Gov't savings a drop in the oil barrel

In an unusual flurry of activity--no doubt aimed at placating voters about high gasoline prices in an election year--the federal government has been scrambling to address this latest spike at the pump and larger energy issues. This situation, of course, is more complicated than sound bites and 60-second news segments reveal, and so far the measures moving through Congress (including the infamous $100 rebates) seem to be mere band-aids that are intended to dissipate public outrage without making the auto and oil industries too uncomfortable.

One example of this are the new light-truck Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations that were recently proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). They will require manufacturers to attain higher average fuel-economy levels for light trucks—SUVs, pickups, and minivans—beginning in 2008. Rather than a common figure all automakers would need to reach, however, the new standards will be based on the configuration of each automaker’s vehicle lineup. This approach will likely be applied to cars, as well.

As part of the regulations, NHTSA has also finally plugged the gaping hole in the current CAFE regulations that allowed the heaviest, most gas-guzzling passenger vehicles escape any fuel-economy standards at all.

While we support measures that lead to improved fuel economy there are significant reasons why we feel the new requirements don’t go far enough:

1)    The government likes to cite the fact that the new rules will save 10.7 billion gallons of gasoline. Sounds impressive, right? But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a research and advocacy group that figure amounts to less than two weeks of U.S. gasoline consumption each year over the next two decades.

From ucsusa.org:
"Fighting America's oil addiction with these standards is like fighting lung cancer by smoking 49 cigarettes a day instead of 50," said Don MacKenzie, vehicles engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Automakers have technology on their shelves right now that could cost-effectively improve the efficiency of light trucks to 26 or 27 mpg, at least double the increase that NHTSA announced today."

2) Even the new higher CAFE numbers aren’t what they seem. But to understand why, we need to take a slight detour.

It’s no secret that the Environmental Protection Agency’s fuel-economy figures, posted on the window stickers of all new vehicles, are typically higher than real-world gas mileage. The original formula for calculating them was established in 1975. To address a rising clamor about their inaccuracy, however, in 1984 the EPA began cutting 10 percent off of its city mpg figures and 22 percent off of its highway mpg. But it didn’t change its original formula for calculating the numbers. This adjustment helped, but the figures are still higher than real-world gas mileage. In a recent Consumer Reports study that compared the real-world fuel-economy results of 303 cars and trucks we tested with their EPA estimates, we found that 90 percent of the vehicles got lower gas mileage, with an average shortfall of nine percent. (The full report on “Why you're not getting the mpg you expect” is available to ConsumerReports.org subscribers.) 

Okay, back to CAFE. NHTSA uses the EPA’s fuel-economy estimates as the basis for their CAFE requirements. But they don’t use the adjusted figures we see today, they use the original formula established way back in the ‘70s, making them doubly inaccurate. In CR’s study, we found that the light-truck fleet fuel economy for the 2003 model year, for example, was off by about 25 percent when calculated using the fuel-economy figures from our real-world road-test results. That means America burns much more gasoline than the official numbers suggest.

If we apply that same reduction percentage to those 10.7 billion gallon savings, it drops to about 8 billion, which is less than 11 days worth of savings each year. 

Bottom line: The sound-bite numbers quoted by government officials are only a drop in the oil barrel and the calculations on which they’re based are outdated and open to question.

In the October 2005 issue of Consumer Reports magazine, Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of CR, proposed a simpler increase of fuel economy CAFE requirements based on the then-current “unreformed” EPA testing protocols. Pushing light passenger vehicle standards to 34.5 and heavy passenger vehicle to 31.1, would greatly contribute to reducing gasoline demand by about 10 billion gallons that year alone, said the Union of Concerned Scientists.

--Eric Evarts & Jeff Bartlett