The Obama administration today released its final rule raising U.S. auto
fuel-efficiency standards to an average of 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg)
by 2016, winning plaudits from environmental groups while offering extra
benefits to makers of electric and luxury cars.
TransportationSecretary Ray Lahood, at left, with EPA chief Lisa Jackson at right.
(Photo: Getty
Images)
The final rule was jointly unveiled by Transportation Secretary Ray
LaHood and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lisa Jackson,
who described the higher fuel standards -- known as CAFE, for Corporate
Average Fuel Economy -- as "a win for automakers and drivers, a win for
innovators and entrepreneurs, and a win for our planet."
Environmental advocates joined the auto industry in welcoming the
higher CAFE standards, which the EPA estimates would yield $240 billion
in total benefits over the life of the rule -- compared with a total
cost of $52 billion for carmakers and drivers.
“By completing these rules, the Obama administration is putting our
country on the road to creating thousands of clean energy jobs and
cutting our dangerous dependency on oil," Roland Hwang, transportation
director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.
Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile
Manufacturers, urged the White House to follow the rule by beginning "to
work on [fuel standards for] 2017 and
beyond.”
The new CAFE rule includes a notable break for electric cars,
giving a zero-emissions rating to the first 200,000 such vehicles made
by each manufacturer despite the fact that carbon emissions would result
from the power needed to charge them.
Jackson said the benefit was included to bolster the
administration's "bullish" stance on plug-in technology. "We all know
that's not entirely true," she acknowledged of the government's
zero-emissions designation, "because when you plug in, there's
some emissions associated with the power you're using ... but we
wanted to incentivize them."
In the text of the final rule, the EPA described its
200,000-vehicle zero rating as a compromise with green groups that
objected to its initial proposal to offer the rating to all electric
vehicles.
"Many state and environmental organization commenters
believed that the combination of these incentives could undermine the
GHG [greenhouse gas] benefits of the rule, and believed the emissions
compliance values
should take into account the net upstream GHG emissions associated with
electrified vehicles compared to vehicles powered by petroleum based
fuel," the rule's authors wrote.
The EPA's earlier proposal also had included a "multiplier" that
would effectively count electric or hybrid cars as more than one vehicle
when automakers calculated the average fuel efficiency of their fleets.
The final rule, however, abandoned the "multiplier" concept.
The benefit for luxury carmakers, nicknamed the "German
provision," would give manufacturers selling fewer than 400,000 cars
per year in the United States extra time to comply with the new fuel
rules between the model years of 2012 and 2015. Automakers which stand
to gain from that efficiency "lead-time allowance" include BMW and
Mercedes.
The EPA and U.S. DOT estimated that their stronger fuel-efficiency
standard would increase the average cost of cars by $950 as of the 2016
model year, but Jackson noted that most auto buyers would "offset the
costs" by saving on fuel bills during their first three years of
driving.
Asked about the auto industry's eagerness for certainty from the
federal government for 2017 and beyond, LaHood told reporters that
"anything post-2016 will come after people get a good week of sleep ...
they've been working night
and day to get this right."
