Hard New Rules on vehicle pollution, proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency this week, could reshape one of the world’s largest industries and transform the way millions of people get around. The goal, government officials say, is get a lot more EVs on a lot more driveways.
But another way of looking at the proposed rules is like some 1,400 pages of models, charts and dense regulatory language, enough to make the heart of any environmental expert pound like an endangered songbird. And buried there is a fascinating federal change: an attempt to close a loophole that may be partly responsible for the explosion the size of passenger vehicles on America’s highways.
To understand the change, you have to start in the 1970s, when the “SUV loophole,” as policy nerds call it, was created. US lawmakers were drafting the nation’s first car pollution rules, at a time when the only people driving heavy vehicles like trucks were people who had things to haul or real reasons for driving off-road. . Farmers and construction workers and such. Who else would pay to buy and power a set of wheels this big? It made sense to subject trucks to more lenient fuel efficiency standards than cars.
Cut to 2010. In the midst of creating new tailpipe emission rules for cars, the Obama administration’s EPA used the same logic to create an additional, similar exception for large vehicles based on their “footprints”: the area between its wheels. An automaker that sold cars with larger footprints faced less stringent tailpipe emissions rules than those that sold sedans or compacts.
Since then, truck and SUV sales have skyrocketed far beyond ranchers and others who actually need those vehicles for their jobs. SUVs, which a decade ago accounted for a third of new vehicle sales, now account for three-fifths, according to analysis 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 familiar with the emission regulation system. A new category of vehicle, the crossover-utility, functions as a passenger car. They are used by families, are driven around, have no role to play on construction sites, and do little daily transportation.
But because they have four-wheel drive, or a bit 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 “fuzzy [of] the lines between cars and light trucks,” says Simon Mui, head of state and federal clean vehicle policy advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. Meanwhile, automakers are able to sell larger trucks and SUVs because these smaller “trucks” reduce the overall emissions of the vehicles they sell, helping them meet federal tailpipe emissions standards.
But the rise of these heavier vehicles hasn’t been kind to the planet. a february report by the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental energy policy organization, noted that SUVs consume approximately 20 percent more oil (as fuel) than the average non-SUV midsize car. The world’s 330 million SUVs emitted 1 billion tons of carbon by 2022, the group found. If SUVs were a country, they would rank sixth for emissions in the world, behind only Japan. Meanwhile, a decade-long increase in pedestrian fatalities on the highway has been linked to the increasing size of the American car. People struck at high speeds by large vehicles are less likely to walk away.