CAFE au lait

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy laws have sizeable loop-holes that have been happily exploited by auto manufacturers for the past ten years or so. To wit: SUVs considered "light trucks" and thus held to a lower standard than other passenger autos, and truly huge behemoths like the Hummer completely exempt because they qualify, by gross vehicle weight, as a commercial vehicle!
So the good news is that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has drawn up a proposal to reform the CAFE laws. The bad news is that they have decided to split fuel economy requirements for "light trucks" (this means SUVs in addition to the class of vehicles originally intended to be serviced by the current loop-hole: farmers' trucks and delivery vehicles for small businesses) up by vehicle size (square footage, this time, in lieu of gross vehicle weight). This means that the proposal really does nothing to close the loop-hole, but since fuel economy standards will slowly be raised for the whole newly-partitioned light truck category (by 2011, 28.4 MPG for the smallest light trucks and 21.3 for the biggest), this looks like reform.

This article at Forbes has the complete story.

For more on current CAFE laws and loop-holes, and information on the SUV problem in general, I found New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's High and Mighty: SUVs--the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got that Way quite illuminating.