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In August 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed a regulation to strengthen corporate average fuel economy standards for passenger cars, light trucks, and heavy-duty pickup trucks and vans. In a comment letter, we explain that while the Proposed Rule and its accompanying regulatory impact analysis offer useful starting points, NHTSA should take further steps to ensure the complete presentation of regulatory benefits and costs and should select a regulatory option that best promotes social welfare, consistent with the agency’s legal obligations. We also submitted joint comments with a coalition of other environmental groups on NHTSA’s use of the social cost of greenhouses gases in the Proposed Rule.

In May 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finalized a rule to increase its corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for passenger cars and light trucks for model years 2024–2026. A group of fuel and petrochemical manufacturers and states challenged the standards in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, arguing primarily that the Energy Policy and Conservation Act bars NHTSA from including electric vehicles in the analytical baseline for the new standards. Our amicus brief explains that longstanding administrative guidance and case law direct agencies to develop baselines that reflect their best assessment of the real world absent any new agency action. In the context of this rulemaking, that guidance and case law required NHTSA to project how many and what kinds of vehicles—including electric (and plug-in hybrid electric) vehicles—would be built and sold if it did not issue new CAFE standards, which is what NHTSA did here. Our amicus brief also explains that NHTSA has consistently prepared baselines for prior CAFE standards in this manner.

We submitted comments on NHTSA's proposed car standards, recommending ways that the agency could improve its modeling and address inconsistences between its and EPA's analyses. We also submitted joint comments on NHTSA's use of the social cost of carbon, recommending that the agency expand its justification of its discount rates and inclusion of global damages in the SCC.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ("NHTSA") sets corporate average fuel economy ("CAFE") standards for light-duty vehicles, and penalizes automobile manufacturers who fail to meet applicable standards. In January 2021, NHTSA issued an Interim Final Rule repealing the inflation-adjusted penalty increase for Model Years 2019-2021, which we commented was untimely and disregarded critical environmental harms. 

In August 2021, NHTSA proposed to rescind the Interim Final Rule. We filed comments supporting the proposal for complying with inflation-adjustment obligations, driving fuel savings, and reducing pollution.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's interim final rule delays the application of its 2016 inflation adjustment of the penalty for violating the corpoate average fuel-economy (CAFE) standards. We submitted comments explaining that the rule is untimely under the Inflation Adjustment Act, whose deadlines to amend the intial catch-up inflation adjustment expired years ago.

We filed a petition requesting that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reconsider and rescind a new rule reducing penalties for automobile manufacturers that fail to meet corporate fuel economy standards. Our petition explains how NHTSA’s analysis ignores financial and environmental benefits forgone by the rule and relies on flawed, even contradictory evidence. NHTSA’s weakened fuel economy penalties deprive the public of substantial benefits and should be rescinded.

In October, we submitted comments to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) critiquing the proposed Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule. We now have also submitted supplemental comments rebutting an analysis, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting and Trinity Consultants and submitted by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, in support of the proposed rule.

In December 2016, pursuant to the Inflation Adjustment Act of 2015, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finalized a rule that adjusted civil penalties for car manufacturers that violate fuel economy standards, in order to line them up better with inflation. That rule put the penalties at $14 per tenth of a mile per gallon. NHTSA is now proposing a new rule to lower the penalties from $14 per tenth of a mile per gallon back to the previous rate of $5.50 per tenth of a mile per gallon, claiming that the $14 penalty would have a significant negative economic impact. Our May 2018 comments argue that NHTSA should explain why it is justified in reducing the penalty from $14 to $5.50 and consider the forgone benefits when considering whether the civil penalties will have a “negative economic impact.” Because NHTSA has not provided this explanation, the proposed reduction is arbitrary and capricious.

In December 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finalized a rule that updates civil penalties for car manufacturers that violate fuel economy standards. NHTSA is now reconsidering the rule, claiming it would have a significant negative economic impact. The agency provides no evidence that economic circumstances have changed since the rule’s finalization to make the rule more costly. Our comments argue that the agency should not proceed with the proposed reconsideration, because it inadequately explained why it changed positions. If the agency does continue with the reconsideration, both the Inflation Adjustment Act and economic cost-benefit analysis would justify an update to the penalties rates rather than maintaining the original penalty rate from 1975.

Vehicle fuel economy standards set by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by making cars more fuel efficient. Our comments on the reconsideration argue that NHTSA should value the social cost of those emissions as robustly as possible, as they have done in the past. We encourage NHTSA to consider the social cost of greenhouse gases in both the rule’s Environmental Impact Statement and Regulatory Impact Analysis, and that it should use estimates considering global damages of climate change using a three percent or lower discount rate.