The oil shock could be worse if it wasn't for U.S. fuel efficiency standards

One small bright spot as drivers stare down rising prices at the pump? Cars and trucks continue to get more fuel efficient.

According to the Energy Information Administration, gasoline consumption fell about 1% last year, compared to 2024. It was down 4% compared to the pre-pandemic high in 2019. And that’s even as we keep driving more: “Vehicle miles traveled” is the government’s measure of our driving habits, and it rose over 1% last year.

It’s a continuation of a decades-long trend of slowly rising fuel efficiency.

One thing that made the oil shocks of the 1970s especially bad: cars back then weren’t very fuel efficient.

“When I was young, a car got 13 miles per gallon, you know? Now they're getting 30 miles, and some of them are up 50, 60 miles per gallon,” said Daniel Sperling, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis.

That’s largely thanks to federal regulations that were created in response to those oil crises, he said.

“So the industry has been obligated to continually supply more efficient vehicles,” Sperling said.

But because we tend to drive our cars for a long time — the average vehicle on the road is nearly 13 years old — those more efficient vehicles take a while to change our overall gas consumption.

“We still have a lot of vehicles on the road that have relatively low fuel economy. They were, you know, produced back a long time ago, when those standards were weaker,” said Joshua Linn, an economist at the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The federal government started bolstering those standards about 15 years ago. So as newer models keep cycling into traffic, we’ll keep seeing overall fuel economy rise, said Rebecca Ciez, an engineering professor at Purdue University.

And that price at the pump?

“It will hurt slightly less, because the average fuel economy, even on these older cars, is much higher than it was in the in previous years,” she said.

The federal fuel economy rules have also pushed companies to make more electric and hybrid vehicles.

Karl Brauer at iSeeCars.com said over the last 20 years, hybrids especially have become a lot cheaper for car companies to produce.

“The cost of the batteries has been dropping, the cost of the motors has been dropping. The space and the weight that both of those things take up has been dropping,” he said.

That’s made hybrids way more common and popular.

But last year, Congress and the Trump administration rolled back the federal fuel economy standards. And some car companies have started making more trucks that don’t get great mileage.

So fuel efficiency, Brauer said, could soon plateau or even get worse.