Safety Takes a Back Seat

Under newly proposed CAFE standards, SUVs and other `light trucks' would have to raise their average fuel economy and, in the process, reduce passenger safety.

They're baaack. After being legislatively frozen for six years, the miles-per-gallon mandates of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for carmakers again may be headed for a massive increase. And forget the evidence of studies suggesting that this could lead to thousands more traffic deaths. Desperate for a quick fix for high gasoline prices and energy shortages of their own making, lawmakers in both parties are touting CAFE as a "painless" way to save fuel.

Sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) again are the whipping boy for everything from costly fuel to global warming. "SUVs ... have brought the average fuel economy of all the nation's new vehicles to its lowest point since 1980," says a press release from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Feinstein and liberal Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, are sponsoring a bill to close the "light-truck loophole" by mandating that SUVs, minivans, pickup trucks and other vehicles classified by the government as "light trucks" meet the same fuel-economy standards as cars.

Under the scheme propounded by the three senators, a carmaker's fleet of "light trucks" would by 2007 have to rise from an average of 20.7 miles per gallon (mpg) to 27.5, a 33 percent increase. Critics say this cannot be achieved without price hikes and weight reduction that greatly would reduce passenger safety. But some in Congress want to go even further, mandating an average standard of 40 mpg for passenger cars and light trucks combined.

Hit by charges that they are too friendly to the oil lobby, even conservative Republicans such as House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin of Louisiana are jumping on the CAFE bandwagon. Tauzin and Energy and Commerce ranking member John Dingell, D-Mich., a longtime representative of the Detroit area, added an amendment to President George W. Bush's energy plan to require the Transportation Department to cut gas consumption for light trucks by 5 billion gallons through CAFE or other means by 2010. Analysts say this could mean increasing its burden by three mpg.

But even many who favor government intervention say that CAFE is the wrong way to go. "Putting [mileage] constraints on new motor vehicles, which is CAFE, would be the worst of all worlds," says Robert Crandall, an economist and senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution. "If we're going to do something about whatever we claim the problem is today -- say global warming -- put on a carbon tax. Much more efficient, much less costly to the U.S. economy, much safer."

Crandall coauthored a 1989 study in the Journal of Law and Economics that found CAFE standards, passed in the midst of the 1970s energy crisis, were responsible for 2,000 to 4,000 traffic deaths during the 10-year cycle of the 1989-model year. The easiest and, many times, the only way to increase the fuel economy of cars is to reduce their weight. But auto-safety statistics show that larger cars, because of their mass, are safer in traffic accidents. As a recent study in the American Journal of Public Health puts it: "Drivers of larger, heavier cars have lower risks in crashes than drivers of smaller, lighter cars."

The average weight of cars has been decreased by about 700 pounds, from 3,610 pounds in 1978 to 2,921 pounds in the late 1990s. Some of that may be due to demand for smaller vehicles, but Crandall's study estimated that CAFE alone caused automakers to reduce the average weight of their cars by about 500 pounds. "The way you meet CAFE is by raising the price of large cars [to] induce people to buy more small cars which will be less safe," he says.

Based on the findings of Crandall, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the free-market group Consumer Alert successfully sued the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for violating its own procedures by not assessing the safety impact of increases in CAFE standards. In siding with the plaintiffs, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found that "nothing in the record or in NHTSA's analysis appears to undermine the inference that the 27.5 mpg standard kills people."

After NHTSA performed a safety analysis claiming that CAFE did not cause size reductions, the court deferred to it in 1995, even though it found that "NHTSA's failure to adequately respond to [Crandall's] study is troubling." By this time, however, Republicans had won control of Congress and through appropriations bills froze CAFE at its current levels of 27.5 mpg for cars and 20.7 for light trucks.

Proponents of higher CAFE standards nonetheless continue to rail against the "SUV loophole," claiming that SUVs, minivans and pickups are bought as substitutes for passenger cars. If so, critics say, CAFE created the market by effectively banning larger sedans and station wagons. In a CEI survey conducted by the Polling Company, 40 percent of SUV owners said they bought their vehicles because they wanted "more space" or "greater safety." CEI general counsel Sam Kazman says, "It's not that SUVS are a loophole; they're an escape hatch from CAFE."