In recent years, Toyota has lobbied hard against stricter pollution regulations that favored electric vehicles over the auto giant’s hybrid vehicles, but experts question their reasoning. Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said that while hybrids were “very efficient on lowering emissions a little bit, they’re not very effective in bringing us to zero emissions in the long run.”
Despite the EPA’s decision to extend the timeline for implementing its new emission limits, Alan Jenn, a researcher at the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis, remains confident that the new standards will “nevertheless push electrification nationwide.”
The issue, according to Gil Tal, director of the EV Research Center at the University of California-Davis, US, is that these municipalities depend on fuel taxes to pay for public infrastructure and services.
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