“Our goal is to save fuel, not endanger jobs.” –Mary Peters, U.S. Transportation Secretary

So, the Department of Transportation (DOT) officially gave the green light (pun intended) yesterday to new fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks. The question we need to figure out is, will these new standards actually help reduce the consumption of oil by our nation? And frankly, with oil now costing $117 per barrel, is it already too late?

The DOT’s new rules call for fuel efficiency standards for both passenger vehicles and light trucks to increase by 4.5% per year over the five-year period ending in 2015 – a 25% percent total improvement that exceeds the 3.3% baseline proposed by Congress last year.

(Chevy Suburbans like this one are covered by the new rules … when they go into effect that is. Photo courtesy of GM).

“This proposal is historically ambitious, yet achievable,” Mary Peters, U.S. Transportation Secretary, said in a speech yesterday. “It will help us all breathe a little easier by reducing tailpipe emissions, cutting fuel consumption and making driving a little more affordable.”

For passenger cars, the proposal would increase fuel economy from the current 27.5 miles per gallon to 35.7 miles per gallon by 2015. For light trucks, the proposal calls for increases from 23.5 miles per gallon in 2010 to 28.6 miles per gallon in 2015.

All told, the DOT said its proposal should save nearly 55 billion gallons of fuel and a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions estimated at 521 million metric tons. The plan should also save American drivers over $100 billion in fuel costs over the lifetime of the vehicles covered by the rule, Secretary Peters said.

(Will these new fuel efficiency rules reduce trips to the filling station? That remains to be seen.)

Is it enough? Many don’t think so – though it should be noted that the voices giving the thumbs down to these new standards, such as Ralph Nader’s advocacy group Public Citizen, opposed them from their very inception.

“The problem is that the nation is addicted to foreign oil, and transportation is one of the biggest reasons why,” commented Public Citizen last year as these new rules were in development. “This problem is simply much too big to be left up to the individual purchasing decisions of consumers, many of whom live in parts of the country in which they have no choice but to drive every day to go to work or the supermarket.”

The group noted that the federal government established the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program precisely because the market without any fuel economy requirement left the nation dangerously dependent on foreign oil. In fact, as CAFE standards have been allowed to stagnate for the past 20 years, that problem has duplicated itself: Manufacturers have chewed up fuel efficiency gains with larger engines, increased vehicle weight and many extras instead of applying them to increase fuel economy, said Public Citizen.

“Instead of taking advantage of technologies that could make vehicles more fuel-efficient, automakers have allowed those technologies to gather dust on the shelf and have produced gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (SUVs),” the group stressed. “Automakers aggressively marketed SUVs to the American public … and U.S. auto manufacturers have focused a greater proportion of their production on the light-truck sector than the Japanese and European manufacturers and have recently extended a long-standing practice of giving consumers discounts, rebates and preferential loan rates in exchange for buying vehicles whose utility exceeds their needs.”

Now, there is some truth in all of this – in fact, much as I disagree with many of Public Citizen’s stances on a variety of issues, they hit this one close to the bone. Back in the 1990s, Toyota and Honda were feverishly working on hybrid cars in their labs, while the “Big Three” (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) sat back and watched the money roll in from their highly profitable truck products – making as much as 50% profit on each vehicle sold.

Hey, gas hovered around 90 cents a gallon back in 1999, and everyone projected that fuel would stay at that bargain-basement price for years to come. Just the way housing prices would keep going up 20% a year, Internet companies were a sure-fire investment, and Enron’s accounting practices conformed to accepted standards.

Yeah, right.

So here we are – finally!! – addressing fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks. Yet this is still just a proposal, now – it must go through the rulemaking process, which takes years. Meanwhile, gasoline costs an average of $3.60 a gallon across the country, with diesel spiking to $4.21 per gallon. These new standards are like over a decade too late, if you ask me.

Then again, it’s better than nothing. DOT noted that, as required by Congress, the proposed rule allows for automakers to earn credits for exceeding CAFÉ standards – serving as an incentive to exceed these goals while giving manufacturers flexibility to meet the standards without compromising their economic vitality. “The goal is to save fuel, not endanger jobs,” Secretary Peters said.

(Alternative fuels such as hydrogen — as demonstrated here by President Bush — can’t come to market soon enough with gasoline and diesel pump prices as high as they are.)

“Looking at the fuel-efficient technologies already available, it’s easy to see a not-too-distant future when cars fueled by something other than gasoline will be readily available and affordable,” she added. “Until that time, however, we will continue to do what we can, safely and efficiently, to improve gas mileage and help consumers spend less time and less money at the pump.”

Don’t know about you, but I think that empty feeling in my wallet is going to be around for a long, long time to come.

Everyone is looking for ways to cut fuel costs these days, and no wonder: with oil now steadily priced over $100 per barrel, diesel costing $4 a gallon, and gasoline predicted to cross the $4 threshold later this spring, fuel is much on the minds of heavy, medium, and light-duty truck users alike.

Light-duty truck makers haven’t been standing still during all of this: they’ve increasingly focused on ways to boost fuel economy for commercial users and consumers alike, from offering more “flexible fuel” options and gasoline-electric hybrids, while improving base fuel economy through new technology and design efforts.

For example, the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks produced by General Motors can come equipped with 5.3L V-8 engines able to run on gasoline or E85, a blended fuel comprised of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.

“It’s increasingly clear that, of anything that we can do over the next decade, ethanol has by far the greatest potential to actually reduce U.S. oil consumption, reduce oil imports, and reduce carbon gas emissions,” said Rick Wagoner, GM’s chairman & CEO, recently.

“GM now has more than two million E-85 vehicles on the road, with plans to expand production significantly going forward,” he said. “In fact, if all of the E-85 vehicles that GM, Ford, and Chrysler have already built, plus those that we have committed to produce over the next 10 years, were to run on E-85, we could displace 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually.”

Waggoner also notes that E85 ethanol fuel produces fewer greenhouse gases during the combustion process and can enhance engine performance. And while ethanol today is mostly made with U.S.-grown biomaterial, such as corn, GM is helping promote research to turn non-food plant materials such as lumber mill waste, switchgrass, lawn clippings and even garbage into what’s called cellulosic ethanol. Unlike corn-based ethanol, the cellulose in the products used to make cellulosic ethanol must be pre-treated and then broken down into sugars before they can be fermented, a step called cellulosis. However, the technology required to do this is still under development, he stressed.

Chevrolet also plans to launch a two-mode hybrid version of its pickups in 2009, based on a system introduced with the 2008 Tahoe sport utility vehicle (SUV). The Tahoe Hybrid full-size SUV uses an all-new electrically variable transmission (EVT), combined with active fuel management, specific aerodynamic aids, lighter components, and electric motor to obtain fuel economy of 21 miles per gallon

Ford Motor Co. is grouping its alternative efforts under a broad “sustainability” strategy that aims to lessen the overall impact of its motor vehicles on the environment. Intended to guide the company through 2020, the strategy serves as a road map of both near- and long-term technological changes for its products to improve fuel economy, reduce pollution, address climate change and bolster energy security, Alan Mulally, Ford’s president & CEO, noted recently.

The cornerstones of the strategy include a new generation of fuel-saving, turbo-charged, gasoline engines for lighter vehicles, weight reductions of 250 to 750 pounds, fuel-saving transmissions, advanced electric power steering, aerodynamic improvements, plus more hybrid offerings and diesel engines for light-duty vehicles, added Derrick Kuzak, Ford’s group VP for global product development.

A new generation of smaller-displacement turbo-charged gasoline engines with advanced fuel-saving direct injection technologies is a near-term part of Ford’s plan, engines that can provide a fuel savings of 10% to 20% without compromising performance, he notes. “With direct injection, fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber in small, precise amounts. When this is combined with turbo charging, customers will enjoy better performance and fewer trips to the gas pump,” Kuzak noted.

Light truck makers are also trying to encourage wider use of biofuels by putting their warranties behind them. For example, Chrysler approved the use of B20 in its diesel-power Dodge Ram pickups two years ago: a blended fuel comprised of 80% regular diesel and 20% biodiesel, which is made from soybeans. A B2 biodiesel blend, comprised of 2% biodiesel, is approved for diesel-powered Dodge Sprinter vans.

“Biofuels represent a huge opportunity to reduce fuel consumption and our dependence on foreign oil,” noted Tom LaSorda, vice chairman and president of manufacturing at Chrysler. “While diesel technology alone can make big strides toward helping us meet our national energy, environment and security objectives, when you add biodiesel and other biofuels, it gets really interesting. They are proof that at least part of the solution to our energy, environment and national security issues can be homegrown.”

So now at least it’s a race of sorts to find ways to counteract the skyrocketing price of petroleum – and the hope is continued high prices at the pump will get commercial users and consumers alike to buy into more of these alternatives very soon.

It’s a quintessential American product that’s rapidly disappearing from the model lists of U.S. automakers: the minivan. Though small vans existed well before Lee Iacocca’s brainchild for Chrysler – Volkswagen’s Beetle Bus comes to mind – they’d never been mainstream until the Caravan and Voyager models rolled into showrooms in 1983.

Even then, all the minivans from Chrysler – and later Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM, etc. – took their key design elements, such as the sliding doors and three rows of seats, from Volkswagen’s 1960s-era vans. American automakers also get credit for coining the term “minivan” as well, to distinguish it from their larger passenger van brethren like Ford’s E-Series.

While minivans ostensibly came to be viewed as the replacement for the family station wagon, they had a pretty significant commercial history, too – the U.S. Post Office, for example, bought thousands of Ford Windstars as a supplemental vehicle for its letter carriers in the 1990s. Those sliding doors – especially when double sliding doors, one for each side of the vehicle, became an option in the late 1980s – really made the minivan an ideal choice for urban deliveries. With no doors swinging out into traffic, they presented just the right profile for many businesses.

And now they are slowly vanishing.

The reasons are, of course, as old as the history books – U.S. automakers got beat in the innovation department. Honda and Toyota came out with more options – especially fold-into-the-floor third row seats – combined with sleek exteriors and rugged reliability. Ford and GM both suffered early from ugly designs, got beat in the options department and never caught up. Chrysler is gamely hanging on, leading in many cases in the functionality quotient, with fold-into-the-floor seats for ALL rows among other ideas.

Of course, a lot of folks out there are happy to see them go, I suspect: Minivans were as far from sexy as Pluto is from Earth. They are all functionality, despite high-tech DVD players, automatic doors, navigation systems, etc. No teenager would be caught dead cruising in a minivan on the streets of a beach town in summer. Not many adults want to, either.

Ah, but that functionality … it made the minivan such a versatile vehicle, even for those without the convenience of fold-into-the-floor seats. My old Ford Windstar is still chugging along at six years and 73,000 miles: hauling kids, groceries, soccer gear, lumber, mulch, refrigerators, toilets, building supplies, you name it. Even its low-tech attributes make it ideal for all this hard work – no automatic door motors to break, no fancy DVD players to damage. The gunmetal gray interior carpet and plastic are also ideal for hiding dirt stains and other unfortunate messes. The front wheel drive gets through the snow, rain, and muck as well as anything else I’ve driven.

But the minivan’s heyday as a light commercial jack-of-all-trades vehicle is all but gone. GM just dropped it from its commercial lineup last year. Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, and yes Nissan’s Quest and Kia’s Sedona all focus their products on the consumer market, with enough options and upgrades to make them as expensive as luxury vehicles ($40,000 for a minivan???? You must be joking!!!!)

Ah well. At least I’ll mine around for a while yet to do my dirty work. Which it handles just fine.

“The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.” –James Russell Lowell

There’s movement afoot in Congress to slow down and modify efforts to improve corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards and I think that’s a good thing, the reason being that cars and light trucks are very different animals and trying to get them to meet the same fuel economy standards via federal mandate would’ve been catastrophic to domestic automakers.

Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) got the CAFE ball rolling this year with a proposal to make cars and light trucks both meet a 35-miles per gallon standard by 2019 — which would’ve required manufacturers to improve overall vehicle fuel economy by 4% a year. That’s incrediably steep and would’ve forced automakers to eliminate whole ranges of models — especially rear wheel drive V8 sports cars, according to Motortrend magazine, in order to save just some (not all) of their light truck lines.

Then Representatives Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) stepped into the breech with their bill, H.R. 2927 (dubbed, appropriately, the Hill-Terry Bill) to instead call for two separate standards — 35 mpg for cars and 32 mpg for light trucks — to be met by 2022. That’s still a big increase the current standards of 27.5 mpg for cars and 22.5 mpg for for light trucks and it gives automakers a little more time so they don’t have to pull a fuel economy rabbit out of the hat every year, as they would’ve been forced to do under Markey’s plan.

Over 138 fellow legislators signed on to support the Hill-Terry Bill in just 11 days, showing it’s got some serious legs, but more importantly this bill recognizes that cars and trucks are just plain different kinds of vehicles — and need to be treated as such. Now, sure, plenty of regular folks (me included) buy trucks and never use them as work vehicles — their primary function. But under Markey, improving fuel economy would’ve thrown a lot of truck models out — ones fleets use to get myriads of jobs done.

There’s other issues at work here, too, that we need to address — the role government and consumers alike play in managing our fuel consumption. Mass transit development, for example, has lagged tremendously in this country, yet it’s what gets commuters off the road. Giving people viable alternatives to using their cars to drive two and from work is a big fuel saver and one we could make cost efficient if managed better. I think about my own experience here in Washington D.C., where the Metrorail subway cars are Italian made and pricey, where monies get spent on artistic displays and expanding the legal department library to the tune of $250,000. The focus on transit needs to be on moving people safely and quickly, day in and day out.

Then there’s every day driving — trips that don’t need to be taken, wasteful idling, the whole smash. If trucking fleets can be rigorous about their fuel expenditure, so can the average car driver (me included). Less driving equals less fuel so the more of that, the better.

Finally, we must remember light trucks are around for a reason — they go places and do things cars can’t. Yes, Detroit makes them cheaper and made a huge (and devastating) bet that light truck sales would keep on clmbing back in the late 1990s, leaving car development behind just as oil prices exploded. But that is the past — we can’t change it. What we can do is make reasonable fuel economy improvements at a sustainable pace that keeps the mix of vehicles we need for daily life on the road.

It’s been three years now since my pickup died — more like killed, actually. The first vehicle I’d ever bought (with a big fat loan from my parents I stress. I paid them back — well, I paid MOST of it back …) my Chevy S-10 Tahoe got nailed dead-on by a drunk driver while parked in the snow outside Squaw Creek Resort in Lake Tahoe, CA, in 2004. It still had a LOT of life left in it — only 150,000 miles on the odometer despite its 16 year age — but the crash totaled it.

Luckily, my brother — my pickup’s driver at the time (and yes I STILL considered it mine even though his name was on the title) — wasn’t anywhere near it. Working at the resort, he heard a loud ‘BOOM!’ and immediately got that sinking feeling. Sure enough, he found the drunk sitting in his smashed SUV beside my now ready-for-the-scrap-heap truck, staring off into space, and kept watch on the guy till the cops arrived.

Now, sure, all we’re talking about here is a hunk of metal on two axles — and a rather small one when compared to the big dualies or Class 8s I regularly write about today. And it wasn’t all that much to look at, shaped rather like a doughnut box on wheels, painted dead black with no fancy trim. Ah, but how USEFUL that sucker turned out to be! That, to me, is what gets missed in all the carping about trucks these days. I moved myself home from college, then moved both my brother and sister to and from college as well. Moved my friends, my cousin, and my parents to new digs. Shuttled furniture for my in-laws. Loads of dirt, lumber, and tailings from various home improvement projects to the dump. You name it, that S-10 hauled it.

That S-10 had oversize tires, too, which helped it really grip the road. Once, I took a road trip with one of my best high school buddies, Jason Epstein, to Syracuse University (his alma mater) in the winter to catch a basketball game. Driving late at night in a howling blizzard, we had no idea they’d closed the highway between Binghampton NY and Syracuse (a good hour drive at highway speed) but there we were in four wheel drive, cruising along slow but steady, no slipping and sliding. That truck got us through. And the fuel economy it logged wasn’t bad, either, I might add: its V-6 engine regularly got 20 mpg in the city and about 22 to 23 highway.

(A tip of the hat to Joyce Motors in Arlington, VA, here: they performed regular maintenance on that truck for over a decade and kept it humming like new.)

Took that S-10 cross country to Colorado for a skiing trip as its extended cab could fit three people (though not comfortably) and it went up and down the Rockies with ease. Once I got married and the kids started coming, though, the S-10’s days in my possession were numbered. Thankfully, none of the car dealers I visited made me a decent offer for it, so I ended up giving it to my mom and dad, who used it for a few years as a work vehicle, storing it at their cabin in West Virginia.

Later, after my brother totaled his Jeep in a freak accident (he has NO luck with cars — though his bad driving may have something to do with it — sorry, Mike, even Mario Andretti wouldn’t let you drive) he took the keys of my S-10 and drove it out West to California, narrowly missing a tornado along the way. And there it spent its final days, roaring along the Sierra Nevada range, dipping down into the nearby deserts, hauling ski gear and moutain bikes all over the place. A very useful truck indeed.

That’s the thing about pickups and, frankly, trucks in general — they are so useful. If I’d had to rent a vehicle for all the jobs I handled with my S-10, I would’ve spent more than the $12,000 sticker price easily. Because once people know you have a pickup, you’re getting calls all the time to borrow it for something (as my neighbor Jay Rouse well knows — I need to borrow his 10-year old F-150 again to get some mulch).

And talk about tough! Less than a year after I bought it, a tree fell on it — the upper branches of a massive oak crushing the roof and engine hood. But I just crawling into the cab, fired the engine up, and backed it out — with branches and glass spraying everywhere (not smart, but hey, I was all of 20 at the time. A DUMB 20).

A solid vehicle that did more than its share of work: that was my S-10. Thanks, Chevrolet. You did good with that one.

“We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” –Charles Darwin

Had dinner a while back with Brian McVeigh, general manager of General Motor’s fleet and commercial division — the second largest division within GM, I might add, just behind Chevrolet. Brian’s a great interview, because he never shys away from speaking his mind on almost any topic and tends to be very blunt in his critiques, even where GM is concerned.

“Listen, there is no question we lost the car market to the Japanese — they build a great product and we got caught sleeping,” he told me. “But we’ve been working very hard to catch up and we’re going to continue to do so. Now, when you look at light trucks, we’ve always dominated that segment of the market. And though the Japanese are starting to introduce product there, we have no intention of giving up our leadership in that segment. That means we have to keep bringing new stuff to the table.”

That’s one reason why GM’s OnStar communication system is now an embedded feature within both its car and truck lines — something that’s getting harder and harder to remove from the spec sheet — because GM believes vehicle telematics is going to become a key battleground in the future.

“Telematics gives you greater dialog with the vehicle and how you operate it — offering fleet managers, especially, the opportunity to save money,” McVeigh explained. “You can achieve significant savings — more so, in my opinion, than buying a hybrid vehicle — simply by routing it better, managing idle time more closely, and staying on top of maintenance issues. [OnStar] is a tool to make the vehicle operate more efficiently across the board, not just in terms of fuel economy alone.”

While GM plans to keep offering more hybrid vehicles, McVeigh still isn’t convinced they generate enough fuel savings yet to repay their hefty sticker price premium. “If you are tacking on $3,000 to $4,000 extra to the base sticker cost of a vehicle, that’s a big deal to fleets,” he said. “That’s one of the issues we’re seeing in the move to become more ‘green.’ Fleets — especially in the public sector — get mandated to become more green, yet they don’t get any increases to their budgets to really help them do so.”

McVeigh also feels the future of alternative fuels isn’t going to be limited to one or two fuels either — it’s going to encompass a wide range of options, from hybrids and ethanol to natural gas and biodiesel, well into the future. “By 2040, we’ll have eight different fuels powering our vehicles because there’s just no single ’silver bullet’ out there than can replace petroleum completely. We’ll need a mix of them to fit various operations.”

On the light truck side, heavy competition mixed with the need to pare down costs is creating a lot of dynamic change for GM and the other domestics, McVeigh said. “We’re all moving away from the minivan, except for Chrysler — and that light van with the two sliding doors served as a great commerical platform for many segments of our market,” he explained. So now, customers must either move up to big 15-person vans or drop down into smaller crossovers, like the HHR panel van, instead.

“Diesel is the next big battleground, because it offers both the great fuel economy and power commerical customers want,” said McVeigh. “Yet the emissions rules are getting tighter, and that adds a lot of cost to diesel. But that diesel engine is key for us — we need to find ways to make it work despite the extra cost emission controls add to it.”

Finally, there are partnerships with upfitters — the companies that add ladder racks, work bodies, and other equipment to GM’s truck chassis. McVeigh feels far more closer integration with these final stage players is going to be extremely important in the years ahead. “We already have partnerships with 30 to 35 upfitters — they help you get down into niche markets where we, by ourselves, would find expensive to serve,” he said. “We’ve got a team of eight engineers that do nothing but work with all our upfitter partners to nail integration issues so we don’t impact safety or vehicle capability as we add things on. We also need a more smoothly inegrated vehicle delivered faster to the customer — all of that is going to just keep growing in importance to commercial customers.”

When I talk to all the light truck manufacturers — GM, Ford, Dodge, and Toyota mainly — I keep hearing the same, singular comment about light truck owners: they want more power (horsepower and torque) and don’t really care too much about fuel economy.

This is simplfiying things a great deal, but there it is — engines, especially light-duty diesels, are cranking out more HP and torque, while fuel economy either stays flat or drops. My question to the reader out there is: does this analysis really hold water? If you have to choose between power and fuel economy, does power really win every time? And what does ‘power’ really mean to you anyway? Does it translate into more trailer towing capacity, more offroad capability, what?

Love to hear your thoughts on that.