Last year, California unveiled the most drastic EV mandate in the United States.
It's called the Advanced Clean Cars II rule, and it aims to ensure that by 2035 every single new car and light truck being sold in California is zero-emissions.
A lot of states and even the federal government have offered incentives to accelerate EV adoption, but California's rule is far more than that.
It's an edict that will greatly reduce the number of vehicles available to Californians and drive some car companies out of the state entirely.
And now, New Jersey is following suit.
That is, last month, the Garden State copied California's legislation and hopes to have it enacted by the end of this year.
If it succeeds, the new law would require manufacturers to start selling zero-emissions cars and trucks beginning with 2027 models, or in 2026.
Furthermore, even if New Jersey doesn't adopt the ACCII mandate by the end of 2023, car manufacturers will still have to adopt the standard by the 2028 model year.
That means more than half of all new cars sold would have to be zero-emissions.
Either way, any car company doing business in the state will be banned from selling cars with gas-powered engines by 2035.
Now, that may seem like a long way off, but it's really not. And when you look at the full list of targets, you can see just how fantastic these goals are:
Indeed, a scant 1.5% of the approximately 6 million total vehicles registered in New Jersey are EVs. And at the end of last year, electric vehicles made up just 8% of new vehicle registrations.