Strict new rules on vehicle pollution, proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency this week, could reshape one of the world’s largest industries and change the way millions of people get around. The goal, state officials say, is to get many more electric vehicles in many more driveways.
But another way to look at the proposed rules is to use some 1,400 pages of modeling, graphics, and dense rule language — enough to make an environmental wound’s heart chirp like an endangered songbird. And there lies a fascinating federal flip-flop: an attempt to close a loophole that may be partly responsible for the explosive size of passenger cars on America’s roads.
To understand the change, you have to start in the 1970s, when the “SUV loophole,” as policy nerds call it, was created. U.S. lawmakers wrote the country’s first car pollution regulations, at a time when the only people driving heavy vehicles, such as trucks, were people who needed to carry things or had real reasons to drive off-road. Farmers and construction workers and stuff. Who else would buy and fuel such a big set of wheels? It made sense to place trucks under more lenient fuel efficiency rules than cars.
Back to 2010. While new exhaust emission regulations were being drafted for cars, the Obama administration’s EPA used the same logic to establish an additional and similar exemption for large vehicles based on their “footprints” – the area between their wheels . A carmaker selling cars with larger footprints faced less stringent exhaust emission regulations than carmakers selling sedans or compact cars.
Since then, truck and SUV sales have exploded far beyond farmers and others who really need such vehicles for their jobs. SUVs, which accounted for a third of new vehicle sales a decade ago, now account for three-fifths, according to analyst firm JD Power. And car sales have plummeted, from about half of new vehicles sold to just one in five.
During that time, car manufacturers became aware of the emission control system. A new category of vehicle, the crossover utility, functions as a passenger car. They are used by families, are used for commuting, play no role on construction sites and do little daily transportation.
But because they have all-wheel drive, or a little more cargo space, or a third row of seats, they’re big enough to qualify as trucks, at least for emissions regulation purposes. The result is a “blur [of] the dividing line between cars and light trucks,” said Simon Mui, chief of state and federal policy advocate for clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. Meanwhile, automakers can sell larger SUVs and trucks because these smaller “trucks” lower the overall emissions of the vehicles they sell, helping them comply with federal exhaust emissions regulations.
But the rise of these heavier vehicles has not been good for the planet. A February report from the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental energy policy organization, pointed out that SUVs use about 20 percent more oil (as fuel) than the average non-SUV midsize car. The world’s 330 million SUVs will release 1 billion tons of carbon by 2022, the group found. If SUVs were a country, they would rank sixth in terms of emissions, just behind Japan. Meanwhile, a decade-long increase in pedestrian fatalities has been linked to the increasing size of the American car. People who are hit by large vehicles at high speed are less likely to run away.
