2010 Honda Pit Sport
The small cars that Canadians most favour will be hit hardest by upcoming fuel economy regulations, because the new rules are anti-small car, an American Honda official said this week.
The rules would potentially make compact and subcompact vehicles much pricier throughout North America.
Robert Bienenfeld, American Honda's senior manager for environment and energy strategy, says the "footprint strategy" that is being used to calculate stricter Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) is a "fundamental frustration" for the company, trade journal Automotive News reported this week.
The new strategy requires vehicles of different physical size classes to meet different higher and stricter fuel efficiency requirements, with larger vehicles meeting less stringent values overall, even if the percentage improvement needed may be more for the larger and heavier vehicles.
All this will be coming to a head soon, as the U.S. government plans to announce soon the steps it will impose through CAFE to meet the target of an industry-wide fleet average of 35.5 mpg for 2016 model-year vehicles.
This will mean that smaller and more fuel-efficient models will need more advanced technology to meet higher standards, raising the cost of the vehicles and potentially hurting their appeal to entry-level buyers.
"If I'm raising technology costs on my small car, in a way, you're disenfranchising the low end of the market," Bienenfeld told Automotive News.
The Canadian government has said that it will follow the "dominant industry standard" for its fuel efficiency regulations, which are to be in place by this fall for 2011 model year-vehicles. But it's likely that Ottawa delay the adoption of the new U.S. CAFE; instead implementing the metric equivalent of the current CAFE mile-per-gallon limits for cars and trucks.
It's not clear whether Canada will adopt the proposed sliding scale of fuel economy targets based on sales mix, which requires companies that sell more small cars to reach a higher overall fuel-efficiency target - in effect, punishing those who've done the best in reducing fuel economy already. Or from a rival point of view, making it a "level playing field" in terms of needed investment in fuel efficiency gains. "There is no incentive to downsize," said Bienenfeld.
"We think that's a mistake." Traditionally this has been a Japan-versus-Detroit debate, as American auto makers traditionally built the the largest vehicles. But with companies like Toyota moving into so many full-size pickup and SUV markets, Ford soon diving into its Euro basket of small cars, and Chrysler looking at bringing over a wave of small cars from partner Fiat, it's now shaping up to be a much more global ideological battle over what consumers will want six years from now.
Fuel economy rules are never a sexy issue, but they have the very real potential to physically and legislatively reshape the cars available to us five years from now, as well as the prices we pay for them.
source: theglobeandmail
