Time to Rethink Automotive Regulations

After 50 years of the U.S. government writing automotive regulations, it’s time to step back and assess if there’s a better way to do it. Today the auto industry is tangled up in red tape because Congress enacted a hodgepodge of policies that, while done with the best of intentions, have created a bureaucratic quagmire.

I believe we can regulate the auto industry a lot more efficiently without sacrificing emission standards, fuel efficiency or vehicle safety.

Here’s the problem: Congress created different agencies to address different problems. NHTSA was created in 1970 to establish automotive safety standards. The Clean Air Act of 1970 mandated that the EPA set emission standards for cars. And the 1975 Corporate Average Fuel Economy law specified that the Department of Transportation set mpg standards. But what made sense in the 1970s doesn’t make sense today.

The EPA’s original mandate for cars was to reduce the criteria emissions that cause smog: hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides. Today the auto industry has eliminated 99% of those emissions from cars, a remarkable achievement. So, the EPA has now turned its attention to reducing CO2 emissions.

But the only way the industry knows how to cut CO2 emissions is by adopting technology that uses less gasoline or diesel fuel. And that, in turn, boosts fuel economy. And yet, while the EPA’s CO2 regulations result in boosting fuel economy, NHTSA has a separate set of CAFE regulations to do the exact same thing. So, the EPA and NHTSA are working on achieving the same goal, but with different sets of regulations that don’t really match up.

Meanwhile, NHTSA also writes safety regulations that add more structure and electronic components to cars which makes them heavier, which means they burn more fuel and emit more emissions.

You’d think that it would make sense to coordinate how all this rulemaking takes place, but that’s not how the system works. 

You can’t blame the agencies. They’re merely doing what Congress mandated them to do. So, it’s up to Congress to fix this problem. Here’s one suggestion: Why not get rid of NHTSA’s CAFE standard and simply rely on the EPA’s emission standards? Emissions regulation – grams per kilometer – is how the European Union does it. The result will be about the same, but it would get rid of thousands of pages of regulations and all the time and money needed to meet them.

It’s also time to rethink our approach to automotive safety regulations. In the past decade, NHTSA has mandated that cars be equipped with electronic stability control, backup cameras, forward collision warning and automated emergency braking. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), which has enormous influence on setting safety standards, recommends that all cars be equipped with blindspot detection and lane departure warning systems. And yet, while automakers have dutifully added all this equipment to their cars, the number of motor vehicle fatalities in the U.S. is 30% higher than it was a decade ago.

Even when you take population growth, the greater number of vehicles on the road and the larger number of miles driven into account, the fatality rate today is almost 20% higher than before all that safety equipment was added. I’m not suggesting this equipment should be deleted, but it’s clear that doing more of the same is not going to reduce traffic fatalities.

And yet NHTSA wants to make seat belt reminders even more annoying than they are right now, and the IIHS wants greater safety for rear-seat passengers. Sorry, but I don’t think this will make much of a difference. And while distracted drivers are a big problem, the data doesn’t support that this is the main reason for the increase. Something else is going on that none of this safety technology addresses.

One technology I’ve argued for several times in this space is the adoption of vehicle-to-vehicle communication, where cars can “talk” to each other. V2V can make it almost impossible for cars to crash into each other. And it can be linked to smartphones to protect pedestrians, too. The technology is on the shelf, it’s proven, it’s cheaper and I believe it will prove to be more effective than all the safety technology on today’s cars.

We came very close to getting V2V mandated in 2017 but then all the wind went out of the sails. It’s time to push for it again. Earlier this year the Department of Transportation issued a roadmap for a national V2V deployment plan. But it’s non-binding plan. It’s time for Congress to pick up the ball and get this mandated.

But it’s also time for Congress to rethink the entire approach to regulating the auto industry. Instead of different agencies writing rules that duplicate what’s being done, or even conflict with each other, why not have one office of automotive regulation? That office could issue regulations that are stable, predictable and come out in a cadence that the industry can efficiently digest.

Here’s the bottom line: We can get cars that are safer, cleaner and more efficient with a lot less red tape and bureaucracy. I don’t really care how it gets done, but it’s pretty obvious that the way we’re doing it now is unnecessarily complicated.