From the Sunday NYTimes comes a piece on the safety effects of CAFE standards (Does Lighter ...). One argument against CAFE standards is that the car companies are able to increase fuel efficiency by making cars lighter and less safe.
Of course, this is subject to debate:
Have traffic deaths really occurred because of efforts to conserve gas? Consumer groups ridiculed this claim, saying safety is compromised because vehicles are too fat, not too light, and point to crash studies showing that heavy-set S.U.V.'s like Hummers pose the real danger. Critics say the system proposed by the administration could provide incentive for automakers to make their S.U.V.'s even larger, though gas prices are an increasingly potent counterweight to such temptations.
"It's more accurate to say that this increases the safety dangers," said Joan Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen and a predecessor of Dr. Runge's.
An architect of the administration plan is John D. Graham, a top official at the Office of Management and Budget. In his previous life as an academic, with some of his research financed by the auto industry, Mr. Graham found that lighter-weight vehicles led to thousands of unnecessary traffic fatalities. "The intent of the administration's C.A.F.E. reform plan is threefold," Mr. Graham said in an e-mail Friday. "To save more fuel, to reduce the unintended safety risks to motorists, and to provide an equitable regulatory framework for all vehicle manufacturers."
A 2001 National Academy of Sciences report backed the essence of his safety research. The panel attributed 1,300 to 2,600 fatalities in 1993 alone specifically to the fuel-economy regulations.
David Greene, an expert on energy research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, served on the panel but dissented from its conclusions, disputing the traffic-death statistics. Still, he called the new proposed system innovative and said it could solve some shortcomings of the current regulation. His one concern, he said, was that automakers might find new ways to game the system.
The proponents of the proposed CAFE standards claim that they are designed to avoid the negative safety effect:
"Clearly, we would love to decrease our dependence on foreign oil down to zero, but what the environmentalists ignore is that, until we phase out the old system, every tenth of mile a gallon that we raise CAFE beyond what is technologically feasible, we kill people," said Jeffrey W. Runge, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "We're against killing people. We have to get this system reformed."
The argument seems to be that in order to avoid the negative safety impacts of fuel efficiency standards the more stringent standards must not be too stringent (of course, I may be missing something). Well, that is one way of avoiding negative impacts on safety ... and positive impacts on fuel efficiency (note: I still prefer gas taxes to CAFE standards).
