Top executives at Ford are calling for the Trump administration to increase fuel efficiency standards in vehicles while the EPA is signaling a move in the other direction.
The EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation have until April 1 to release revised vehicle emissions targets for cars and light trucks in model years 2022 – 2025. Former President Barack Obama drafted the current standard for those years, and it places automakers on a tighter emissions reduction schedule, Bloomberg reports.
The Trump administration has already drafted arguments for not just decreasing the Obama-era standard but decreasing the standard overall, in-line with what some automakers are asking for.
Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford and President and CEO Jim Hackett appear to be the exception, however.
“We support increasing clean car standards through 2025 and are not asking for a rollback. We want one set of standards nationally, along with additional flexibility to help us provide more affordable options for our customers,” the executives wrote in Medium.
Ford and Hackett are not necessarily calling for the Obama-era standards to remain untouched. The executives’ ideal standards could be much looser or stricter than the ones currently in place. The wording is ambiguous.
Fuel economy standards, first implemented for model year 1978 vehicles, were originally meant to reduce U.S. dependence on oil imported from other nations but became a tool to lower emissions and fight climate change under Obama. The standards have increased the price of new cars by nearly $4,000, according to a 2016 report from The Heritage Foundation.
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