For some time, California has acted as a de facto second level of regulatory authority over national automobile policy. Ever since the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act included a special carveout for California to set its own stricter auto emissions standards, California has enforced standards that automakers have had little choice but to abide by. But while this blurring of the federalist structure is just one more example of California flexing its muscle as the country’s largest economy to effectively set national policy, New York may soon try and get in on the action.
A recently introduced bill in the New York State Senate would require cars sold to New Yorkers to comply with several new safety standards by 2024. These standards include visibility rules for larger vehicles such as trucks and SUVs, as well as speed-limiting technology (known as Intelligent Speed Assistance or ISA) and automated emergency braking systems.
The European Union (EU) has already passed rules requiring all new cars sold in the EU beginning in 2024 include ISA technology, which uses GPS data and reads speed limit signage to limit automobiles’ speed. Cars with ISA technology can issue audible and visual warnings that the driver is speeding, and can even begin to force the acceleration pedal upwards (though the driver can override this pressure by pushing down harder).
It’s important to recognize that whether or not these features are worthwhile is not really relevant to questions of whether New York should be the one to require them. While many of these features are becoming increasingly common in new car sales and implementation is not prohibitively expensive, neither is it free. A 2012 EU report estimated that the cost of components for automakers to comply with its ISA requirements would cost between $223-300 in inflation-adjusted dollars, costs that would be passed on to the consumer.
That may well be a cost that consumers and taxpayers are willing to pay for such technology, which has been proven to reduce automobile-related deaths, but New York would not be giving the rest of the country a choice. While California is by far the largest automobile market in the country, New York remains too large of a market for vehicle manufacturers to ignore. In 2018, New Yorkers had the fourth-most automobile purchases in the country with over 280,000. Should New York pass these proposed requirements, automakers would likely make them standard rather than lose access to the New York market.
Increasingly, individual states have taken it upon themselves to set national standards where they perceive a lack of action at the federal level. An analogous example is California’s effort to impose consumer privacy standards on how businesses use consumers’ data. While most Americans want their data to be kept safe, California’s strict and comprehensive standards entailed $71 billion in compliance costs over the next decade for California businesses alone, with no effort to estimate costs for affected out-of-state businesses.
Consumers in other states had little opportunity to weigh in on whether they considered the added costs, which would inevitably be passed on to them as well as Californians, worth the data privacy requirements entailed. If such a groundswell of popular support existed among other Americans, it should have found its outlet in the form of action at the federal level.
States imposing national burdens on interstate commerce is something that all Americans should oppose on principle. Americans should be governed by the representatives that they elect — not the ones elected by residents of states on the other side of the country.
