Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that all states follow the U.S. Clean Air Act.
Three in four vehicles in the U.S. could be electric by 2050 if certain states enact California's ban on gasoline vehicle sales by 2035.
If the 17 states that follow the California Air Resources Board's limits on pollution also adopt California's Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which requires all vehicles sold to be zero-emission by 2035, more than 239 million vehicles on U.S. roads could be electric by 2050. That's from a report published Monday by Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank.
Those states make up nearly 40 percent of vehicle registrations today, according to CARB. If each state goes all-EV by 2035, the shift "could really dramatically reshape the U.S. car market," Robbie Orvis, Energy Innovation's senior director of modeling and analysis, told Automotive News.
Without the Advanced Clean Cars II rule, 189 million U.S. registrations would be EVs by 2050, the group found. If only California followed the rule, 207 million EVs would be on the road by 2050.
According to Experian, 2.2 million EVs were in operation in the U.S. last year. J.D. Power said that battery-electric vehicles made up about 8 percent of U.S. light-vehicle sales in the first quarter, compared with 5.2 percent a year earlier. Plug-in hybrids made up another 2 percent of sales.