Consumer Groups Say New Car Buyers to Benefit From Fuel Efficiency

Susan Phillips

Recent Stories

Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

January 12, 2012 | 1:54 PM

Jeff Haynes / Getty Images

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) greets an assembly line worker while touring the Ford Motor Company in Chicago, Illinois. Ford has received a Dept. of Energy loan intended to help the company retool for fuel-efficient vehicles.

The Consumer’s Union and the Consumer Federation of America say new car buyers will see a significant savings with President Obama’s proposed new fuel economy standards. Obama wants to raise fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025. Hearings on the standards, proposed for years 2017 through 2025, will take place in Philadelphia next week. The Administration says those standards would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide by 6 billion metric tons.
But the Consumer Federation of America’s analysis doesn’t focus on the environmental benefits. The group wanted to see how much money car buyers would save over the long run. Greater fuel efficiency would increase the cost of a new vehicle. The Consumer Federation of America’s report says drivers would more than make up for that extra cost with savings at the pump.

“And by far the single largest benefit of ‘54.5 by 2025’ is the reduction of consumer expenditures on gasoline,” said Mark Cooper, the Consumer Federation of America’s director of research. ‘The consumer pocketbook savings for the typical consumer with a 5 year auto loan will be immediate and substantial.”

The report says consumers will save an “estimated average of $800 dollars” by the end of a new car loan.
Rising costs of gasoline have recently made fuel costs higher than the actual cost of owning a car.