CFACT to Feds: This CAFÉ is serving nothing sensible

Warming ideologues have forced unrealistic fuel standards on American drivers for decades.  Time to get smarter.  

Read CFACT’s official submission:

Public Comments Submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

at the U.S. Department of Transportation regarding:

The Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule III

for Model Years 2022 to 2031 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks

Submitted by the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)

January 9, 2026

As a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization focused on energy and environmental policy, CFACT is pleased to submit comments on the above-cited proposed rule.

While welcoming NHTSA’s effort to bring a measure of realism to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards, we cannot help but state the obvious: The entire CAFÉ program is a failure and should be repealed altogether. Created by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act in 1975 ostensibly to free the United States from dependence on foreign oil, primarily from the politically unstable Middle East, CAFÉ quickly became a means by which the government determined which types of automobiles automakers could manufacture and the driving public could purchase.

CAFÉ was enacted decades before the United States reemerged as a global energy superpower, which was made possible by advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Today, the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of oil (and natural gas), and the country is not the least dependent on foreign oil for its prosperity. Furthermore, the program was used by the previous administration to set such rigid fuel-efficiency standards that gasoline-powered vehicles would be effectively regulated out of the marketplace, forcing automakers to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs), for which there was little consumer demand and a woefully inadequate recharging infrastructure. This development threatened the very existence of the U.S. auto industry and the viability of the nation’s economy. So long as the statute is on the books, there is nothing to keep a future administration from engaging in similar abuse.

Alas, repealing CAFE would require an act of Congress or a Supreme Court ruling declaring the program unconstitutional – both of which are beyond the authority of NHTSA. But there is no need to remain captive to the prevailing practice of an antiquated statute. For example, cars and trucks in the United States currently average about 24.4 miles per gallon (mpg), according to the Department of Energy. ¹ Under the Trump administration’s proposal, the fleet average would be required to rise to 34.5 mpg by 2031. While far less stringent than was proposed by the previous administration, there is nothing in the 1975 statute that requires the mpg standard to be raised. Doing so simply legitimizes the market-distorting power of a law in search of a mission in the drastically changed circumstances of today. As a first step, we recommend freezing the CAFÉ mpg standard for cars and light trucks at 2025 levels, once that has been determined by the Department of Energy.

Abandoning the MPG Metric

Secondly, the mpg-standard for measuring fuel economy should be abandoned in favor of a metric that offers a clearer picture of actual fuel use and cost savings. Stop averaging miles per gallon and start averaging gallons of fuel burned per 100 miles (GPHM). The latter, superior metric shows that improving the performance of a less-efficient, typically heavier vehicle saves much more fuel than boosting the fuel economy of an already efficient, typically smaller car. GPHM reveals how much fuel is saved over s set distance.

By focusing on improvements in mpg, the current CAFÉ metric leads to diminishing returns. For example, an increase from 10 mpg to 20 mpg saves 50 percent more fuel (10 gallons vs. 5 gallons per 100 miles), but a spike from 30 mpg to 40 mpg saves much less (3.3 gallons vs. 2.5 gallons per 100 miles), even though both are a 10 mpg-increase.

“The Honda Civic Hybrid is a great car,” automotive journal Edmunds noted in 2024, “but it doesn’t benefit the environment nearly as much as, say, a Ford Expedition (which gets 18 mpg combined) with a hybrid powertrain would. To boot, the math shows that improvements to the Expedition’s fuel economy (or the mpg of other large SUVs) are a greater environmental positive than any gains the Civic will make.” ²

By employing the method already adopted by the European Union (EU) to measure fuel economy, albeit under the metric system (liters burned per 100 kilometers), the United States would have a system that is directly related to fuel use.

Congress, through its enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, abolished civil penalties imposed on automakers that fail to meet the government’s purely arbitrary CAFÉ standards. By adopting the recommendations submitted here, NHTSA can make further improvements to the CAFÉ program.

Thank you very much.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D.

Senior Policy Analyst

Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)

Washington, D.C.