New fuel economy standards May be Little Unrealistic

If you have watched Al Gore's  Inconvenient Truth, you will remember the graph showing Fuel efficiency in USA and China and other countries. USA is far behind China as of now and will reach today's China fuel efficiency standards by 2020. That's lame for USA, otherwise dubbed as the high tech world with lots of innovation.

If you also think that its lame and quite inefficient, think again. Consumer Reports argue that the new standard to raise fuel efficiency to 35Mpg by 2020 is not realistic, based on where we are today.  So, cars in USA might not even reach there and ask for extension to that deadline. Who knows?

The new standards require all new passenger vehicles sold in the United States by 2020 to average 35 mpg. That's reported to be about a 40 percent increase over the current standards of 27.5 mpg for cars and 22.2 mpg for pickups, minivans, and SUVs.

However, in our testing, reaching a real-world 35 mpg would require a bigger jump than that. The current new vehicles we have tested have averaged 20.4 mpg overall on our fuel economy test loop—22.8 mpg for cars and just 16.6 mpg for pickups, minivans, and SUVs.

To reach a true 35 mpg in the real world would require an increase of more than 70 percent in overall vehicle efficiency, broken down to more than 50 percent for cars and more than double the efficiency for pickups, minivans, and SUVs combined. That would be a tall order, for sure.

New fuel economy standards won't bring real 35 mpg cars: Consumer Reports Cars Blog