Do you think the government should greatly increase fuel effiencey standards for all vehicles?

More regulation may not be the answer in this case. It might be possible to increase fuel mileage requirements so much that only electric vehicles could meet the standards. Such regulation has a history of being extremely difficult to pass and has often been compromised to uselessness. This also may be a poor and perhaps contentious way to get what may be the eventual result.

Mileage standards are an odd bit of regulation that is administered by the EPA (environmental protection agency.) These are also the same people desperately trying to determine a miles per gallon standard that is appropriate for electric cars. It all seems a bit backward. The reason that mileage is significant for polluting internal combustion cars is that the better mileage a vehicle gets the further they are traveling while spewing out the same pollutants. The rational is that you are going to travel the same miles regardless so a vehicle that spews fewer pollutants per mile is going to be better for the environment.

Electric cars don’t pollute the environment in their operation. They are a true zero emissions vehicle (ZEV.) By rights there is then an argument that they should not be regulated by the EPA and there should be no mileage requirements for them at all. This is certainly a case where technology is outpacing government regulation. If we switched entirely to electric cars the EPA would be out of the transportation business and we could have a bit smaller government.

Instead what is likely to happen is that the EPA, like most government agencies, is going to look for work to do and start to regulate something outside of their mandate. They might try to do as the competing regulatory body did. CARB the California Air Resources Board predates the EPA by 3 years and has some legitimacy for at least a duel existence with the EPA. States can follow the EPA or CARB for some regulations but not make up their own. This raises a California Board to the status of governing places like NY… It is a mess.

CARB, seeing that GM has already made an electric car, (the impact prototype) created the ZEV mandate in the early 1990′s. Initially oil companies were looking elsewhere but later turned their attention to destroying the ZEV mandate as threatened a substantial portion of their market. The story is a great read starting on p.52: 1 60 to 70% of refined oil products are used in the transportation industry. Regardless of what lowly consumers wish this is why the ZEV and the EV1 failed in California and why reasonable mileage standards for vehicles have failed and will fail today. We are basically in thrall to what and how oil companies wish to market, pollute, or use the environment. It is the wealth of oil companies and their major stockholders that will dictate the course of regulations. I would be thrilled if you could prove me wrong.

The only recourse is a popular shift to ZEV that will force increased mpg by competition as regulations have historically been extremely difficult to pass. Other world events (carbon regulation and peak oil) will force this shift in the near future. http://electric-vehicles-cars-bikes.blogspot.com/2009/12/study-says-evs-to-be-300-billion.html