Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
Seems like something that improved fuel efficiency standards could have mitigated, but instead they were essentially unchanged in the US for about 30 years from the early '80s to the early '10s. By 2010, European and Japanese Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards were about half of what North American ones were. And as a result, in 2010 the US and Canada were #1 and #2 in the world in road sector gasoline consumption per capita, nearly twice as high as the next highest peer country (Australia) and about 7x higher than the EU average.
Blame consumers all you want, but it would have been relatively trivial for the government to do what most peer countries were doing by increasing efficiency requirements, which would have led to a significant reduction in fuel usage. But they didn't, largely because of lobbying by oil companies and North American automakers.
|
Does that gas consumption per capita take into account that North America is a vastly larger and more spread out land mass than Europe or Japan?
For fun, I looked up your car on fueleconomy.gov. It gets virtually the same mpg and emissions rating as my new f150. I'd call that a pretty large improvement in fuel-efficiency and emissions standards over the last 15 years.