Driving Into the Future

When we were kids, the renowned futurist George Jetson taught us that we'd all be driving flying cars someday. But it turns out, nearly 50 years on, that our motoring habits have more in common with Fred Flintstone--we're still driving around in cars powered by the fossilized dinosaurs. So much for progress. Now, though, through the benevolence of our federal lawmakers, it appears that George's utopian driving dream may finally be within our grasp.

On Wednesday, President Bush signed into law a new energy bill that will boost the average mileage of cars to 35mpg, a 40 percent increase from today's 25mpg average and the first time Congress has ordered new fuel-economy rules since the oil embargos of the 1970s. This aggressive new mileage standard--hailed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as "groundbreaking"--goes into effect in 2020. (Progress takes time, especially in Detroit.) By then, you might expect that we'd all be riding around in those Jetsonian future-mobiles, powered by air or atomic fusion, or at least by electricity. And you would be dead wrong.

"If a Martian looked down on the fleet of vehicles on the road in 2020, he won't see much difference," says environmental activist Dan Becker, the former director of global-warming initiatives at the Sierra Club, who, nonetheless, considers this a landmark change. But wait a minute. What gives here? How come we can't finally get our cars of tomorrow thanks to today's legislation? The answer is part bureaucratic and part technical: the way Washington computes fuel economy is Byzantine and backward, and the biggest technological changes will be under the skin.

"Cars won't look dramatically different," says Becker, "but they will be significantly different."

Back in the 1980s, consumers began complaining that those mileage window stickers on new cars didn't match the reality of the road: drivers never got the miles per gallon promised by the EPA. So the bureaucrats in charge of the window stickers lowered the city mileage estimate by 10 percent and the highway estimate by 22 percent to bring them more in line with the real world. But the bureaucrats in charge of computing the automakers' average mileage on their new cars didn't make a similar adjustment, leaving their estimates higher than drivers' actual experience. A car that regulators figure gets 27.5mpg today, for instance, will carry a window sticker showing it gets only around 21mpg, according to automotive technical expert Dan Edmunds of the Edmunds.com car-research Web site. Because of the discrepancy, Edmunds figures that to achieve the new 35mpg mandate, cars only need to get about 26.5mpg in real-world driving. That's still a significant, 24 percent increase, but it's no 40 percent jump, which would require a completely new model for making cars. "There is a big disconnect between the number politicians talk about," says Edmunds, "and what's on the window sticker."

Already in today's showrooms, there are 38 models that would technically meet the new mandate because they get more than 27mpg in combined city and highway driving, according to their window stickers, says Edmunds. But if you were to try to find a car now that actually gets 35mpg in real-world driving, you would only have nine models to choose from.