It's unfair to say that these people don't understand the free market. They understand that the free market will not push us out of gasoline cars and into electric cars until oil becomes very expensive.
The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out, thus before the free market is willing.
Nobody wants to pay more for their transportation, so at some point someone just has to step in and force the issue.
California's laws don't dictate exactly how producers and consumers find their way off gasoline, they simply state that they must, and so leave it to the free market to find that path.
Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea, since batteries are likely to change rather quickly in the near future, and this is a time when we want as much competition and innovation (both in technical methods and business methods) as we can muster.
> Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea
But it would be great to standardize something. Imagine a world where my car could only burn Honda Gasoline (TM), whereas your car could only burn Toyota Gasoline (TM).
There are cars that run on diesel fuel, cars that run on ethanol, cars that run on gasoline, and cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells.
Your suggestion of cars that only burn HondaGas seems fairly implausible, as Honda would need to build a large network of special HondaGas filling stations, and no one would be willing to buy a HondaGas car until the network was complete. It would be massively risky for the company, and they would be pretty unlikely to try it absent some kind of external force.
(By contrast, an electric car can charge from widespread, non-proprietary electricity sources, not only specific branded superchargers.)
But in any event, I don’t think your world would be so bad in a nascent industry, where formulating a special type of fuel might conceivably lead to a dramatic improvement in efficiency or a dramatic cost reduction, or some other advantage.
Sometimes forcing standards helps build a common platform on which people can innovate in other areas, but sometimes forcing standards (or even just having de facto common standards win in the market) holds a whole industry back by precluding better alternative infrastructure.
In computing, we have many examples of this: the dominance of the x86 architecture, the C programming languages, UNIX, the mouse and keyboard as basic input devices, HTTP as the main network protocol, the Mac/Windows GUI, MS Office, Photoshop, etc... these behemoths all won over their respective markets then stagnated, in most cases allowing flourishing innovation on top but preventing some amount of innovation at the same level unless and until radically different conditions unseated them.
> The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out
You mean before irreversible ecological disaster? I don't think anyone outside the business of fossil fuel extraction is concerned about us running out of fossil fuels.
The goal is to get Californians into electric cars before the gasoline runs out, thus before the free market is willing.
Nobody wants to pay more for their transportation, so at some point someone just has to step in and force the issue.
California's laws don't dictate exactly how producers and consumers find their way off gasoline, they simply state that they must, and so leave it to the free market to find that path.
Standardizing battery packs sounds like a terrible idea, since batteries are likely to change rather quickly in the near future, and this is a time when we want as much competition and innovation (both in technical methods and business methods) as we can muster.