The aggressive fuel-economy rules that the Biden administration put out last week are meant to encourage more electric cars to be made, but they rely on a credit programme that some environmentalists say hurts the program’s goal of cutting pollution.
The system allows carmakers to say that each electric vehicle in their lineup is getting more than 100 miles per gallon, which could help them meet the 49 mpg fleetwide mandate by 2026 even if the rest of their cars are still running.
It’s a system that allows car companies to get around rules by buying credits from other companies or making their own that they can use to avoid stricter rules. Dan Becker, the director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “automakers have been having a lot of fun with this system.”
Carmakers will have to improve the average fuel efficiency of their fleets by 8% each year for the 2024 and 2025 model years, and 10% for 2026. It will have to be 49 mpg by the 2026 model year to pass the government’s tests. Motorists will likely get 39 or 40 mpg.
That seems like a steep rise for an industry that now gets about 25 mpg. Manufacturers who don’t meet the rules can be fined by the government.
But automakers get extra credit for each hybrid or electric car they have in their lineup, no matter how many they sell. The mileage is expressed in terms of an equivalence, which gives hybrids and electric cars a lot more miles-per-gallon for the purposes of the regulation, which makes a company’s average much better. equivalency rates for hybrids are a little less.
Electric cars made by Tesla Inc., for example, get about 134 miles per gallon for the purposes of the federal fuel-economy rules that govern them. It was 2020, and Tesla, the world’s biggest maker of electric cars, had a fleetwide average equivalent of 119 mpg. This is how the next best average was: Honda got 29.1 mpg on average.
There are rules that allow automakers who don’t have enough electric cars in their lineup to buy credits from other companies with better average mileage. This helped Tesla in its early years.
In a big change from President Trump’s policies, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released new rules about how cars should be made. Many groups concerned about climate change applauded them.
People who work for a group called Center for Climate and Energy Solutions said in a statement that the new standards show NHTSA’s commitment to climate change and show that the market is moving toward a zero-emissions future.
The mileage programme has been around since the Obama administration, but many environmentalists don’t like the fact that you get points for every mile you drive.
People who work for the Natural Resources Defense Council say that the new rules send a message that electric cars should be sold more often. It will still be necessary to set stricter rules to make sure that all cars are completely free of gasoline and oil.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in announcing the new standards on Friday that they are “a big step and part of a Biden–Harris administration strategy to speed up our path to cleaner energy and electric cars and lower the cost that American families pay each month.” This is what he said.
Biden wants half of all vehicles sold in the United States to be able to drive without emitting pollution by 2020. A major trade group for automakers gave the plan some support, but said that the U.S. government will need much more help to get there.
John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, was in Washington when Biden made the announcement. He told reporters that it will take a lot of work from both the private and public sectors to reach Biden’s goal. This includes more EV charging stations, clean power, building codes that are EV-ready, and government policy.
The alliance, which includes companies like Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, Honda, and Toyota, has generally been in favour of the government’s efforts to make cars get more fuel efficient and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from their tailpipes. The group says that the government needs to spend more money on building charging stations and giving tax credits to people who buy electric cars in order to get more people to buy them.
Carmakers sold a record 657,000 electric cars in 2021, but only 4.4% of new cars were electric, BloombergNEF found. In 2020, the percentage was a little more than 2%. SUVs and pickup trucks made up about 70% of sales in 2021, according to Kelley Blue Book.