1700+ pages means a million loopholes
http://jalopnik.com/5948172/how-the-...ars-and-trucks

 

forget cafe, put a $3/gallon tax on gas and you'll see small vehicles again.

 

I prefer CAFE to accomplish reduced consumption. Gas tax disproportionately affects the less well-off.

Best would be a single combined mpg CAFE rating, anything below that and you get tax credits. Anything over and it gets hit with a proportional gas guzzler tax (which could be written off for work vehicles).

The problem is the gov't doesn't want to lose the tax revenue, and of course is somewhat beholden to oil interests, and the more gas we by the better the GDP numbers look, so they don't really WANT us to consume less.

My understanding of it is that there are different targets for different size footprint vehicles. So guess what? All vehicles will migrate UP to the next larger size so they have an easier mpg target to hit!

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong...

 

That's what basically fueled the SUV craze. Cars and trucks were held to two different emissions standars...guess what, automakers started pushing suvs onto people.

 

Pretty much this.

An issue is that, as you stated, vehicles are just migrated up to meet the new standards.

IMHO, a better solution, if reducing overall consumption is the desired goal, is to approach the issue not from the vehicle supply side but from the community planning side. Penalize developers who want to build miles from any services. Penalize developers who wish to surround a shopping area with acres of parking lot miles from any transit network. If an individual wants ten acres for a yard, that's fine, but if a developer wants 50 two-acre lots in the woods ten miles from the nearest grocery store or gas station, make them pay an "environmental impact fee" commensurate with the expected residential fuel consumption over ten years, based on a current average. $3 a gallon sounds fair, right?

The problem isn't that Americans buy vehicles that are too large, it's that people are working 30 miles from home, cannot conceivable walk to lunch from their work place in a half hour, and could never walk to and from the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time because zoning trends have segrated residential, commercial, and retail into discrete environments. And encouraged developers to seek out cheap land far from other developments.

IOW, housing, work places and stores are too widely separated, encouraging a widening spiral of consumption. Manipulating automobile regulations will never change that.

 

Kinda sounds like the Dodd-Frank bill. Interesting article and not surprising. But ya, the US is a "free market."

 

Yea that's a huge loophole, make bigger cars and we will overlook the crappy MGP's and high CO2 emissions.

The sooner we go to the euro CAFE standard the better off we will be in the long run, for those of us who want the power (i.e. current horsepower wars 650hp gt500....) will have to foot the bill and pay the tax on the CO2 emission.

Will also push the technology towards efficiency, talk about progress. I still think those who are driving those high CO2 cars will keep driving them, but it will force the majority of the population who struggle to afford that F350 monthly payment to downgrade to something more efficient in turn saving gas for the rest of us.