What are "auto mileage standards"?
Auto mileage standards are set by the US government and they say that there is a sticker on every car sold which tells you what the fuel economy is of your car, if you drive it in city conditions, if you drive it on freeway conditions. It will give you a prediction of how many miles per gallon of gasoline you'll get. There is a law called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy law that was passed after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, and that was an attempt to try to get each car company to make their entire car production for a year more efficient. So rather than say any one car had to have a certain miles per gallon the government said to Ford, General Motors, Toyota, if they wanted to sell in the United States, all of their cars when averaged out, must average a certain amount: corporate fuel economy. When we started that program in 1975 the average of cars sold in the United States was a little over 18 miles per gallon. By the mid-1980s we had it up to about 25 or 26 miles per gallon, so the program was clearly working and it allowed the market place to work because it said to car companies, "you can sell fairly fuel inefficient trucks or SUVs as along as you also sell quite a few of the more fuel efficient smaller vehicles," and on average you get a certain outcome. Well, in the mid-1980s the administration of President Regan abandoned our progress in CAFE standards and Congress hasn't seen fit to address it since. So the result is today the average fuel economy we get on our cars is worse than it was in 1987, and we're going backwards every single year.
