A week after the Environmental Protection Agency certified the Ford C-Max Energi with an all-electric driving range of 21 miles and a total range of 620 miles, the vehicle has joined the ranks of cars allowed to cruise California's car-pool lanes without any passengers. The C-Max Energi will receive the state's coveted single-occupant car-pool-lane bumper sticker, which signals that a vehicle meets the state's Clean Air Vehicle standards.
It used to be that hybrids such as the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid qualified for stickers to drive in the state's high-occupancy-vehic?le (HOV) lanes, and at least 85,000 drivers of such vehicles took advantage of the program from 2005 to mid-2011, when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) instituted stricter regulations and barred their eligibility. Now, only drivers of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids can travel solo in the lanes if their vehicles meet the state's tough zero-emissions or partial-zero-emissio?ns requirements.