US drivers want better mileage when they fill up
John Dillin
The Christian Science Monitor - June 21, 2001
WASHINGTON
Driving a 2001
Ford Taurus 500 miles from Washington, D.C., to Boston would burn about
20 gallons of gasoline. If reformers get their way, the same trip in
a new fuel-efficient family sedan would use just 12
gallons of gas by 2012.
With strong public
backing, members of Congress are discussing two major changes that could
bring swift, and perhaps painful change to the auto industry. The revamp
being discussed includes:
- Requiring light
trucks, including popular sport utility vehicles like the Chevrolet
Suburban and the Jeep Grand Cherokee, to meet the same mileage requirements
as automobiles.
- Ratcheting up
the mileage standards for both cars and light trucks to as much as
40 miles per gallon by 2012 and 55 miles per gallon by 2020.
General Motors,
the world's largest automaker, says it will oppose both
changes. But the pressure is on Congress and the White House. Rising
gasoline prices, increasing imports, and the debate over global warming
are all focusing critical attention on America's growing appetite for
oil.
Federal fuel efficiency
standards that have been frozen at 27.5 miles per
gallon since the 1980s. But now the public appears in a mood to get
tough with the auto industry.
A new nationwide
Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll found that by nearly a 5-to-1 margin,
Americans say they would favor a new law that would force manufacturers
to increase auto and truck fuel mileage.
Even Republicans,
the most skeptical group, favored higher fuel standards in the poll
by better than a 2-to-1 margin. Democrats backed the higher standards
by 7-to-1.
The Monitor survey
was conducted June 7 to 10 and included interviews with 936 Americans
aged 18 and higher. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage
points.
The Bush White
House has reserved judgment - at least publicly. White
House officials say the president is waiting until late July when the
National Academy of Sciences will complete a seven-month study on the
efficacy of more stringent standards.
But Vice President
Dick Cheney, visiting a GM research facility this week in Michigan,
did not sound favorably disposed toward higher
fuel-efficiency standards. He told GM officials: "I'm one of those
who believes deeply in the market, and I think we have to be very careful
not to pass artificial, unfair standards that sound nice."
On Wednesday, the
Union of Concerned Scientists weighed into the debate with a new report
that strongly supported tougher fuel-efficiency goals. The report notes
that during the nation's first energy crisis in the
1970s, the federal government imposed the CAFÉ (Corporate Average
Fuel Economy) standards. At that time (1975), the typical American passenger
vehicle got 13.1 miles per gallon.
CAFÉ pushed
up auto fuel efficiency requirements to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985,
but then something unexpected happened. Instead of driving autos, millions
of Americans switched to minivans, sport utility vehicles (SUVs), and
pickup trucks for their everyday needs. Those vehicles were required
to attain only 20.7 miles per gallon.
Today, 46 percent
of all passenger vehicles sold are in this "light truck"
category and the effect has been to drag down the nation's overall fuel
efficiency.
Yet Congress and
the White House are nervous about boosting efficiency standards. The
auto industry accounts for approximately
one-seventh of the nation's economy. Any major action by Washington
could endanger its prosperity. As the Detroit News observed in an editorial
on Monday: "Trucks, vans, and SUVs are Detroit's most profitable
products. Strangle them and you kill jobs."
Another consideration
is that while gasoline prices are currently high,
they have begun to go back down. If prices fall into the $1-a-gallon
range, support for new laws could dry up.
Even so, the opportunities
for saving fuel with new technology are tempting to some lawmakers.
Since the 1980s,
with fuel prices low, Detroit, Japanese, and European
automakers have often used advances in technology to boost performance
rather than mileage. The new UCS report found that from 1985 to 2000,
vehicle makers used new technology to increase the power of light trucks
by 61 percent, the weight by 17 percent, and the acceleration by 22
percent while boosting mileage by zero percent.
Similarly, auto
acceleration increased by 23 percent, weight by 10
percent, and power by 53 percent while mileage went up by just 4 percent.
In the long run,
however, the most damaging argument against high fuel
efficiency may be the safety question. Boosting mileage has often meant
making cars smaller. One of those interviewed in the Monitor/TIPP poll,
Wallace Erickson, an oil field technician in Canadian, Texas, says after
the first CAFÉ rules were passed, "They came out with little
bitty cars
that had better gas mileage, but people were getting injured in them….
It's a person's choice what they want to drive. Smaller cars are less
safe."
Staff writer Sara Steindorf contributed to this report.
