Cars, Homes, Skills, Worker Classification

ZEV program running out of gas?

By: Kish Rajan

With the clock ticking down to the end of this year’s legislative session, our leaders in Sacramento are debating initiatives that will put more clean cars on the road, boost air quality and innovation, and improve the health of our residents. We must take advantage of this brief window of opportunity to recalibrate the state’s primary mechanism for encouraging electric vehicle adoption – the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credit system.

California – led by Gov. Jerry Brown and the state air resources board — leads the world in the transition to zero tailpipe emissions, powered by ingenuity not only in the technological realm, but in the policy arena as well. The goal was to bolster the efforts of automotive entrepreneurs to accelerate the deployment of clean cars up and down the state, in an industry notoriously immune to change.

The ZEV credit program as it’s currently structured won’t get us to where we need to be – currently, fewer than four percent of cars sold each model year are electric.

To ignite and accelerate this shift, state policymakers introduced so-called “ZEV credits”, a program to incentivize car companies to devote significant resources toward developing and deploying electric vehicle models that excite drivers.  This is the carrot for the automotive industry to move forward. The intent was to inject vehicles with zero tailpipe emissions into the marketplace; it was smart, creative regulation to bolster innovation and creativity that should be a national model.

These credits were designed to work with companies small and large, legacy and upstart, in order to push the clean car market forward.

Yet, despite the best intentions of state regulators, the ZEV credit program as it’s currently structured won’t get us to where we need to be – currently, fewer than 4 percent of cars sold each model year are electric.

Read the full article here.

Tech Entrepreneurs Can Learn A Lot About Marketing From Tesla

By: Mike Montgomery

Beating expectations on Wednesday, Tesla Motors TSLA -4.11% reported $1.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter on a 45% sales jump from last year. The fact that the climb came with a 57 cent per-share loss didn’t bother investors who were braced for a 58 cent per-share loss.

The Elon Musk hype machine rolls on as Tesla prepares to roll out 500,000 units of its newest car, the Model 3.

Cars are not the kind of thing people usually wait hours in line to buy. But that’s exactly what happened last month when Tesla Motors started taking down payments for the Model 3. The car won’t even be available until 2017 and certainly no one has given it a test-drive, but at $35,000, it costs less than half the price of a Model S — and that’s all most people need to know.

Silicon Valley types like to throw the word “disruption” around a lot, but Elon Musk is truly disrupting the car industry. Not only did he manage to create a car so exciting that people are lining up overnight just to put down a payment, but those locations where customers were dropping their money? They’re not even actual stores. You can’t buy a Tesla there — you can only purchase one online. The storefronts you see are simply places where people can test-drive the vehicle. This business model, which bypasses the dealership, is of course upsetting the car-sales landscape and is under attack by the dealership lobby.

But it’s important to remember that disruption in and of itself should never really be the end goal. Not every industry needs to be disrupted. If entrepreneurs are going to work to disrupt, they have to make sure there is a positive end goal — that consumers are going to benefit, that work is going to become more efficient or that some overall good comes from the disruption.

Read the full article here.

Mercury News: New economy requires a new safety net

By: Mike Montgomery

When the California Labor Commission ruled that Uber drivers are employees and should therefore be entitled to benefits, it showed how out of touch our regulators are with the new economy.

The ruling is another reflection of outdated thinking about the employee-employer relationship. Digital platforms and apps are reinventing the intersection of supply and demand. This change may have skyrocketed with ride- and home-sharing, but we will soon use these systems for all types of services, from parents finding Little League batting coaches for their kids, to truckers picking up extra loads on their routes.

These new platforms are creating profound change. Over the last 40 years we’ve gone from a workforce where an employee had two or three employers over his or her lifetime to workers now switching careers regularly and even scaling by hiring their own employees along the way…

(Read the full article here)

Business Insider: Uber and Lyft fail to convince judges their employees are ‘independent contractors’

Here are the two most pertinent quotes from the story, both coming from California District Judge Vince Chhabria:

“The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes.”

“California’s outmoded test for classifying workers will apply in cases like this. And because the test provides nothing remotely close to a clear answer, it will often be for juries to decide.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-and-lyft-fail-to-convince-judges-their-employees-are-independent-contractors-2015-3#ixzz3UIFTYbVy