Two years ago, scores of Washington residents were killed by a defective product. The fatality figures for 2001 haven't been released yet, but they are likely to be similarly high. The dangers of this product have been documented for over a decade, and were confirmed by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences last summer. Yet not only is this product still around; it's actually a mandatory component of every new car sold in this country. Worse yet, there's a widespread push to make this product even deadlier.
The product is the federal government's new car fuel economy standards, known as CAFE (for Corporate Average Fuel Economy). CAFE imposes a minimum fuel economy requirement on every automaker's yearly output of new cars in the U.S. The current passenger car standard is 27.5 mpg.
The connection between fuel economy mandates and car safety is relatively straightforward. Downsizing a car is one of the most effective means of increasing its fuel economy, but smaller cars are less crashworthy than similarly equipped large cars. This is true for practically every type of accident, from single-vehicle rollovers to multiple-car collisions.
A 1989 Brookings-Harvard study found that CAFE was responsible for a 500 lb. downsizing of the average car. The result was a 14 to 27 percent increase in occupant traffic deaths. A new study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a national think tank in Washington D.C., shows that, for 2000, this translated into 2,500 to 4,400 additional deaths nationwide. In Washington alone, which suffered 344 car occupant deaths in 2000, CAFE was responsible for about 42 to 73 of those deaths.
This past summer, CAFE's lethal nature was confirmed by a new study from the National Academy of Sciences. While its estimates of CAFE's death toll are about half of the Brookings-Harvard numbers, it still found a very sizable number of fatalities. Since CAFE has been in full force for far more than a decade, its full toll nationally may well be in the tens of thousands of deaths.
As dangerous as CAFE currently is, it may get worse. Current law separates standards for cars and trucks and under current definitions sport utility vehicles are classified as "trucks." Trucks are not required to meet the more stringent standard set for passenger cars. Regulators and environmental activists view this as a loophole and now there is a proposal in the U.S. Senate to force trucks and SUV's to meet tighter standards.
More stringent fuel economy standards have become a key issue in the global warming debate and in the push for energy security. The Sierra Club claims that raising CAFE is "the biggest single step we can take to curb global warming."
Are these objectives worth CAFE's cost in human life? You won't find an answer from CAFE's proponents, because they uniformly deny that CAFE kills anyone. Even the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which administers CAFE, has played games with this issue. In 1992, in a suit brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Consumer Alert, a federal appeals court rejected NHTSA's approach as resting on a combination of "fudged analysis," "statistical legerdemain," and "bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo."
If CAFE were a privately manufactured product, it would have been recalled long ago. But CAFE is a product of politics, and politics is a different world entirely, a world in which a law that is supposed to improve our security ends up killing American citizens.
If you needed yet another reason to buckle up, this may be it.
