Does Lighter Equal Deadlier?
By DANNY HAKIM
The New York Times
August 28, 2005
THE last time the government decided to make cars go farther on a gallon of gas, during the energy shocks of the 1970's, the strategy worked. Or at least it did for about a decade, as new regulations forced automakers to make more efficient vehicles. Soaring gas prices and shortages were also a powerful motivator for consumers to trade in their Oldsmobile Toronados for little Datsuns and Ford Escorts. Gas mileage for the average new vehicle went from 13.1 miles per gallon in 1975 models to 22.1 miles per gallon in 1987 models, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
For this latest energy shock, with its first overhaul of fuel economy standards in three decades the Bush administration is responding more cautiously, citing safety as a reason for restraint. The regulatory system adopted 30 years ago, they say, led to unnecessary deaths by forcing automakers to produce cars that were too small, light and unsafe.
Last week, the administration proposed a new structure for corporate average fuel economy regulations - the so-called CAFE standards - for sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and vans that they said would save 10 billion gallons of gas over nearly two decades.
While environmentalists called that a pittance - "at best, they're proposing a system that will save a month's worth of gas," said David Friedman, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists - the administration, with previous steps and its current proposal, is doing more to raise vehicle mileage than Washington has accomplished in at least two decades, which is to say more than practically nothing.
"Clearly, we would love to decrease our dependence on foreign oil down to zero, but what the environmentalists ignore is that, until we phase out the old system, every tenth of mile a gallon that we raise CAFE beyond what is technologically feasible, we kill people," said Jeffrey W. Runge, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "We're against killing people. We have to get this system reformed."
Have traffic deaths really occurred because of efforts to conserve gas? Consumer groups ridiculed this claim, saying safety is compromised because vehicles are too fat, not too light, and point to crash studies showing that heavy-set S.U.V.'s like Hummers pose the real danger. Critics say the system proposed by the administration could provide incentive for automakers to make their S.U.V.'s even larger, though gas prices are an increasingly potent counterweight to such temptations.
"It's more accurate to say that this increases the safety dangers," said Joan Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen and a predecessor of Dr. Runge's.
An architect of the administration plan is John D. Graham, a top official at the Office of Management and Budget. In his previous life as an academic, with some of his research financed by the auto industry, Mr. Graham found that lighter-weight vehicles led to thousands of unnecessary traffic fatalities. "The intent of the administration's C.A.F.E. reform plan is threefold," Mr. Graham said in an e-mail Friday. "To save more fuel, to reduce the unintended safety risks to motorists, and to provide an equitable regulatory framework for all vehicle manufacturers."
A 2001 National Academy of Sciences report backed the essence of his safety research. The panel attributed 1,300 to 2,600 fatalities in 1993 alone specifically to the fuel-economy regulations.
David Greene, an expert on energy research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, served on the panel but dissented from its conclusions, disputing the traffic-death statistics. Still, he called the new proposed system innovative and said it could solve some shortcomings of the current regulation. His one concern, he said, was that automakers might find new ways to game the system.
So how does this all work?
The current system regulates two broad categories of vehicles: cars and light-duty trucks, including S.U.V.'s, pickup trucks and minivans. In 2005 models automakers are required to meet a fuel economy average of 27.5 miles per gallon for cars and 21.2 miles per gallon for light trucks. The new proposal would break up the light-truck group into six smaller categories based on vehicles' dimensions. Requirements would be less stringent for bigger vehicles. Particularly irksome to environmentalists is that the largest S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks, like Hummer H2's, would remain excluded from the regulations. (Administration officials say jumbo S.U.V.'s could still be covered in their final plan due in April.)
The new system encourages manufacturers not to reduce weight to improve mileage, but to take steps like putting better technology under the hood, from hybrid electric systems to more efficient transmissions, or perhaps de-emphasizing horsepower.
While the new system would probably discourage some dubious practices, like raising the ride height of cars to reclassify them as light trucks, some vehicles could move into less demanding mileage categories with only tiny changes in dimensions. Regulators say they are considering ways to guard against this."In a perfect world, we would have no dependence on foreign oil, we would drive hydrogen vehicles and we would be carpooling," Dr. Runge said. "But that's a dream world. We have to operate in reality." |
