A new poll making the rounds this week claims nearly two-thirds of Californians oppose Governor Gavin Newsom’s rule requiring every new car sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035. Cue the outrage columns. Cue the triumphant “the market has spoken” commentary. Here’s the part almost nobody writing about that poll bothered to check: the mandate they’re arguing about, in the form that actually had legal teeth, has not existed since June 2025.
That’s not a typo, and it’s not spin. It’s sitting in plain language on the California Air Resources Board’s own website.
Some background, because the press-release version of this story skips the parts that matter. In 2022, CARB adopted Advanced Clean Cars II, the regulation that set the 100 percent zero-emission target for new passenger vehicles by the 2035 model year. It also tightened smog-forming pollutant limits and, less famously, let plug-in hybrids count toward that 100 percent figure. The whole framework worked only because the EPA had granted California a Clean Air Act waiver, the decades-old mechanism that lets the state write stricter vehicle rules than the federal government, and lets other states copy them.
Then the federal government moved to take the waiver back. In 2025, Congress passed resolutions attempting to void it, and the Trump administration signed them. CARB didn’t quietly comply, but it also stopped pretending the ground hadn’t shifted. Its own program page now describes “illegal federal actions purporting to revoke California’s Clean Air Act waiver” — language from the regulator itself, not a press release, and it tells you exactly how unsettled this still is.
Governor Newsom’s response wasn’t just a lawsuit. On June 12, 2025, he signed Executive Order N-27-25, directing CARB to figure out what comes next. What came next is a program called Drive Forward, and it’s the first moment in this story that should stop readers cold: California’s environmental regulator has spent more than a year rebuilding its own signature climate rule from scratch, in public, because the version everyone is now polling about got knocked out from under it.
Drive Forward isn’t a rebranding exercise. CARB held public listening sessions in Fresno, Sacramento, and Long Beach in July 2025, took written comments into August, and is still gathering input through a companion effort called ZEV Forward, which is compiling a report back to the governor. Picture that for a second: the agency accused of forcing automakers to sell electric cars is currently running community workshops to decide what its own rule should even say.
The second surprise is buried in the part of Advanced Clean Cars II that almost nobody arguing about it seems to remember. The 100 percent zero-emission target was never a pure-EV mandate. Plug-in hybrids, with a tailpipe and a gas tank, counted toward compliance. The rule pundits describe as banning gasoline cars quietly built in an exception for cars that still burn gasoline.
None of this makes the polling irrelevant. Public opinion matters, and a climate rule built on an executive order instead of legislation was always going to be politically fragile — that might be the real lesson here. But treating a defunct rule as the live wire misses the actual story, which is what happens to an entire industry when its compliance target disappears in the middle of a product cycle.
Automakers had spent years lining up product plans, battery contracts, and ZEV credit banking around Advanced Clean Cars II’s phase-in schedule. That planning didn’t get easier once the rule went legally ambiguous. It got worse, because now they’re engineering cars toward a target regulators themselves are still redrafting. We’ve written before about how Detroit’s EV strategy has become a bet on whoever occupies the White House rather than a bet on the technology, and this is exactly the kind of regulatory whiplash that produces that behavior. Nobody invests with confidence in a rule that might not survive the next election, let alone the current fight.
It’s bigger than California, too. More than a dozen other states adopted California’s vehicle rules under Section 177 of the Clean Air Act specifically so they wouldn’t have to write their own. When California’s rule goes into limbo, so does theirs. A fight that reads like a state-level culture war is actually a fight over how much of the new-car market in this country runs on rules nobody in Washington or Sacramento can currently guarantee will hold.
There’s historical irony here for anyone who has covered this beat long enough. California’s waiver has been fought over before. The Bush administration denied a similar request in 2007, only for the Obama administration to grant it in 2009. The first Trump administration revoked it again in 2019, and California sued to get it back. What’s happening now isn’t a new war. It’s the same one, on its third or fourth rematch, and the casualty each time is any automaker or supplier trying to plan five years out.
The economics complicate the simple “nobody wants EVs” reading of the poll, too. By CARB’s own accounting, California blew past its goal of 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road two years ahead of schedule, without the toughest phase of Advanced Clean Cars II ever taking effect. People bought the cars anyway. What they’re rejecting in the poll isn’t necessarily the product. It’s being told they have no other option.
That’s the idea worth remembering once the poll numbers fade from the news cycle. The EVs aren’t the fragile part of this story. The paperwork underneath them is. A mandate written by executive order can be unwritten just as fast, and every automaker still building a decade-long product roadmap around a rule this unsettled is making a bet, not a plan.