35MPG U.S. of gasoline is 6.7L/100km or 160 g/km CO2. That's roughly where the EU#s carmakers are today across all new LDV registrations, of which almost 50% are diesels. The targets are 140 g/km CO2 by 2008 and 120 g/km CO2 by 2012, but these are currently not legally binding.

Since the emissions regs mean the U.S. isn't ever going to be a really big diesel LDV market, a fleet average target of 35 MPG by 2017 ought to be achievable, even with the updated (i.e. more realistic) EPA test procedures for fuel economy. However, as many other posters have pointed out, there is little value in regulating vehicle fuel economy using CAFE. In due time, industry lobbyists will always find ways to undermine the spirit of the legislation (cp. the E85 loophole).

Besides, the proposed legislation apparently does not include a gas guzzler tax that really bites hard.

If you want carmakers to produce more fuel efficient cars you have to move the goalposts to generate lasting demand for such products. The simplest and most effective way to achieve this is to raise the price of fuel by taxing it more heavily (by energy content or CO2 potential, take your pick). Announce that you will ramp it up by $0.02 a month through 2017 and disburse the extra revenue by way of flat income tax credits for everyone (x2 for those filing jointly). After 120 months, you'd have slapped an additional $2.40 on each gallon of gasoline. Those who use less than the average, for whatever reason, earn themselves a net tax cut.

Long before then, full-size pick-up trucks and SUVs would become rarities on suburban streets. You would find a lot of A-C segment cars with 3 and 4 cylinder engines with 1.2-2.4L displacement, four valves per cylinder, thermal management, turbochargers, gasoline direct injection, cam phasers and integrated starter generators.

Btw, for all you Detroit haters. All three are building gasoline engines with some or all of the above features in Europe today. They could bring these engines to U.S. showrooms within 24 months if that is what customers there wanted. The point is, US customers do not. Gasoline is still way too cheap to make do with fewer of those cubic inches. Too many are still hoping this is just a blip, as many before have been.

Meanwhile, Spitsbergen is recording temperatures 13 deg C above average and its glaciers are melting.

Simple fact. Neither dems nor reps have the power alone to change cafe much because it can and will trigger massive layoffs and a backlash. The ONLY way to get cafe increases above a small amount is CONGRESS and all of congress so both sides take the heat equaly.

So only conngress can manage this hot potatoe.

Now ford and gm actaykly want a cafe increase because then they can fire a bunch of expansive workers and close wasteful plants and move more opf thier operations to far far more profitable areas of the world while pinning all he blame and heat on the morons stupid enough to fall for the trap.

Big oil wants higher milage because the higher the milage the more spendy the gas can be without people getting bitchy about it.

Rafael hit the nail right on the head. The US consumers do NOT want more fuel efficient vehicles. Even in 2003 when a poll (with a somewhat proper statistical sample) was taken the results indicated fuel efficiency was around 7th on the list of priorities for new car shoppers.

Safety, Performance, Reliability, and Aesthetics made up the top four (but not in that particular order).

The Plug-in Hybrid can reach this mileage goal handily, and surpass all other measurements of vehicular advancement, particularly safety, and advance other technologies in energy production and conservation. I'll just keep blowing my Plug-in Hybrid siren until all the other lesser technologies are drowned out.

Plug-in Hybrid! PLUG-IN Hybrid!! PLUG-IN HYBRID!!!
Plug-in HYBRID! Plug-in Hybrid!! PLUG-IN hybrid!!!!
PLUG-IN Hybrid! Plug-in HYBRID!! Plug-in HYBRID!!!!!
Plug-in Hybrid! Plug-in Hybrid!! PLUG-IN HYBRID!!!!!!

What? What? I can't hear you!

I think it's pretty clear that when a Tahoe racks up 33 CAFE MPG that CAFE has failed.

People are bailing on the SUVs because they are ahead of the government, and are adjusting themselves to new market conditions. It's not becaue CAFE pushed them.

This "35MPG CAFE by 2017" plan just means that will continue. We will pretend that we have a CAFE plan, but we are really leaving it to consumers to vote with their feet.

Poeple arnt bailing on suvs for any sane reason. They are mostly bailing on them because they arnt fasionable. Others a small number realy are bailing simply because they were stupid in the first place and got a car they couldnt afford to fuel.

The rest dont give a crap.

How many people understand their own motivations? Experimenters in behavioral economics would tell us that the number is low, I think.

On that, the behavioral aspects of economics, would not surprise me in the least that there are feedback mechanisms between a changing price structure, a changing environmental climate, and what is fashionable.

In my country there is a strong taxation over vehicles. As an example, if you want to buy a 5 Litre car with a base price of $40,000 you would add $43,546 of displacement tax and more 21% of VAT over $83.546, that means plus $17,544. From $40.000 you go up to $101,091.

That is called motivation.

Honda? What do you have to say?

I think they'd probably say, "How do you like our first version of our first truck sold in the US? Motor Trend seems to like it."

That would require going from an income tax to a consumption tax and yes repa sre VERY for that:) Oh and if you realy want to state it the right way to get reps on it also add in a wastefulness penalty. Any car thats needlessly ineffeicent in gas usage gets extra consuption tax added on. Course then you have to define needlessly wasteful.

But it is a truck. I'm sure we all hope that if someone buys a truck that they have the need of a truck for towing or hauling. As far as towing and hauling go, the Chevy Avalanche gets almost the same city mileage, the same highway mileage, yet blows the socks off the Ridgeline for payload. Seems like Chevy's got a better vehicle.

It's interesting to me that Chevy can get virtually the same mileage in a more powerful vehicle than Honda.

Wintermane -

the notion of an extra penalty for wastefulness would be unneccessary moralizing by a nanny state. Just make fuel significantly more expensive (cp. European price levels) and gas guzzler market share will melt away even faster than the snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I'd suggest you disburse the extra revenue by way of flat rate income tax xredits (x2 if filing jointly). That way, not only do the politicians not get any extra money to pour down their favorite drain, you can also ramp up the tax twice as far. By tying the credits to actual fuel sales, owners are forced to keep up with Jones' wrt MPG not just once but every time they buy a car, for the rest of their lives. You also avoid unexpected budget shortfalls.

"we all hope that if someone buys a truck that they have the need of a truck for towing or hauling"

I've given up that hope ;-), too many Avalanches and Escalades used as 1-person commuter cars here in Orange County California.

Seriously, what's the lifetime "percent time hitch connected" or "percent time the bed has 500lbs plus?" We'd be better off with a good easy "truck sharing" plan. Drive a civic to work every day, but pickup a truck whenever you need one.

(I saw a 1-ton pickup on PCH yesterday hauling ... wait for it ... a 15 pound racing bike in the back bed.)

I tire of the "I'm all right. I got mine Jack; all you other slobs... WALK". The movement types here b**ch and p*ss and moan about how other people need to change, and want to change them.

I got news for you, a wise man once said about changing human nature; "...it ain't never happened, an it ain't never gonna happen...".

There is no more wasted effort than getting the government to mandate something. Of all those self bloviating hot air machines you quoted would get up off their asses and sell their limos, and stop[ jetting around in G-IVs, now that would do something. If all those hot air lawyers had buckled down and studied Engineering or business and actually helped make a higher efficiency ground transport happen, it would have done some good.

But the best thing I can think of for the cause of global warming is for those knuckleheads in congress, Chafee, Snowe, Durbin and Feinstein to close their mouths and stop emitting hot air. Feinstein is the only one for the four to have an IQ higher then room temperature, the other three collectively couldn't score that high,and she is almost always wrong.

They could also stop subsidizing 1870's era technology in mass transit; that is also pouring money better used on intelligent highways and 2020 era technology like maglevs then pouring it down a down a rat hole because the transit unions want them to continue.

Never happen.

The quote from Durbin is wrong in every respect. Isn't it amazing that professional politicians consider themselves experts in everything that they have no personal knowledge of at all?
Proposing higher mileage cars as the answer to global warming,energy security and "consumer relief" is so ignorant as to be frightening. It is typical of liberals with damaging agendas to misrepresent everything to further their agenda.
Even if the car companies built all the hybrid cars they possibly could, (and ignoring the devastating environmental damage from the battery mining and manufacturing), and we all gained 30% better mileage, we would be using just as much gas in 10 years, and all the trouble would have been for nothing. The prices and exhaust volume would be just what it is today. He is all wrong about his pollution theory anyway.

The obvious answer is to USE AMERICA'S OIL! If we actively drilled and built new refinery's (always opposed by ignorant liberals like Durbin):

1. The price of oil would be under $40 a barrel, giving us all the consumer reief we need.

2. Iran, Syria, and Lebanon would be out of money and out of the terror business, and we would be out of Iraq. (Understand what that means anti-war idiots - we are in Iraq and fighting terrorism all over the world because liberal Democrat politicians are financing the terrorists with their insane refusal to use our oil and make gasoline in new refineries in the US!

3. The greenhouse gas gag is scientific fantasy. Just out - Ethanol would cause more smog than gasoline!

4. I know Forest Gump, I mean Al Gore says we are all going to die from car exhaust. Study history before you fall for that. 1000 years ago the world was several degrees hotter than it is now. Guess what? It was a good thing! More croplands, less disease, more exploration. Guess what else? Their were no SUV's spewing out CO2!

Drivers of cars with manual transmissions should study the BSFC (brake specific fuel consumption) map for engines like theirs. These maps show that for low horsepower requirements (under about 8 HP) for driving in the city, the engine speed should not exceed about 35% of redline for getting the best fuel economy. Don't worry about 'lugging' the engine, they have microprocessor controlled ignition timing. I have a 2003 Subaru Forester with a manual transmission. I consistently get 38 to 39 mpg summer (34-35 mpg winter) in combined city highway driving, by keeping the engine speed between 1500 and 2000 RPM.
Robert Shafer (Ph.D. Physics)
Los Alamos, NM

This mandate (35 mpg) and another to charge a "road damage/maintenance fee of $10,000" on SUVs which weigh over 4500 pounds should have been enacted 20 years ago.

I love to drive my old Jaguar but I now ride motorcycles (80 mpg and 55 mpg)to work because it's really a necessity.

I don't buy the line "I need a Suburban (or Explorer) to drive my kids to this and that....and because they're safer" from today's moms. Packing less, maybe getting those kids to ride their bikes to soccer practise, etc. and less coddling doesn't require using these gas-guzzling machines. As for being safer, better trained drivers helps make a vehicle safer, not the vehicle.

What will I do about my 1961 Jaguar? Maybe convert it to electric based on the 1981 issue of Mother Earth News hybrid electric conversion.

Just my two bits.

As for motorcycles being safe or unsafe. More and more motorcycles and scooters are appearing on the roads. Drivers need to be made aware of them and localities needs to offer more parking for them. Plus, some new bikes are coming out with automatic transmissions, three-wheelers are coming out in various styles and it's better for one person on two wheels as opposed to one person on four wheels.