Auto dealers want the Trump administration to ease federal regulations on fuel emissions they say will dramatically increase retails prices for SUVs and trucks.
They want the president to reverse rules enacted by former President Barack Obama requiring automakers to double the average fuel efficiency of car and truck fleets to an eye-popping 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
Mark Scarpelli, the National Automobile Dealers Association’s new chairman, told an audience at an auto dealer conference earlier in January that the technology needed to improve fuel efficiency could add as much as $3,000 to a car’s price tag.
“You inflate the price of the vehicle and a car that was maybe within reach of being affordable now may not be,” Scarpelli said, referring to the fuel emission mandates Obama’s EPA heaped last year on the auto market.
EPA surprised the auto industry by publishing a report on fuel efficiency standards before its scheduled 2017 release date — critics of the Obama administration claimed at the time the agency was rushing through rules before Trump took office.
Obama EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, urged agency employees to finalize as many rules as they can before Obama left the White House.
The industry also impressed upon the president the impact the emission standards might cause to American jobs.
Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields, meanwhile, told Trump at a business meeting that “various studies showed that up to 1 million jobs could be at risk if we’re not given some level of flexibility on that to align with market realities.”
The EPA and Department of Transportation pushed the emission standards in 2012. The Obama administration said at the time the rule would slash fuel costs and global warming emissions.
Automakers slammed the agency’s early release of its fuel efficiency study.“This extraordinary and premature rush to judgment circumvents the serious analysis necessary to make sure the [fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas] standards appropriately balance fuel efficiency, carbon reduction, affordability and employment,” the Auto Alliance said in a statement, according to The Washington Examiner.
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