By James F. Peltz
Los Angeles Times
A possible clash between the U.S. government and California over future fuel-economy standards raises the question of whether automakers one day might have to build different sets of the same vehicles for various parts of the nation.
Even though automakers pushed the Trump administration to loosen standards, they will work to avoid such a costly and complicated scenario — one that probably would raise the price of cars prices as the companies pass some of those costs along to consumers — analysts said. “Automakers do not want to build two sets of cars, for sure,” said Jessica Caldwell, director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com.
Still, there’s a good chance that the Environmental Protection Agency and California could be locked in court for years over the EPA’s expected plan to scale back mileage targets that the Obama administration drafted in tandem with California.
The targets aimed to boost average fuel economy for passenger cars and sport utility vehicles to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. But the agency plans to replace those targets with a weaker standard that would be announced soon, according to people familiar with the plans.
Officials in California, whose standards have been adopted by a dozen other states, said the state would challenge any rollback by the EPA.
“California has its own authority under the Clean Air Act to fight pollution,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a statement Friday. The EPA’s plan “will create confusion for the industry because manufacturers will have to meet two separate standards,” she said. “The years of litigation and investment uncertainty will be far harder on the auto industry than simply living up to the fuel-economy standards they once embraced.”
Assuming California prevailed in court, “if we got to two standards, the consumer is going to suffer,” said Rebecca Lindland, executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody wins, including the environment, in this scenario.”
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group representing a dozen major automakers including General Motors, Ford and Toyota, “would prefer to have one standard for the entire country,” said spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist. “We think that’s better for consumers, the auto industry and California.”
She acknowledged that while the automakers currently have vehicles that could meet the rising fuel-economy standards —hybrids and other vehicles using electric power — there would be disruption in the marketplace if California’s legal fight was upheld and there suddenly were two sets of mileage standards in the country.
Those vehicles with full or partial electric power, and thus higher energy efficiency compared with those running with internal-combustion engines, account for only 3 percent of the nation’s auto sales, Bergquist said.
“Companies wouldn’t be able to sell certain vehicles in California,” she said. “California would have reduced choice.”
For now, the automakers want a government-industry review of the situation “to gather all the current data — what the sales are, what the cost of technology is, what gas prices are — crunch it together and propose standards for the future,” Bergquist said.
California’s aggressive stance toward anti-pollution standards is found in other sectors, notably in automotive emissions and in the gasoline market where the state requires special blends of fuel.
But fuel prices have remained in check in recent years. That plus and buyer tastes toward SUVs have prompted many consumers to keep buying fuel-burning vehicles. Despite improvements in their gas mileage, trucks like the best-selling Ford F-150 pickup — whose 2018 model gets 18 percent better mileage than the 2008 model did, according to driving data compiled by the Fuelly website — are less fuel-efficient than hybrids and electrics.
