Federal MPG regulations

[Denis4x4]

U.S. finalizes 2025 fuel rules for automakers | The Detroit News | detroitnews.com


I'm so thankful that the government is looking out for me! Hopefully, some of the money saved will come back to me in the form of tax credits that will offset the costs to repair the damage on my collector cars caused by ethanol.

[dznf0g]

"cash for clunkers". They don't want you to HAVE your collector cars.

[Coastalview]

They should offer cash for clunkers on some new car models!

[MrUKToad]

Just back from three weeks in the UK where my rental car was VW Passat CC, 2 litre diesel. It had a raft of fuel economy measures including a device that switched the engine off when you stopped at a red light and switched it back on when you lifted off the brake - very odd until you get used to it, or switch it off as I did. It was a reasonably sized car and did a respectable 38MPG (US) (45MPG Imperial) across a mix of town and highway driving. According to the standards agreed upon according to the article, though, even VW have some way to go to get close to those figures.

It also had that curious VW transmission that allows you to roll backwards on a hill when you're in drive - another fuel economy measure I think. It had no handbrake like a stick shift so relied on "auto hold", an electronic handbrake, to prevent that roll back but I never really warmed to it, especially when the thing held you tight on a down slope when a bit of roll forward (under braking) might have been handy. Auto hold was a gadget too far in my opinion.

Actually, 38mpg was a bit disappointing given that the old 1.4 litre gas powered Rover 214 (almost a Honda Civic) I used to drive when I lived in England was getting that figure. Sure it was a smaller car, but not a compact by UK standards. More work needed by the manufacturers I think.....

[bweybright]

Don't forget to consider what government mandated emission requirements and safety standards do to the mileage on vehicles. Knowing a few folks working in engineering for auto companies I got to see first hand the frustration they felt every time those "here to help you" passed a set of laws not totally based on science but more on getting re-elected. It is all about balance and we can't have it all - something has to give; air quality, mileage, safety in vehicles. Europe has been behind the US in both standard mandates, which is part of why their vehicles have gotten such better mileage. They are not coming closer to our standards, hence their mileage is not as great as it used to be.

[moparjohn]

They can take their new cafe requirements and put them were the sun does not shine. I am taking this so personally, my life is based around cars with V8's and power, and they are trying to take it away! I thought this was a free market, guess I'm wrong, the Feds know whats better for us. I'm so disturbed by this you can't know! MPJ

[dznf0g]

In order to keep your V8 and power, you'll have to buy something rated as 8600# GVW and up. They are exempt from CAFE as they are "work" vehicles. MFRs will be playing with those GVW numbers to offer what you want in vans and trucks.

UK, you'll see a rapid expansion of the use of "start/stop" anti idle technology here in the states prior to 2016.

[MrUKToad]

Bwey, I don't think Europe is behind the US in targetting fuel economy measures - the price of gas is the key there and manufacturers work hard to get good consumption ratings for their vehicles as that's what the public wants and will buy. The governments there may not make specific laws about MPG but they do load gas with tax, which has the same end result. I don't think law making or taxing gas is palatable to Americans so I'm not sure where all this will go.

[purman]

Originally Posted by dznf0g

"cash for clunkers". They don't want you to HAVE your collector cars.

Problem was they would only take cars up to 20 years old. So really they were not clunkers. I did a ton of research on cash for clunkers. Ca the state that benefited the most only reduced emission by 1/16 of a percent. This was best case. Most traded in car was the ford explorer . And most who traded in we're going to do it in the next year any way.

I couldn't trade in my 1975 dodge truck. Was to old. They just wanted new cars so they couldn't be resold as used. So people who couldn't afford new cars now didn't have good used cars to trade up from their crappy ones. It was a total bust. Other than another bail out for the auto companies.

[cooperhawk]

We recently purchased a new 2012 VW Passat TDI. So far with almost 3000 miles on it our city driving is averaging a little over 42 MPG, however on a recent 800 mile trip the vehicle averaged 50.2 MPG. Not too shabby. We have loaded it on a tow dolly and towed it behind our motor home as well. No problems.

That hill hold thing takes a little getting used to. From what I've been told it something that has been mandated by the govt and will soon appear on all vehicle.

The vehicle is for my Wife but she complains that I like to drive it too much! She is right of course. It is a very nice car. I drive it whenever I can talk her out of it.

[Gene]

If the government didn't require increased gas mileage years ago, our big trucks we use to tow with would still get 10-12 mpg without towing. But under pressure, auto and truck companies figured out how to increase gas mileage and still deliver lots of power—more power in bigger trucks than we had decades ago.

My '72 Chevy pickup got about 12 mpg and was smaller and lighter than my Tundra. The Tundra is much more powerful, heavier and more comfortable, has 4WD, and gets 16-17 mpg.

I am going to hold off buying a new pickup as long as I can so I can have better mileage figures. How this will shake out is unclear—hybrids, turbo, superchargers are among some of the possibilities.

If we don't increase fuel mileage, we will have to import more and more oil at higher and higher prices. As other countries develop, there will be more and more demand for fuel. Even with increased drilling in the US, there is not enough oil for our long term future. Nobody likes to be told what to do, but there's no other way the manufacturers are going to make big changes in fuel mileage. Every time we take a trip, half of the cost is gas. I'd like to reduce that.

Gene

[Wayward]

Originally Posted by CrawfordGene

If the government didn't require increased gas mileage years ago, our big trucks we use to tow with would still get 10-12 mpg without towing. But under pressure, auto and truck companies figured out how to increase gas mileage and still deliver lots of power—more power in bigger trucks than we had decades ago.
Gene

The observation is correct that vehicles are more fuel efficient, but your assumption as to why. is not necessarily correct. There is a reasonably sound argument that had the government left the competition of a free market to do this, it would have happened even sooner and even cheaper.

I can add some perspective to the "accepted wisdom", as an engineer who has worked on command and control software ranging from aerospace launch systems, to consumer vehicle electronics.

Everything "new" you see in vehicles today has been in an R&D "pipeline" for 10 years. Automotive engineers long ago realized that increasing displacement to increase power had practical limits in the consumer market.

For example in the 70's US R&D engineers in car companies and their suppliers were, as demanded by a competitive free market, working on technologies like multi valve cylinder heads, variable camshaft timing, electronic fuel injection, closed loop air/gas management, direct injection, electronic ignition control and a range of other highly competitive technologies to improve power, torque curves and drive-albility without brute force displacement increases.

As we see today in our contemporary engines, we of course knew that more efficient and controlled combustion delivers more power on the same amount of fuel, or the same amount of power on less fuel (better mileage). Smaller engines, more power, better fuel efficiency, lower emissions. This is just the basic stuff we all learn in engineering school. In the 70's there was a missing piece to bring it all together. We knew it, and were working on it.......

What changed the game in engine technology was microprocessors and Moore's Law, not the government. Engineers were anticipating digital engine management. The knee jerk regulations and mandates ordered by EPA bureaucrats and environmental activists in the 70's, sabotaged the US automotive R&D pipeline, because US engineers were forced to drop major technology investments, to go "bolt on" all sorts of garbage on US cars like EGRs. PCV, air injection etc. It was a terrible mistake which set the technology back by a decade or more, and gave the German and Japanese companies a huge advantage.

Had the US government not meddled in private industry, we would have better technology sooner and not have been playing catch-up.

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help"

[DKB_SATX]

@Wayward: I'll happily give you the point with respect to fuel economy and specific power, the market would get there, to a certain extent. The fine points about diminishing returns when the market as a whole prefers larger vehicles but economy prefers smaller are more or less noise in comparison to the technological advances.

However, while improving overall efficiency improves emissions somewhat as a byproduct, the market as a whole doesn't care about emissions and would probably not have gotten anywhere near the level of "clean" the industry has attained today.

Also, saying that the emissions regs gave the Germans and Japanese some sort of special advantage is not supportable. They had to meet the same emissions requirements in the US that the US manufacturers did, they were just faster (especially the Germans) at finding ways to meet the standards without completely undermining vehicle performance.

It's definitely true that many federal regulations are overly prescriptive. Airbags come to mind... by the time airbags were in wide use auto manufacturers had realized that there were big performance improvements to be had by using bags that had different deployment characteristics than the initial mandate prescribed, and it took a while to get the feds to loosen up.

[Wayward]

Originally Posted by Denis4x4

I'm so thankful that the government is looking out for me! Hopefully, some of the money saved will come back to me in the form of tax credits that will offset the costs to repair the damage on my collector cars caused by ethanol.

I use far less gas every week in my pickup than my "green" buddy and his wife, who relish this regulatory garbage but drive 2 Beemers separately to work, and commute every weekend to their vacation home. They are agast that I "drag" an RV across the country with my "gas guzzler", while they do not think twice about boarding a jumbo jet for a European get away,

Food for thought. If the central planners care so much about us and the environment that they insist on regulating and controlling an entire industry, why not simply ration gasoline?

I mean it makes sense right? If we all had only 20 gallons a week, think of the great choices we could make. Car companies would be climbing over one another to sell a 50mpg mini car. We might rush out and by ultra efficient diesel. We might decide to buy a house closer to work. We might decide to walk to work so we could save our gas coupons so we could spend the summer blasting across Route 66 in a 1969 big block Camaro or towing a shiny Airstream.?

Now of course they never will..........I wonder why? Never mind - dumb question.

[DKB_SATX]

Originally Posted by Landshark

I'm with you, Moparjohn! Not so much the power issue itself, but Choice! Somehow, I thought this was a free country, but DC (city elites) are trying to tell us how we can live and what we can do (or not do). City folks don't do much requiring power or trucks. Notice the commercial where the father is building his little girl a playhouse and RENTS a truck to bring the lumber home? This is where the DC elites would have us go.

However, some of us people in the less populated areas DO THINGS ourselves--as in camping, hauling tree prunings to the dump, hauling lumber for home projects, pulling Airstreams, hauling wood for heat, hunting, hiking, hauling furniture, hauling snow machines or water jets or boats, etc etc. How would it work if we had to rent a blooming truck for each trip? And how would a stinking Prius get me home on a snow-filled road in a blizzard? (Hint: it wouldn't.) I'm so tired of DC or other elites telling us how to live! I don't notice Gore or any other of these power-grabbing elites giving up his huge home or limos or sports cars or AC to save energy or pollution, so why should we be forced to give up what we like?

Sorry for the rant; I'm just afraid it's too late and we have already lost what makes life fun for us and lost our ability to make our own choices. Freon and light bulbs were the thin end of the wedge.

Vivian

So, the fact that Home Depot and Lowes offer rental trucks to meet a market demand for their customers who want to buy large things and drive smaller cars (or even giant truck-based SUVs with nice leather interiors and don't want drywall and fence posts inside) is the result of some government plot to take away your truck?

At the end you mentioned light bulbs, which is actually an even more spurious argument in the direction the rest of your post takes. The government actually got that one right, they didn't outlaw or mandate any particular technology, they just said "here's a baseline efficiency requirement in terms of lumens out per watts in, meet it any way you want to." NO ONE OUTLAWED INCANDESCENT BULBS. Manufacturers are already producing nice soft-white incandescents that meet the standard, as well as compact fluorescents and expensive LEDs.

[Gene]

Wayward, while the manufacturers may have been researching various fuel saving technologies, they weren't adopting them a generation ago regardless of competition. Foreign companies did have more fuel efficient vehicles, but didn't have a large market share until well into the '80's and '90's—as much caused by reliability and by meeting a need for smaller vehicles. Gas was cheap and few people were asking for better fuel economy since the shockwaves years before by the oil embargo.

The manufacturers have fought every attempt to increase fuel economy over 4 decades—until recently. They may have had the technology, but they didn't do much to adopt it.

As others, we live in a rural area and we need a big pickup for actually picking up things. Some people buy them to feel cool or tough; we buy them to pick up things and to tow. Because of a back injury, it is difficult for me to get in and out of small cars. Even the 4Runner can be a struggle. We live in a state where snow has been known and there's nothing as good as a fairly big truck (or truck based SUV) to get us through bad storms. So we need (and like) our big vehicles.

If the manufacturers (and that includes Toyota which lately has been worse on mileage than the domestic companies) wanted to increase mileage they could have years ago. Toyota has a supercharger that can be combined with either V8 or their V6 and will increase mileage significantly. They do not promote it and almost keep it a secret for reasons beyond me. It costs too much too. Ford has done something similar with their EcoBoost and sold a lot of them.

Fuel prices do quickly change consumer habits. Every time the prices spike, sales of small cars and hybrids and electric cars spike too. Prices go down and people buy gas hogs. This happens over and over. Prices creep upward over a period of years and people get used to it—remember when people were predicting that $2 gas would mean people would stop buying big vehicles? The manufacturers learned to provide both gas guzzlers and economy vehicles to survive (except Chrysler which ended up foreign owned because they only had gas guzzlers). Fuel prices, because they fluctuate wildly, have not done much to encourage fuel economy.

After the '80's, the CAFE standards didn't change. The manufacturers opted to increase power instead of fuel economy. Hybrids did get a small portion of the market, but there were strange ones like the hybrid Highlander—it isn't very fuel efficient, but it has a lot of power with its 3 electric motors. It is very expensive toy rather than a practical choice.

The market has done little to change habits and only some outside force can cause fuel economy to rise.

Gene

[Denis4x4]

This morning's WSJ has an interesting piece on wether consumers will pay the $1800 - $3000 for this increase in mileage.

Several weeks ago, I was coasting into the carport and the camper tie down tab caught the corner of the building. The right side of the bed on my 2012 Chevy 2500HD was crumpled. Final cost was $2125 to replace the bed side sheet metal. When I asked why it couldn't be pounded out, I was told that the metal was a thinner gauge to make it lighter to help the mileage. Along those same lines, I removed the bumper tiedown for the camper from the '06 GMC and went to install it on the '12 Chevy only to find out that the bumper requires an extra brace due to the new lightweight rear bumper.

The '12 Chevy costs $10,000 more than the '06 GMC...both equally equipped. With a 3:73 rear gear and a 6 speed auto, this truck should get better mileage than the '06 with a 4:11 rear gear and a four speed. It doesn't!

While these moves to increase mileage might appeal to the tree huggers and pander to conservation voters, the unintended consequences hit a lot of us in the wallet.

[purman]

I had a 1979 honda Accord in college. 1989-1993 that got 32 mpg. And I even got it up to 100mph once. On the flat. (might have had a tail wind.)

Problem I see with Hybrids is: they are not cost effective or GREEN. Sorry but the extra you pay for a Hybrid $4000-$6000 is a lot of gas in my regular SUV vs. Hybrid SUV.. I did the math on the Toyota Highlander, with the miles I drive, It would take 6.5 years to recoup that cost over a regular Highlander. I would have well over 200,000 miles on it and had to replace the batteries at least once.. $$$$$$$ And probably traded it in on a new one before a recouped the cost...

The making of Batteries is devastating to the environment also. How is this green?

I'm for fuel efficient cars, Trucks, and SUV's but don't give me batteries!! give me something that will last... And that is really Green for the Environment.

They should be able to make my Sequoia get 30 mpg somehow... while not losing HP

[Landshark]

Originally Posted by Wayward

The observation is correct that vehicles are more fuel efficient, but your assumption as to why. is not necessarily correct. There is a reasonably sound argument that had the government left the competition of a free market to do this, it would have happened even sooner and even cheaper.

I can add some perspective to the "accepted wisdom", as an engineer who has worked on command and control software ranging from aerospace launch systems, to consumer vehicle electronics.

Everything "new" you see in vehicles today has been in an R&D "pipeline" for 10 years. Automotive engineers long ago realized that increasing displacement to increase power had practical limits in the consumer market.

For example in the 70's US R&D engineers in car companies and their suppliers were, as demanded by a competitive free market, working on technologies like multi valve cylinder heads, variable camshaft timing, electronic fuel injection, closed loop air/gas management, direct injection, electronic ignition control and a range of other highly competitive technologies to improve power, torque curves and drive-albility without brute force displacement increases.

As we see today in our contemporary engines, we of course knew that more efficient and controlled combustion delivers more power on the same amount of fuel, or the same amount of power on less fuel (better mileage). Smaller engines, more power, better fuel efficiency, lower emissions. This is just the basic stuff we all learn in engineering school. In the 70's there was a missing piece to bring it all together. We knew it, and were working on it.......

What changed the game in engine technology was microprocessors and Moore's Law, not the government. Engineers were anticipating digital engine management. The knee jerk regulations and mandates ordered by EPA bureaucrats and environmental activists in the 70's, sabotaged the US automotive R&D pipeline, because US engineers were forced to drop major technology investments, to go "bolt on" all sorts of garbage on US cars like EGRs. PCV, air injection etc. It was a terrible mistake which set the technology back by a decade or more, and gave the German and Japanese companies a huge advantage.

Had the US government not meddled in private industry, we would have better technology sooner and not have been playing catch-up.

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help"

Exactly what I would have said, but you said it better and beat me to it! Thank you! Those who think the "guvmint" has to force industry to do what is "right" don't understand two things: how a free market operates, and what a democracy means. In a free market, industry responds to what the consumer market wants and spends its money on. In a democracy, the majority vote determines the laws. No bunch of people in DC has any right to tell us how we "should" live, what are the "right" things to consume, etc. In a democracy, we, the people, determine individually how we want to live, and as those ways become noticeable to industry, they respond to that market. Or at least that's the way it is supposed to work before our wonderful, know-it-all guvmint got heavily involved and wasted billions and trillions of OUR $ taken unwillingly from OUR pockets on total losers of technology and industries. I just want to scream at the waste and the basic illegality of it all!! And even worse, I think it's too late to reverse this awful trend!!

Vivian.

[Landshark]

Originally Posted by DKB_SATX

So, the fact that Home Depot and Lowes offer rental trucks to meet a market demand for their customers who want to buy large things and drive smaller cars (or even giant truck-based SUVs with nice leather interiors and don't want drywall and fence posts inside) is the result of some government plot to take away your truck?

At the end you mentioned light bulbs, which is actually an even more spurious argument in the direction the rest of your post takes. The government actually got that one right, they didn't outlaw or mandate any particular technology, they just said "here's a baseline efficiency requirement in terms of lumens out per watts in, meet it any way you want to." NO ONE OUTLAWED INCANDESCENT BULBS. Manufacturers are already producing nice soft-white incandescents that meet the standard, as well as compact fluorescents and expensive LEDs.

No, it's not a govt plot that a market demand has been responded to by business in re truck rentals, but the direction is clear: for example, tax on diesel fuel is much higher than on gas although diesel is actually cheaper to produce than gas. The tax functions as an indirect way to "encourage" us to not use diesel pick- ups. In a more direct way, NY, i.e. Mayor Bloomberg, has made 16oz cokes illegal and is "encouraging" new mothers to breast feed by mandating removal of free samples of formula and requiring counseling for any mother who defies his "encouragement" by deciding to feed formula anyway.

And you are right: no one outlawed the sale of incandescent bulbs, although freon IS outlawed, it is just no longer feasible to make them. But what about the mercury/lead in the fluorescents and LEDs that will go into our landfills? How green and terrific is that?

What I rant about is the removal of our CHOICE, and the Big Brother Knows Best attitude of DC. Sorry if I came on too strong and offended, but I just feel so helpless as I see the juggernaut of Big Brother crunching on over our right to choose. Why is it not OK to choose to use an incandescent bulb or continue to use my rig's fridge that uses freon? Surely it is more "green" to continue to use something than throw it into the landfill (anti-green) and buy new (energy and materials used in manufacture are anti-green). OOOps, sorry, I'm ranting again.

Vivian