The US Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed stringent new regulations on vehicle pollution, which have the potential to reshape one of the world's largest industries and change how millions of people travel. The aim of these regulations is to encourage the use of electric vehicles and reduce pollution from traditional vehicles.
However, the proposed rules are not just a simple set of guidelines. They consist of over 1,400 pages of dense regulatory language, charts, and modeling. This complexity has made it difficult for environmental enthusiasts to fully grasp the details of the proposed rules. Nonetheless, buried within the pages lies an intriguing change that could help to close a loophole responsible for the burgeoning size of passenger vehicles on US roads.
To understand the loophole, one must go back to the 1970s, when US lawmakers first created pollution rules for automobiles. At that time, only people who had specific reasons to drive heavy vehicles like trucks, such as farmers and construction workers, did so. To accommodate this group, lawmakers made fuel-efficiency rules for trucks more lenient than those for cars.
Fast forward to 2010, and the Obama administration's EPA used the same logic to create an exception for large vehicles based on their "footprints" - the area between their wheels - when drafting new tailpipe emission rules for cars. Car manufacturers selling vehicles with larger footprints were subject to less stringent tailpipe emissions rules than those selling sedans or compacts.
Since then, the sales of trucks and SUVs have skyrocketed, far beyond those who genuinely require such vehicles for work purposes. SUVs, which previously accounted for one-third of new vehicle sales, now make up three-fifths, while car sales have dropped significantly from around half of all new vehicle sales to just one in five.
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