[dragonwriter]

The Business Insider piece sourced it's information on what the bill does not on the bill text, but on a combination of an advocacy email from an opposed legislator and reporting by the Mercury News.

The rebate plan does not do at all what the article claims; specifically, for instance, it does not establish a new general rebate that is designed to match the difference between an electric vehicle's price and that of a non-electric vehicle with similar features. Instead, it establishes a declining rebate for compact electric vehicles that starts at an initial level that would provide an approximate net purchase price after all existing incentives equal to the most commonly sold compact vehicle in the State, but where the rebate level would decline with EV penetration by income segment. (Health and Safety Code 44215.4, as added by the bill.)

In fact, there was no specific rebate plan in the version passed by the Assembly, which notionally is the subject of the article; there was a requirement for the PUC to adopt incentives. The sources the article relied on (assuming BI doesn't misrepresent then) were either inventing bill content from whole cloth or speculating about what the PUC might do; in any case, the bill has been significantly revised already in the Senate, to address the same broad purpose but to be more specific about program parameters and move the primary administrative responsibility for programs to the Air Resources Board rather than the PUC.

[dragonwriter]

FYI, in case the reference to Business Insider in the above seems odd, the mods have apparently not only changed the headline to a more clickbait one than it used to be, but also ibexplicably changed the source article from a BI article to a nearly-identical (to the point that if they were turned in in a the same class in school, the putative authors would probably be hauled in to answer questions about plagiarism) WolfStreet article.

[greenyoda]

Is this the Business Insider article you're referring to?

http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-price-california-...

If so, it's written by Wolf Richter, the owner of the Wolf Street blog, and has a link to his "original article on Wolf Street" at the bottom. Not plagiarism.

HN Guidelines ask you to "submit the original source", so this is probably why the HN headline was changed.

[Someone]

Good to hear, as the way they phrased this was as a blanket invitation for electric vehicle manufacturers to raise prices (if they add $x to their prices, their revenue would go up by $x, but customers wouldn't complain, as they would get $x more rebate)