At the same time President Obama has won widespread praise for his historic proposal to increase fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks to 54.5 mpg by 2025, his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is getting criticism from an unexpected source: the Sierra Club. In a just-issued report titled “CAFE: Truth Behind the Testing,” the environmental group outlines what it calls “the need to revamp the arcane testing procedures used to estimate fuel-efficiency standards and close the gap between the numbers used for standards and real-world mileage.”
It claims the current procedures are inaccurate and “inflate the fuel-efficiency values used for setting and measuring compliance with fuel-efficiency standards by about 25 percent above the EPA’s best estimates of actual on-road fuel efficiency that car buyers see on the window sticker.” The report says current tests for setting fuel-efficiency and carbon-pollution standards assume that cars average 48 miles per hour on the highway and that you’ll never use the air-conditioner, heater or any other accessories. Due to outdated testing, the 54.5 mpg standard announced last week will mean consumers in 2025 can expect new vehicles that average approximately 40 mpg, it claimed.
“Unfortunately, the testing process used to determine these standards is still stuck in the 1970s, giving us fuel-efficiency standards that are inflated and divorced from what Americans can expect to see on new vehicle stickers and on the road,” says Ann Mesnikoff, director of the Sierra Club’s Green Transportation program. “We need to modernize the testing procedures used for setting standards, and move toward one set of numbers for both the standards and for what American families will see on window labels at the dealership.”
