Hands were set wringing last week when the Environmental Protection Agency announced it no longer expects the fuel economy of America's light-duty vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon in the 2025 model year.
But the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are but one of several policies forcing engineers to rethink automotive propulsion. Even if the CAFE standards' impact falls short of estimates, the combined policies compel the industry toward electric vehicles, according to a former GM engineer and mobility expert.
"What is going to happen here, I believe, is that it’s just going to become easier to build an electric car," said Lawrence Burns, the former vice president of research & development and planning for General Motors.
Engineers trying to improve the fuel economy of internal-combustion engines also have to enable them to meet the renewable fuel standard, which some automakers have argued is testing engines' mechanical limits. At the same time, automakers have to meet the Zero Emission Vehicle standard in California and nine other states, requiring them to field a minimum of 15 percent of battery-electric and fuel-cell vehicles.
"I think the key message here is that beyond 2025, battery and fuel-cell electric vehicles could just become the best way to design and engineer light-duty vehicles," Burns said this spring at the University of Chicago. "Set aside all the motivations for climate change, oil dependence—it’s just a better way to do a car. It’s simpler."
When Burns made that statement, he stressed the importance of all three policies driving engineers to that threshold: "The worst thing that can happen here, quite honestly, is we blink on 54.5 CAFE in 2025,” he said.
I contacted Burns last week to ask whether the EPA in fact had blinked when it released its draft Technical Assessment Report July 18, saying America's fuel economy is more likely to average only about 50 mpg in the 2025 model year.
Burns emphasized that the EPA's draft Technical Assessment Report "is the first step in a long and complex process. As such," he said, "I feel it is too early to reach any conclusion.
"Also, California's ZEV is as important as CAFE in motivating the auto industry to continue the commercial learning cycles with battery and fuel cell EVs," said Burns, who also served as a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan and director of the Program for Sustainable Mobility at Columbia University.
"My contention is that we will reach a point where it simply makes more sense from a design/ engineering/ production standpoint to do electric vehicles rather than combustion vehicles."
The CAFE standards are falling short of 54.5 MPG largely because consumers are buying vehicles that use more gas than the government predicted when it launched the standard in 2012.
CAFE sets different efficiency targets for different models based on their footprint. The success of the system depends somewhat on consumers, who detemine whether we reach 50 mpg or 54.5 mpg by deciding whether to buy small footprint, high-efficiency vehicles or large-footprint, lower-efficiency vehicles.
Burns believes many of those less efficient models are crossover vehicles, and he contends consumers are motivated to buy them not just by lower gas prices, but by their features. Beyond 2025, he contends, automakers may produce crossover vehicles with those features with electric drive.
"It’s just going to be so hard to get to these goals with a combustion based platform, and we’re going to see a maturing of the key enablers of electrically driven that I think the automobile industry is going to reach the conclusion it’s easier to architect our platforms around electric drive."
Although EPA's draft Technical Assessment Review is not a decision document, it offers evidence that American carmakers should be able to achieve the Obama Administration's rigorous fuel economy standard.
"The results of the Draft TAR show that manufacturers are adopting fuel economy technologies at unprecedented rates. Car makers and suppliers have developed far more innovative technologies to improve fuel economy and reduce GHG emissions than anticipated just a few years ago," according to an EPA summary released with the report.
The Obama Administration implemented the standards in 2012 with broad support from the auto industry, but it agreed to conduct a mid-term evaluation to see if standards should be revised for model years 2022-25.
An important step in that evaluation, the report concludes that automakers:
- now have more technologies at their disposal to meet the standards, and at costs equal to or lower than the costs estimated in 2012;
- can achieve the standards largely through advanced gasoline vehicle technologies, with modest levels of hybrid cars and very low levels of full electrification.
- can achieve the standards regardless of factors like economic growth, gasoline prices, and other macro-economic trends.
EPA is taking public comment on the Draft TAR for the next 50 days. It expects to issue a final determination on whether to change the CAFE standards in April 2018.
