There was an article in the Times within the last few days (sorry, no linkage handy at the moment) about how the government was going to be dropping its proposal to increase CAFE standards from its plans to overhaul the methods used for determining the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks. If you’re not familiar, “CAFE” stands for “Corporate Average Fuel Economy”—the government requires that the average fuel economy of all a given manufacturer’s vehicles be above a certain value, currently just over 20 miles per gallon.
As though the current CAFE requirement were not ridiculously low already, it was decided when this standard was created (sometime in the late Seventies) that vehicles above a certain weight should be exempted from the standards. At that time, nearly all of the vehicles that qualified for this exemption were commercial in nature—tractor-trailers, delivery trucks, etc. However, most of the large SUVs currently in production now fall into this exempt weight class, and therefore, car companies are not penalized for producing these 16-mpg-and-lower beasts.
The reason I bring all this up is that on the way home from work yesterday, I paid $2.67 a gallon for gasoline. Not the 94 octane premium grade, mind you, but the low-grade, 87 octance, maybe-all-the-cylinders-will-fire-or-maybe-not crappy gas. For fifteen bucks and change, I barely got half a tank.
On the one hand, this really sucks. Thirty dollars to fill the dinky tank in my 1993 Mazda does not make Pete happy. On the other hand, I really think this is the only way to get people to cut down on the amount of gas they use.