CAFE Standards Could Mean Bigger Cars, Not Smaller Ones
Popular Mechanics — The automotive industry is bracing for its biggest engineering challenge in decades. The pending changes to federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations call for a stunning 5 percent increase in fuel economy per year, culminating in a fleet average of 54.5 mpg by 2025. Common sense—and a fair amount of industry experts—would indicate that cars are about to get smaller, or at the very least stop getting bigger, and that SUVs will continue their steady decline in popularity.
According to a new paper from the University of Michigan College of Engineering, however, CAFE will likely have the opposite effect: It will lead to an increase in size for most vehicles, and more SUVs and light trucks on the road.
The researchers, whose results will be published in the January issue of the journal Energy Policy, put themselves in the shoes of carmakers designing for the 2014 model year. By weighing what they know about what cars customers want—taken from existing surveys and recent market data—against the projected costs of efficiency-boosting features and technologies, they concluded that practically every type of vehicle would get a size bump. Overall, the footprint of the entire U.S. fleet could get between 2 to 32 percent bigger, resulting in a 1 to 4 mpg drop in efficiency. In terms of emissions, that’s the equivalent of running three to 10 extra 10,000-megawatt-class coal-fired plants for a single year.
How could this be? It’s a shocking, counterintuitive prediction, which only makes sense when you wade through the tall grass of CAFE’s sordid, politically charged history. CAFE was born in 1975, a product of that era’s energy crisis. It changed shape through the decades, finding varying degrees of success in boosting average fuel economy. During an aggressive overhaul of the regulations in 2007, Congress attempted to make the regulations fair for all automakers.
