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How would fuel effiency labels affect car sales?
One of the new proposed EPA labels for gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles.
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Kai Ryssdal: If you happen to be in the market for a new car, you know how the variables can be endless. Electric, increasingly; hybrid, gas-only. What's greenest versus what's cheapest versus what can fit all the kids and the groceries? The Environmental Protection Agency has a new system that ranks cars by emissions and the cost of gas to run them. It says assigning an A, a B or a C to your car's MPG would just make things easier.
From the Marketplace Sustainability Desk, Eve Troeh reports.
Eve Troeh: The EPA hasn't changed the way it rates fuel economy in more than 20 years. The proposed new stickers would show energy use and emissions.
Kenny Berns is sales manager at Hollywood Toyota. He says gas mileage is already prominent on each car's sticker.
Kenny Berns: I'm looking at a Corolla, which is 26 in the city, 34 in the highway and between those two numbers is a shaded fuel pump like at a gas station.
The EPA says that's not enough information. It wants to tell consumers how much and what kind of energy a car uses. One idea is to give grades for overall fuel economy. That Corolla would get a big letter B on its tag. It's cousin the Prius Hybrid? An A-. And beefcake brother the Tundra truck? A D. There are no F's.
Kenny Berns says grades could affect how cars get sold.
Berns: If it's an A or a B, sales will use it as a selling point. If it's less than that, I don't think that's gonna be something that they would be pointing out.
He says people who buy trucks or SUVs know they're not fuel efficient. So a C or D won't change their minds.
Jon Linkov is managing editor at Consumer Reports. He says the grades could influence people.
Jon Linkov: There are people who may shun a vehicle simply because it gets a C, such as a minivan. And then go for a vehicle that's an A or a B and end up not being happy at the end of the day, because it doesn't fit their needs.
Linkov also says the main reason people buy more efficient cars is to save money on fuel. While zero-emissions electric cars get an A+ for emissions and cost from the EPA, that grade doesn't include the price of a charging station, which could run a few thousand dollars.
In Los Angeles, I'm Eve Troeh for Marketplace.
This is a terrible idea. Instead of using a quantifiable, tangible metric, like MPG, why use a subjective grade? Currently, mileage ranges from ~14 for the Expedition, Hummer, Tundra or Sequoia, to ~50 for the Prius. Instead of having a range of 36mpg, this would get condensed to A, B, C, D. Stupid. Information is lost here. People will think all cars in the B range are equal. I can easily look at the MPG, determine the number of miles I drive that vehicle, compare it to others, my wants and needs. That becomes much harder with a broad binning system like A-D.
Terrible. The EPA gets and F for this idea.
I'm all for providing consumers with good information that is helpful to their decision making but i find this idea of "grading" their decision abhorrent. The government does not know what peoples' needs are. People are smart, they'll make good decisions if left to do so. http://bit.ly/95yqTf
It was unclear from the story, but if the purpose of this program is to grade vehicles on fuel efficiency *AND* emissions, then emissions due to the production of the fuel and due to the production of the vehicle should be included. The unfortunate undertone of this message is that all of the information necessary to judge a vehicle's environmental worth can be distilled down to a letter grade that a 3rd grader can understand. Fuel efficiency is *one* characteristic we use to make purchase decisions, along with the utility of the vehicle required by our own personal lifestyles and needs. Shame on the government bureaucrats for trying to shame us into buying what they think is right for us.
Eve Troeh's Marketplace story regarding the EPA's new vehicle-rating stickers provided her an ideal opportunity to break an unfortunate editorial perspective that NPR reporter's consistently use. In closing her story, she referred to the fact the purchase of an electric vehicle should calculate in a considerable cost in gaining access to a recharge system. Some truth to this. But the opportunity for Ms. Troeh to provide a full context to her story was lost as she did not draw a "source" comparison to fossil fuel autos. It should have been mentioned that there are considerable and very substantial subsidies to the oil industry, the cost of national security, numerous health-care expenses as well as very calculable environmental degradations and related costs. These are real expenses directly attributable to the gas-driven auto. Should not that cost side be mentioned versus always referring to the "costs" of alternative fuel vehicles?
The EPA did change the way it rates fuel economy in 2008. The new style of estimates gives lower MPG numbers. This was kind of a silly change, since now, when comparing the MPG of an older car vs. a newer car, you have the added complication of needing to make sure both numbers were done the same way. But maybe there's some benefit in that more people will believe the revised MPG numbers, now that they're "closer to real-world results". The proposed use of letter grading for this is completely ridiculous, though. If people ignore the numbers, they'll ignore letters too. Letters will mask smaller distinctions between cars of similar size/weight. And, one would hope, a car that's considered A-B today will be considered C-D 20 years from now.
Electric cars may have zero emissions on the road, but that is only because the emissions for their fuel have already been released at the coal/nuclear/gas power plant. AND we're still excluding the emissions and waste from the production process.
I think we're headed in a great direction, but to call electric cars zero-emissions vehicles is misleading.
