Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order N-79-20 requires all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California to be zero-emission by 2035. (Leydi Cris Cobo Cordon/Daily Bruin senior staff)
Zero-emission vehicles accounted for 29.1% of all new car purchases in California in the third quarter of 2025, marking progress in the state’s goals of achieving a fully clean-energy future.
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-79-20 in 2020, directing the state to require that all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state be zero-emission by 2035. Under this order, newly sold vehicles would no longer generate exhaust emissions while operating. The California Air Resources Board – a state agency that manages California’s air quality and climate protection efforts – solidified this order in 2022, adopting the Advanced Clean Cars II regulations. This program established a timeline for automakers’ delivery of ZEVs, culminating in a complete phaseout of new gasoline car sales by 2035.
Qiao Yu, a postdoctoral scholar at the Fielding School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the state set the 2035 goal because electric vehicles were becoming more widespread.
“If we were to set that going back to 2015, that was a time when only Tesla – or maybe some of those very higher end BMWs – has some kind of type of EVs, whereas, by the year of 2019 or 2020, we are seeing more affordable options coming from electric vehicles,” Yu said.
Deepak Rajagopal, a professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said the increasingly clean electricity grid in California – which powers electric vehicles – made this decade an opportune time to set the 2035 goal.
“From an environmental perspective, California has among the cleanest electric grids in the nation,” Rajagopal said.
Rajagopal added that ensuring vehicles run on clean electricity is essential to reducing emissions before they even hit the road.
“If you make your electricity from clean sources, driving electric cars makes a lot of sense,” he said. “If the electricity is coming from dirty sources. … there may be air pollution at the point of electric power generation.”
According to the CARB, 50% of greenhouse gas emissions and 80% of air pollutants in California come from the transportation sector. Yu said – because the state has long been committed to fighting climate change – targeting vehicle emissions is an efficient way of reducing pollution, considering their large share of total emissions.
In 1967, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan established CARB to address the state’s efforts in regulating vehicle emissions and reducing the state’s air pollution. When Congress passed the Federal Air Quality Act that same year, California was given the ability to set its own, tighter air quality rules. Congress made this decision based on factors such as the state’s distinct geography, weather and its large population of car users, according to CARB.
The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 built upon the 1967 Air Quality Act by establishing federal air pollution standards and giving the Environmental Protection Agency authority to enforce them. The law also granted California a waiver to set its own vehicle emissions standards, recognizing the state’s preexisting regulations and its significantly worse air quality compared to the rest of the country.
“California … has always been troubled by air pollution, and that really origins from the car culture,” Yu said. “We really need a car to drive around, and that brings a lot of air pollutants to this region as compared to the rest of the nation.”
In 1990, CARB adopted the state’s first ZEV mandate to begin the process of transitioning away from gasoline vehicles, according to a report by independent research institution Resources for the Future. The agency set a goal for 10% of new car sales in the state to be electric by 2003, an intentionally ambitious goal designed to spark innovation and the development of electric vehicle technologies.
However, according to CalMatters, CARB rescinded this mandate six years later after pushback from automakers and the oil industry.
Narayan Gopinathan, a doctoral candidate at Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said, in the 1990s, these goals were not feasible with the existing technology.
“Unfortunately, the technology was not really ready yet at that time, and so they had to essentially water down the targets,” Gopinathan said. “Eventually, they did revamp the program with more flexibility to enable a tradable credit program, which actually enabled certain companies – such as Tesla – to specialize in the development of zero emission vehicles.”
This credit, banking-and-trading system allowed automakers to earn ZEV credits based on the number of ZEVs they sold in California, according to the Legal Information Institute. This system also allowed CARB to monitor compliance with its ZEV quotas .
Yu added that credits can be banked, saved for future compliance, or traded and sold among automakers, giving traditional automakers more flexibility and benefitting those who manufacture a lot of ZEVs.
“Traditional car manufacturers need to buy those credits from Tesla, or from Lucid or these other ZEV manufacturers, … so Tesla is really a beneficiary,” Yu said. “But there will be penalties if you do not meet the sales requirements.”
CARB also mandated that vehicle manufacturers must deliver a growing percentage of ZEVs to the California market in its Advanced Clean Cars II regulations. While these regulations cover car model years 2026 through 2035, its predecessor program, Advanced Clean Cars I, established requirements for model years 2012 through 2025.
Furthermore, in order to be eligible to receive ZEV credits, automakers must certify that their cars meet CARB’s test procedures and emission standards for pollutants and greenhouse gases.
Rajagopal said, as a result of these regulations, electric vehicles are becoming more efficient and affordable.
“Because of California doing these things, it brings down the cost of electric vehicles for everyone in the longer run. Because companies invest on a large scale, things come down and become cheap for everybody,” Rajagopal said .
Yu added that air quality improvements that will result from an increase in ZEVs on the road will be felt most by those in underserved communities.
“In California, we find that the majority of those highway infrastructures were built in the under-burden communities, ……and that goes back to the 1960s and racial segregation,” Yu said. “If we can make the cars moving through these communities to be quieter and cleaner, that’s going to really eliminate or reduce a lot of the air pollutants.”
Despite the economic, environmental and public health benefits that California’s ZEV mandate is projected to deliver, it has been attacked by the federal government.
In May 2025, Senators voted to revoke California’s Clean Air Act waivers granted under the Biden administration after EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin – a President Donald Trump appointee – called on Congress to review them, according to the Sierra Club. Zeldin, a former Republican congressman and member of the House of Representatives’ Climate Solutions Caucus, generally voted against environmental legislation during his tenure in Congress.
These waivers had allowed CARB to establish three regulations to reduce vehicle-caused air pollution and speed up the transition to zero-emissions transportation.
The Advanced Clean Cars II and Advanced Clean Trucks programs were among the rescinded waivers.
These programs required automakers to sell increasing proportions of zero-emission passenger vehicles, reaching full zero-emission sales for new cars by 2035 and 40 to 75% for new trucks by 2035. The third regulation, the Heavy-Duty Omnibus NOx rule, targeted nitrogen oxide emissions from large trucks. The EPA granted waivers for the Clean Cars II and Omnibus NOx rules in early January just before the Biden administration ended and approved the clean trucks rule in April 2023.
The California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Newsom and CARB, along with a coalition of 10 attorneys general, filed a lawsuit against the federal government June 12 challenging the waiver rescission.
“What California does has a huge impact because automakers don’t want to make two types of cars – one for California and for the rest of the nation,” Rajagopal said. “So, if California requires electric cars, they’ll have to produce it on a massive scale.”
The same day the lawsuit was filed, Newsom issued an executive order reaffirming the state’s commitment to accelerate the deployment of ZEVs. The order also directs CARB to design a new set of regulations that build on the Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks and Heavy-Duty Omnibus NOx rules so a contingency plan is in place if the court permanently blocks California’s existing rules .
But, in spite of federal pushback, Rajagopal said university research efforts, including those being conducted at UCLA, should continue to advance the ZEV plan.
“Universities should be at the forefront of this,” Rajagopal said. “Everything from the basic science, the fundamental science, the basic physics and chemistry to engineering, to law, policy, economics, has happened and should continue to happen.”

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