Last week, General Motors announced that it plans to eliminate emissions from its passenger vehicles by 2035, and become carbon-neutral across its operations by 2040. Still, it may be an encouraging sign that an often-antagonistic relationship between the industry and environmental regulators could shift. “This is a seismic event that is hard to overstate in its importance to America’s transition to zero-emission vehicles” says JR DeShazo, an expert in sustainable transportation policy and the director of the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles.