<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Okay, it&amp;#039;s all over the news: The House of Representatives is officially forcing car manufacturers to build more efficient vehicles. If the bill clears the Senate and a possible White House veto, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards will rise 40 percent by 2020, to 35 mpg--a mark that some vehicles already are more than capable of hitting. But car manufacturers will still be allowed to average their mileage across all models, from economical, shoebox-size rides to family sedans to big, thirsty SUVs. Supposedly, ratcheting up CAFE will force more people to downsize their rides and purchase more fuel-efficient cars. I don&amp;#039;t buy it. There are already a lot of cars on the market today that can get 35 mpg. I drove a bone-stock three-cylinder Geo Metro across the country a dozen years ago and got over 56 mpg, keeping up with traffic on I-80 from San Francisco to New York. There are cars on the road today that could probably eclipse that number. So what&amp;#039;s wrong with legislating car manufacturers to provide better fuel economy? Every time Congress has raised CAFE standards in their 30-year history, we&amp;#039;ve seen the same arguments. And the way I see it, the problem isn&amp;#039;t technology. It isn&amp;#039;t that buyers insist on purchasing vehicles large enough to fit the whole soccer team. The problem isn&amp;#039;t that the car manufacturers get Brownie points they can subtract from their CAFE numbers for building flex-fuel vehicles and selling them in parts of the country where E85 isn&amp;#039;t available--at any price.  The problem is that gasoline is too cheap, and it always has been. Diesel, too. I know, that might sound preposterous to someone who&amp;#039;s just dropped the best part of a day&amp;#039;s pay to fill up the pickup, but hear me out. Really. The profit margin on one big luxury car or truck is high enough to allow Detroit to sell a half-dozen little econoboxes for little or no profit. The people who buy these huge gas guzzlers haven&amp;#039;t hit the point where the cost of fuel overpowers their need to drive a car big enough and heavy enough that it needs its own zip code. Classic economics theory calls this an elastic marketplace, and it just hasn&amp;#039;t been stretched tight enough--yet. Congress is attacking the &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; from the wrong end, as Congress tends to do with many issues. The car companies will find other loopholes and circumnavigations while they&amp;#039;re scrambling to meet the standards. Or maybe Congress will cave in and extend the 2020 deadline, like they&amp;#039;ve done before.  By forcing the CAFE issue, Congress makes it look like the U.S.&amp;#039;s profligate consumption of energy is the direct fault of the evil car companies, probably in cahoots with Big Oil. That&amp;#039;s revisionist history. We, the American consumers, need to take a huge share of the responsibility. Ultimately, we&amp;#039;re the ones who will pay the costs of any policy the government imposes. Sure, there are plenty of people who really do need a vehicle the size of a tugboat to fill their needs--a quarter-million or so pickup-truck owners come to mind, for instance (at least the ones who actually carry stuff around in them). But pretending the car companies are forcing us to buy big, inefficient cars is specious--and so is expecting the government to bail us out for free. Ultimately, the pressures of the marketplace and the laws of physics may be the only way to get people to buy smaller cars. Like many other legislations with unintended consequences, raising CAFE is likely to come back and bite us on the behind. The car manufacturers are partly right: It&amp;#039;ll cost lots of money to change over their product mix from big cars to more fuel-efficient models, to use lighter-weight materials and to develop new technology.  When gas is more expensive, the marketplace will realign the mix of vehicles on the road, as it has in Europe and most of the rest of the world, where gasoline can cost double what it does here. We just haven&amp;#039;t reached that point yet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a2352/4235773/>