What the New York Times doesn’t understand about cars.
This is the analysis I promised yesterday of a Times page-one report. Not paywalled.
My old boss Charlie Peters, 1926-2023, founded the Washington Monthly after serving in the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations, where he helped establish the Peace Corps.
Charlie composed many rules about Washington institutions. Two of them are relevant here:
1. Big-deal reporters and editors are bored by policy details, so they are easy for government and politicians to hoodwink
2. Much of what Washington does is make-believe
Both tenets apply to the page-one lead story in Saturday’s New York Times, which spells out a White House announcement of a coming incredible, amazing, astonishing improvement in the fuel economy of new cars and light trucks.
First, it’s make believe. Nothing like what the Times story describes can happen as quickly as the White House claims. But it’s make-believe that sounds exciting and reflects well on the administrative state, and that’s enough to make Page One.
Second, reporter and editor both were so bored with details the story includes this howler: “The new standards require American automakers to increase fuel economy so that, across their product lines, their passenger cars would average 65 miles per gallon by 2031, up from 48.7 miles per gallon today.”
up from an average of 48.7 miles per gallon today.
Why Washington engages in such make-believe we’ll get to in a moment.
First, here is the EPA guide to new-car MPG. Good luck finding cars that get the claimed 48 MPG average.
A few hybrids do -- check the Toyota Prius. But the Prius is tiny, only a child could squeeze into the rear seats. The sedan-sized Toyota RAV4 hybrid gets 37 MPG, while the RAV4 gasoline-only model gets 28 MPG. The Dodge Hornet hybrid is rated at 77 MPGe when running on batteries, 29 MPG when burning gasoline.
Yet the Times tells us today’s new cars average 48.7 MPG. Only two percent of vehicles on the road are EVs, too slight a share to explain that claimed average.
Most new cars achieve far lower mileage than the Times pretends. According to the EPA, for example, the Buick Enclave gets 20 MPG. The Lincoln Navigator, a popular model, gets 18 MPG. (In all cases I am using the EPA’s “combined” figure that blends city and highway performance.) I drive an Acura RDX built in East Liberty, Ohio. Its EPA rating is 24 MPG, half what the Times thinks I am getting. And the RDX is not a sports car (those days are over, sigh). It has a four-cylinder engine with middling acceleration.
The New York Times makes rudimentary mistakes about cars, and the environmental aspects of auto policy, in part because most who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn don’t own cars. Times senior correspondents and editors use Ubers or “black car services,” a New York City specialty.
Perhaps the correspondent and editor of the story linked above hadn’t shopped for a car, or filled a car’s tank, in years, and so has no idea what kind of mileage new vehicles get.
The “48.7 MPG” number was in a fact sheet the White House handed out. The rule as announced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a numbing 1,004 pages of gibberish. That an auto-mileage rule needs to be 250 times as long as the draft of the United States Constitution (four pages) shows red tape run wild.
But neither reporter not any editor thought, “Wait a minute, that number cannot be right.” (Reporter and editor at Politico also fell for “48.7” as the current average.)
How could the Times have fact-checked its piece? Here the EPA tracks real-world mileage of new vehicles. See chart ES-1 – average MPG of new vehicles sold in the United States is 26, not 48.7.
That’s actually great progress!
Average MPG was just 16 in 1980, now it’s 26 as cars have gotten bigger, quicker, better-appointed and safer.
Rising average MPG is one of the reasons the United States no longer needs Persian Gulf oil (and no longer should provide free military protection for Gulf dictatorships – wouldn’t it be nice if Congress noticed). It’s also a reason U.S. greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2006 and have been in mild decline since.
But it took 43 years of engineering to add 10 MPG to the U.S. average, going from 16 MPG to 26 MPG. The White House make-believe announcement pretends another 16 MPG can be added to the average in just seven years.
Even if EVs do very well, this much improvement this fast simply won’t happen, especially with the White House imposing tariffs to drive China-built affordable EVs out of the market.
Why the Washington make-believe about mileage numbers? One reason is the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, based on a law enacted in 1975, has become larded with dozens of special-pleading exemptions and asterisks.
The EPA simply tells you what mileage a car will get – that is, thinks like a car owner. The CAFE hierarchy throws in technicalities – that is, thinks like a lobbyist. For example, technicalities allow the Detroit Big Three to manufacture profitable low-MPG pickups and SUVs that are in effect exempt from fuel standards and from foreign competition.
Another reason is that the Democratic Party conceived federal MPG standards, over the strong objection of the GOP, and good for the Dems! Now, wants to exaggerate success – while demonizing the petrol that cars use. (Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the world’s leading petroleum consumers with her armored motorcades and private jets, has said oil company executives should go to prison.)
Democrats in the White House have a long tradition of fibbing about MPG.
At the 2015 Paris climate talks, President Barack Obama boasted about how the United States had made so much incredible, incredible progress, new cars were averaging 34.5 MPG. The actual number for 2015 was 24 MPG for new cars.
But Washington is addicted to make-believe, so Obama and other delegates to the Paris conference went with made-up numbers. Michigan Rep. John Conyers, 1929-2019, then Detroit’s voice in Congress, gave a speech praising U.S. automakers for their amazing achievement of a new-car average of 34.5 MPG – an amazing achievement that was imaginary.
Of course Obama and Conyers had not themselves shopped for, maintained or put gasoline into a car in many years – drivers were always magically standing by.
Obama and now Biden exaggerate MPG success both to flatter their political party and to please the United Auto Workers, a key donor base. If things are going swimmingly with MPG, then there can be more exemptions for the Detroit-built heavy pickup trucks and SUVs that mean job security for the UAW.
Plus Biden’s make-believe objective announced last week – an average 65 MPG by 2031 – does not come into effect until a two-term Biden presidency has ended. Biden gets credit for a dramatic announcement, won’t be around to take any blame: and the New York Times will not fact-check the details.
Maybe you’re thinking, hey, at least these rules will reduce greenhouse gases, and that’s good.
That is – but the reduction is microscopic. NHTSA announced the rules would cut greenhouse gases by 710 million metric tons through 2050.
Sounds amazing and incredible! Except: works out to 0.0007 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions expected through the period.
Bonus: There’s a practical way the United States could make much larger cuts in vehicle-based greenhouse emissions without having to spend trillions of dollars building new electric infrastructure. A coming All Predictions Wrong will detail this solution that’s hiding in plain sight.
Note to readers:
Today’s is not paywalled because the subject is a public policy issue in the news.
Regular All Predictions Wrong returns on Friday, as does the paywall.
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Your Prius description is inaccurate. The rear deck of the standard Prius (mine is a 2019) seats two adults conformably. With rear seats down, I can haul much stuff in the rear. I once loaded a standard size metal file cabinet in the rear -- about the length of a coffin but higher. Believe me, you can haul a helluva more in a Prius than an SUV. We know because we recently moved back to the Midwest from NoVa -- and we utilized every cubic inch.
Current mileage on my hybrid (not a plug-in hybrid) is 60.8 miles/gallon. Nine gallon tank.
I really think hybrids are the interim solution. That and higher gasoline taxes at the pump. people drive big hulking pick ups and SUVs because gas is cheap. Simply raising the tax would encourage migration to more fuel, efficient vehicles.
But because that would be unpopular it won’t happen.