Also, because of CAFE standards, the US can't even attempt to create its own competing light trucks as everything needs to be fucking massive to maintain the emission exemptions.

The thinking was it would make cars more efficient but instead everyone just built obscenely large vehicles that were classified as trucks instead of passenger vehicles.

There are two ways to improve fuel economy. The first is technology (fuel injection, aerodynamics, hybrids, etc.). The second is to make the vehicle smaller.

The first one is a trade off against cost, but the market is already pretty good at handling that one on its own. Fuel injection and aerodynamics don't add much to the cost of a car, so pretty much everything has that now. Hybrid batteries are more expensive, but the price is coming down, and as it does the percentage of hybrid cars is going up. You don't really need a law for this; people buy it when the fuel savings exceeds the cost of the technology.

The second one is a trade off against things like cargo capacity. If you say that "cars" have to get >35 MPG at the point before hybrids are cost effective, or keep raising the number as the technology improves, it's essentially just a ban on station wagons. And then what do the people who used to buy station wagons do instead? They buy SUVs.

The entire premise is dumb. If you want more efficient vehicles then do a carbon tax which gets refunded to the population as checks, and then let people buy whatever they want, but now the break even point for hybrids and electric cars makes it worth it for more people.

CAFE stopped being enforced in 2022 and don't apply going forward.

As much as I like to slag on CAFE, we have been here before.

Automakers simply hate making affordable cars. MBAs extol "Number must go up! BRRRRRRR!" and you cannot do that with cheap cars.

Remember the 70s? What did the big automakers do? They made bigger and bigger cars ever shittier and jacked up the prices. Sound familiar?

And then what happened? Japan showed up and cleaned their clock. And then the protectionist laws got passed, but it didn't matter because the Japanese cars were smaller and better and used less gas. Sound familiar?

History may not repeat itself, but it sure likes to rhyme.