The New Fuel Economy Standards for Cars

An article on new federal fuel-economy standards for cars to take effect in 2025 appeared online, and it was interesting to read the comments.

Of course we have those who are decrying it as unneeded government intervention in our lives, and blasting Obama--conveniently forgetting that fuel economy standards were enacted by Congress in 1975, so I don't see that they come from Obama.

One argument against greater fuel economy is that the standards will cause cars to become smaller, and smaller cars are less safe. Yet light trucks are the vehicle class with the poorest safety,* and the US, with the biggest cars in the world, has the worst traffic fatality rate of any first-world nation.* Also, the standard, as applied starting in 2011, actually gives a break to larger vehicles.* There is a so-called "footprint" standard for calculating vehicle mileage, and it encourages production of larger vehicles.

Proponents of higher CAFE standards argue that it is the "Footprint" model of CAFE for trucks that encourages production of larger trucks with concomitant increases in vehicle weight disparities, and point out that some small cars such as the Mini Cooper and Toyota Matrix are four times safer than SUVs like the Chevy Blazer.[54] They argue that the quality of the engineering design is the prime determinant of vehicular safety, not the vehicle's mass. In a 1999 article based on a 1995 IIHS report, USA Today said that 56% of all deaths occurring in small cars were due to either single vehicle crashes or small cars impacting each other. The percentage of deaths attributed to those in small cars being hit by larger cars was one percent.[55] [Wikipedia, s.v. Corporate Average Fuel Economy]

So, once again, what we might call "popular opinion" is based on a lot of wrong ideas. Too often, opinion precedes being informed, rather than the other way around. Since the objecting ideas are clearly what we might consider conservative, I'd like to blame conservatives, but I have to concede that the Right has no monopoly on ill-informed opinions.
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* All these facts are from the Wikipedia article, "Corporate Average Fuel Economy."

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein