advocates are seeking additional regulation on vehicle hood height for pedestrian safety.

It's not only size that counts. It's weight. A recent study by The Economist revealed some startling statistics on American cars:?

• American cars are bloated and getting bigger: The average new car in America weighs more than 4,400lb (compared with 3,300lb in the European Union and 2,600lb in Japan)
• Heavier vehicles have made American roads less safe: getting hit by an additional 1,000lbs of steel and aluminum boosts the likelihood of death by 66%.
• Vehicles in the top 10% of weight distribution have a disproportional mortality rate: with roughly 26 deaths per 10,000 crashes – with most of the deaths afflicting smaller vehicles on the road.

By their nature, EVs tend to be heavier than non-EVs. So over the coming decades, some automotive bloat is likely. But it needs to be controlled.? Besides saving lives for pedestrians or people in other vehicles, safety standards that encourage lighter vehicles could slow down the inflation of auto insurance rates. Heavy EVs with lots of torque correlate with more damage in collisions, leading to higher insurance costs.?

Micromobility --> microemissions

Circular economy is not just about controlling automotive bloat, but capturing the unique technological opportunities presented by EVs. Small EVs (think electric bicycles and scooters) can transform urban and suburban mobility in ways that effectively shrink neighborhoods and bring people closer to retail centers and transit. They can also help America economize on emissions and mobility costs (see graphic Figure 11).?

Federal funds should be invested in building out robust infrastructure for scooters and bicycles -- infrastructure that is safe, comfortable, convenient and converges on retail and transit hubs. We should also directly subsidize electric bikes. (For the cost of one Tesla Model 3, you could buy over 100 good quality electric scooters.)

There are also benefits in terms of efficiency. An electric scooter is 99%+ lighter than an electric car. The weight reduction means that 99% less energy is being used to lug around a heavy car and its heavy battery. Instead, most of the energy is used to transport the human or goods being conveyed.?For the amount of energy it takes to drive a normal ICE vehicle 1 mile, you can drive an electric bike or scooter over 100X farther. It costs more than 60X more to fuel a standard ICE vehicle compared to an electric bike or scooter.

That may sound like a lot of weight to put on the handlebars of electric bikes and scooters. But Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that 2 and 3-wheeler EVs already account for more than 60% of oil displacement by electrified mobility and use a tiny fraction of the industry’s batteries (see Figure 15). So we think they're a worthy investment.???

So what should those investments in micromobility look like? They should focus on 1) funding for protected bike and mobility lanes and 2)direct subsidies for micromobility devices. ?

Pool party!

Pooled mobility contributes to a circular economy by filling up seats that would otherwise be vacant. This maximizes the utilization of mobility assets (e.g. cars) and improves fuel economy on a per passenger mile basis. Pooled mobility could have more immediate impact on mobility emissions than practically any other opportunity. Unlike a new battery, or rail line there's no scientific breakthrough or infrastructure investment required. The challenge, then, is how to design policies that promote pooling.

The average automobile in the U.S. is utilized only about 5% of the time, and 38% of the time that a car is actually being used it is only carrying a single occupant, the driver.? An in depth discussion of the potential for pooling can be found in Dr. Daniel Sperling's (editor) book Three Revolutions: Steering Automated, Shared and Electric Vehicles Toward a Better Future. “The single most powerful technology in this transformation is not going to be a better battery or a more fuel-efficient engine, but a smartphone (providing geolocation and a consumer interface) and advanced routing algorithms (enabling on demand carpooling),” argues one author.

Some of the knock-on effects of intensive pooling may be as important as short-term reductions in carbon emissions and traffic. Intensively utilized pooled vehicles will have a compressed lifecycle, accelerating the turnover of capital stock, thus allowing for faster innovation cycles. A new vehicle will no longer hang around for 20 years. Instead, it could run into the ground in less than 5 years.?

The Harris Administration should create opportunities for ride-share drivers and communities to financially benefit from pooling miles, thus decreasing the number of vehicles on the road and emissions in the air.

Sky's the limit: reduce, reuse, recycle, revitalize?

There are a lot of other elements that can and should be integrated into a circular economy policy framework. These include: minimizing production scrap; remanufacturing (where durable components such as shocks are refreshed for second-life use); utilizing low-carbon materials (including decarbonizing steel, aluminum and battery manufacturing); utilizing low-carbon manufacturing methods; recapturing material stock for recycling at end of life; adopting “component-as-a-service” (e.g. tires) business models; and modular vehicle design. Add to that better end of life sorting and recycling, “right to repair” laws that extend the practical lifetime of goods, more rational warranty and second life requirements and international agreements to extend circular economy practices across borders. Other things can be done to make polluting vehicles less attractive. Low Emission Zones can bar private and polluting vehicles from city centers, preferential lane access can give clean vehicles a leg up during their commute, incentives for mode switching from cars to bus and rail can be adopted and government can invest more in flexible high utilization transportation methods like bus rapid transit.??

Each of these strategies can support a transportation ecosystem with as little waste and pollution as possible while still achieving the desired output: high quality mobility.?

America’s ultimate ambition should be to build a mobility ecosystem that doesn’t just damage the environment less, but actively improves it by enabling the wide scale integration of clean energy, mobility, agricultural and lifestyle technologies (see level 5 of the WEF’s Circular Economy taxonomy).? Imagine a mobility ecosystem that actually has a net positive impact on the environment -- not just doing less harm, but revitalizing ecosystems. Now that’s something to get excited about.?

Fleets

One last critical area of focus for a Harris Administration EV agenda is fleets – and especially medium and heavy duty fleets. That's because America’s truck electrification track record has, thus far, been long on promises and short on actual trucking. One might say that the hype cycle for electrification of U.S. trucking began in December 2017 -- when Elon Musk delivered an early Christmas present to adoring stockholders. Two massive, sleek, metallic semi trucks rolled silently onto a cavernous black soundstage.? The lead truck door swung open and out jumped Musk himself, throwing both hands over his head to thunderous applause. Onstage Tesla’s VP of Trucks and Programs effused that Tesla had created “the best trucks ever!” All electric, they claimed 500 miles of range, 5-second 0-60 time (without load) and 80,000 pound towing capacity. Six years later, these Tesla-fied semi trucks are missing in action. And so are other commercial electric trucks in the US.??

When it comes to fleets, electrification is a tough nut to crack. At the same time, trucks and other fleet vehicles have the potential to provide the most bang for your buck in terms reducing emissions. That’s because fleets drive a lot. For instance, the average American car only drives 11,467 miles per year. But the average New York City taxi does about 70,000 miles per year. In other words, electrifying one taxi cab is as good as electrifying 6 normal vehicles. (In fact, it's better. Because you save the emissions required to manufacture the 6 electric vehicles.) And while a UPS delivery truck only drives 12,400 miles annually, it will likely run on dirty diesel and greedily slurp up a gallon for every 10 miles it drives. Electrifying these gas hogs should be a high priority.

“Urban operating, defined mileage, and back to basic fleet vehicles fit hand in glove with EVs.” said Roger Atkins, a leading voice in the EV industry with 300,000 followers on LinkedIn. “[T]hen there's the marginal cost benefit? . . . in many applications they are cheaper to run!”

But building fleet charging depots is expensive and recharging takes time. Both of these challenges stand in the way of fleet electrification. And, of course, EVs can be energy hogs too. Overbuilt vehicles with wicked acceleration are inefficient –? regardless of whether they are gas-powered or electric. They use more batteries, steel and aluminum in production and require more electricity to operate. For instance, the all-electric Rivian R1T pickup truck weighs over 7,000 pounds and does 0-60 in about 3.5 seconds. With that kind of performance, you're going to be an energy hog -- and the R1T is. But properly designed and thoughtfully deployed delivery trucks and other commercial vehicles have a huge role to play in decarbonizing our economy?

Bulking up

To succeed in deploying electric medium and heavy duty commercial vehicles at scale, America has to get creative. Part of the solution likely comes in the form of battery swapping. EV trucks simply take too long to charge. To address this, Chinese manufacturers have developed and deployed battery swapping systems for MD/HDV trucks at significant scale. Japan is following close behind. Last year at the 2023 Tokyo Mobility Show, major truck manufacturers like Isuzu, Mitsubishi Fuso and Honda displayed a solid array of real-world battery swapping electric trucks and delivery vehicles – ranging from the 15,000 pound Mitsubishi Fuso eCanter to Honda’s pint-sized N-Van.

While speed is a major component of the appeal for battery swapping in this space, grid management is also significant. High power charging facilities for MD/HDVs promise to be enormously expensive. Battery swapping allows charging facilities to aggressively manage and fully utilize their precious grid resources.?Without them, the challenge is much the same as for public charging with light duty vehicles: charging takes too long and costs too much. Then there is also the issue of permitting and construction – which, once again, takes too long and costs too much.?

Today, ?China dominates the market for electric trucks, accounting for 70% of global sales (a modest decline from 85% in 2022). Roughly 50% of China’s electric truck battery swap. They may not boast Tesla’s 0-60 sprint or 500-mile driving range, but they are actually on the streets, delivering packages, hauling trash and concrete, and packed with utilitarian features that address the real world challenges of fleet electrification.

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The Personal Energy Independence and Security Act of 2025

How we talk about this transition is critically important. All of these changes are going to cost money, they will require Americans to learn to deal with new technologies and sometimes they will be inconvenient. So it's important to emphasize the elements of the transition that are genuinely attractive to those beyond the tree hugger community. The framing we suggest? Energy independence and security.?

In the mid-2000s, clean energy groups were successful in building unconventional coalitions to support environmental policies. They did this by largely emphasizing energy security in their messaging. These groups eschewed left-leaning messengers like the Sierra Club and various flavors of social justice warrior. Instead, NGOs like Securing America's Future Energy recruited four star generals and national security buffs to make the case. The resulting Energy Security and Independence Act was jam-packed with provisions that have fueled decades of environmental progress – including higher fuel economy requirements and electrification -- but were not the product of environmental politics.

This playbook should be rerun and supercharged by the Harris administration.

Rather than national energy security and independence, the Harris Administration should give her voters a pathway to personal energy security and independence. Rooftop solar paired with improved insulation, more efficient appliances, heat pumps and electric cars can allow any American to break free from rising utility bills, volatile oil and gas markets, and secure themselves and their loved ones against outages caused by extreme weather events.

That’s a framing that appeals to independent voters who may not be fully bought into saving the whales. Enabling real energy independence and energy security for voters and their families could allow Harris’s environmental policies to appeal to a large coalition spanning the center right to the far left while also largely eliminating household emissions.?

One last thing

Roughly 1% of American cars and trucks are electric in 2024 (~3 million EVs out of almost 300 million cars and trucks on American roads). That's a big hill to climb. So in our push for deployment, we can't forget the importance of innovation. Policies need to keep pushing innovation aggressively and unapologetically.

Within the environmental and policy community there is an inevitable tension between forces that want to take the wins America has in hand and deploy them at scale, and those forces that want to hold off until we innovate toward something better. This frequently leads to misplaced confidence in the quality and applicability of the technology of today. When that technology reaches the hands of normal consumers, they may be disappointed -- even disillusioned -- by the real-world limitations.

So let's not pretend that everything we've built to date is perfect.

This may end up being a common theme across the Democrats' 2024 coalition. The Democratic Party appears to be in a period of ideological retrenchment after pushing too far, too fast, with too much certainty on a whole host of issues.? Kamala Harris and her policy team appear to be embracing a more practical, centrist approach to governance. They must continue to do this without abandoning the critically important and time sensitive work of decarbonization. Emphasizing the ongoing role of innovation is one way to admit room for progress, without stepping down from critical deployment priorities.?

We hope that this agenda will shed light on what a forward leaning presidential EV agenda could look like. It is obviously an incomplete sample of policy prescriptions. But it draws upon many years of study and experience and seeks to harmonize the intentions of electrification with the real world needs of Americans.

We want to thank Ample for supporting this analysis and our colleague Misa Haring for her editorial support. The opinions and analysis expressed reflect only the authors' views.