Opinion: Grading cars’ fuel economy without a curve
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Is it just me, or is there something irritatingly nanny-state-ish about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to give letter grades to vehicles based on their fuel efficiency? It’s one of two competing ideas for updating the window sticker that new cars and trucks must display on sales lots, starting with the 2012 models that arrive next year. The other proposal is just a more detailed version of the current edition.
I’m all for simpler disclosures, but this strikes me as an overreach. It’s bad enough that the EPA grades every vehicle against the same absolute standard, so electric cars, hybrids and natural-gas vehicles are the only ones capable of getting A’s. What’s worse is that the schoolhouse scale is freighted with value -- C might stand for average, but it carries more than a whiff of underachievement and mediocrity.
My colleague Dan Turner, who’s written quite a bit about CAFE standards, says I protest too much:
The government is not interfering with consumers’ ability to choose the car they want, it’s simply providing comparative information for consumers who care about such things as fuel economy and pollution. If you don’t care, you’re free to ignore the label, just as car buyers have always done. If you do care, it’s a nice piece of information to have. Who’s hurt?
What about the automaker who goes the extra mile to make a large gas-powered sedan 20% more fuel-efficient than other cars in its class, only to be emblazoned with a big fat C+? Doesn’t that imply that the car isn’t as good, in some meaningful way, as one of those sleek smaller cars emblazoned with a B+ or better?
Dan’s retort: The point here is that there was a time when you could argue (and Detroit did argue) that this kind of regulation would deeply harm American manufacturers. Now, all the American manufacturers are making clean cars as well as dirty ones. If this steers some people from dirty cars to clean ones, it won’t necessarily hurt Detroit.
Your problem with this seems to be that you don’t want the government to pick winners and losers. If this label were giving hybrids an advantage over, say, clean diesel cars that get really high mileage, I’d agree. But they’re not picking superior technologies, they’re just basing it on mileage and emissions. Social engineering? Yes. But fairly harmless social engineering and for a very good cause.
Maybe so. Still, I prefer the alternative (displayed on the right). It would add information about emissions, make the combined city-highway mileage rating more prominent, and show how the vehicle stacks up against the entire field without sacrificing the comparison to other models in its class.
True, it lacks the at-a-glance simplicity of the letter grade version. But letter grades look too much like product reviews, which the government shouldn’t be doing. More important, if Washington really wants to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars and trucks for environmental and economic reasons, slapping C’s and D’s on SUVs and trucks is a really inefficient way to do it.
By the way, Congress ordered the mileage labels to be revised in the 2007 Energy Independence and
Security Act, so don’t blame this initiative on the Obama administration. The EPA is accepting comments on the proposed labeling rule for two months; you can do so here, in addition to sounding off in the comments section below.
-- Jon Healey
