[jcp123]

Originally Posted by TheEnemy

Largely the original fuel economy requirements were only on cars and vans and left the light trucks which is what SUV's were listed as alone.


As someone who uses trucks and 4x4's, I don't like how big they have gotten, or how high the bed floor is now, almost unusable. We will often take the 19 year old small truck instead of the new comfy big one because it is so much easier to maneuver in tight spaces. Even though the new big truck gets almost the same fuel economy.

That's what I was gently pushing towards, so I'll play some hardball and see what trickles out of it.

A 25-30mpg - maybe more - highway rated wagon which can tow a good load doesn't exist because CAFE makes that costly. Enter trucks and SUVs, unencumbered by dimwit policy makers with little understanding of the things they are actually regulating, and said trucks and SUVs carry the torch for the same exact things American buyers have sought for a long time, aided by some marketing, of course. And we wonder why practical vehicles on a meaningfully more efficient scale don't exist.

There's no way to know how the counterfactual of more equal CAFE standards would affect fleet MPG. But I wonder if the shift to SUVs would have been so drastic? Would we have more, beefier cars with marginally but meaningfully better FE than full-size trucks and SUVs? Would it even out? Would it matter if the lower-to-the-ground cars had better accident rates?