WASHINGTON — New government rules designed to boost fuel efficiency and slash greenhouse-gas emissions will give automakers “clear certainty” at a time when their business is enduring a “historic crisis,” President Barack Obama said Tuesday.
“In the past, an agreement such as this would have been considered impossible,” Obama said in a speech in the Rose Garden, where he was joined by auto executives, state governors, union officials and environmentalists — groups long at odds over energy issues.
Unveiled late Monday, the new rules would require new passenger cars sold in the U.S. to meet an average mileage requirement of 39 miles per gallon by 2016.
Light trucks would have to deliver an average of 30 mpg. That’s a drastic rise from current averages — 27.5 mpg for cars, 23 mpg for trucks — and would bring the overall average of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads to 35.5 mpg by 2016, four years earlier than current federal law requires.
“These standards come at a time when America also is beginning to prepare for a new era of alternative-fuel cars and trucks and expanded fleets of compressed-natural-gas vehicles,” Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter said Tuesday.
Obama said that will bring much-needed clarity to the tangle of regulations that auto companies now have to deal with.
“Right now, the rules governing fuel economy in this country are inadequate, uncertain and in flux,” Obama said.
The new standards also resolve a dispute between the auto industry and California, which is seeking a waiver from the federal government to set its own rules on greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles.
The environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists said it expects the plan to slash the U.S.’s dependence on oil by about 1.4 million barrels a day by 2020, almost as much as daily imports from Saudi Arabia.
But the rules also will raise the cost of manufacturing new vehicles at a time when the auto industry is struggling, and Chrysler is in bankruptcy, where it may soon be joined by General Motors.
