If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that in recent years, governments have made buying a car in the West completely unaffordable for the average consumer. The European Union’s mandatory requirements to force the population to buy electric and hybrid cars have burst like a balloon. It’s all well and good to think about the environment, but when your economy is heavily dependent on the automotive industry, imposing overly harsh restrictions is like shooting yourself in the foot.
Europe has already backtracked on its plans for combustion engines, and the United States has just lowered the fuel efficiency standards imposed during President Joe Biden’s presidency. From now on, new vehicles will not have to meet unattainable efficiency standards in the United States. We have more pressing things to think about. Working families need cars, and the least we can do is rescue an automotive industry that is being stifled by regulations made by people in Congress who don’t even have a degree in mechanical engineering.
The Origin of the Pressure
To put this into context, we must understand exactly what the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are. These are administered by the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and regulate the fuel efficiency of an entire fleet of cars and trucks sold by a manufacturer in a given year.
The problem began with the standards imposed by the Biden administration, which set such a high target that it became an unofficial but mandatory mandate for electric vehicles. It required that models for the year 2031 average 50.4 miles per gallon, something unattainable in the industry without incurring large economic losses. It was an open secret: manufacturers were forced to invest billions in complex fuel-saving technologies and had to adopt electric vehicles—in a totally forced manner—that the mass market did not have the means to purchase profitably.
It was a Utopia dictated by politicians and bureaucrats who did not know the reality of working families—or rather, did not care remotely—and used the excuse of caring for the environment to make the manufacture of cars and other vehicles more expensive. This regulatory burden artificially increases the cost of gasoline-powered cars, the only option for most families.
The unreality of automotive regulations
If cars didn’t achieve the 50.4 mpg milstone, companies would face billions of dollars in fines if they failed to meet these targets. Joe Biden’s administration aspired to be as regulatory— and social-communist—as Vonder Legend’s with the European Union, which had already dealt a fatal blow to Stellantis with unrealistic regulations. American companies such as Ford and General Motors, creators of much of the country’s wealth and industrial fabric in the last century, were being punished by governors as if they were naughty children who needed to be corrected.
Trump’s Reset for New Automobiles
Somehow, large countries that had once prided themselves on having a strong automotive industry that drove the country forward had become subjugated—as if they were countries of the USSR—to having to do what bureaucrats in a government office hundreds of miles away from the factories and R&D centers told them to do.
The Trump administration’s intervention immediately halts these regulations. The new proposal is to create a much more reasonable and achievable new standard of 34.5 mpg for the 2031 model year. The average cost of a new car would have been almost $1,000 more(without adjusting for inflation, that is).
The purchase of a brand new car, no matter how basic the model, would have been unaffordable for thousands of families who are already struggling in this economy. In a country where Henry Ford’s assembly line made the purchase of a car accessible a hundred years ago, it was simply a travesty that a country like the USA had to suffer artificially imposed rules on the manufacturing of vehicles for their own population.