California doesn't make cars, but wants pass to laws that attempts to govern how cars are made.

Now, it makes political sense- it doesn't have voters who will punish them because it threaten their jobs. And the politician can pretend they doing something about gorbal warming- but in fact does very little.

Wouldn't it make more sense if politicians could pass laws that enabled a car maker to make cars in California that are to be sold in California which have significantly lower emission? Wouldn't that actually be doing something opposed to placing restriction on "other parties" which could go into effect after a few election cycles?

And look at it from this prospective, if California is buying cars from Alabama, that car must be shipped some 2 thousand miles, before mile 1 is added to odometer. And along similar lines, *before* the plant is built have some tax incentive to sell locally. If you could have say at peak production 100,000 electric cars sold to Californian and these car for Californian is a competitive price to other electric cars or gasoline driven cars, gradually you could get to 10% or more of car population being electric.
Now, you don't need to focus only on electric cars you could also have high mileage gasoline cars. But the point is you saying to Carmakers, we want low pollution car made in California, and we don't want these cars shipped global from some mega-carplant, but we want them made *mostly* for the local market- it's a big market, so it should possible to do this economically.