May 19, 2008

Bye-Bye, Pickup Trucks?

Will the California anti-carbon-dioxide regulations soon doom your ability to buy a full-size pickup truck…even if you don’t live in California? Now a major trade publication has compiled the fears of many of the world’s auto manufacturers: A new set of California regulations, if allowed by the courts, will make doing business in the state and 12 others difficult at best and nearly impossible at worst. One key casualty might be the full-size pickup truck.

According to a report in the trade publication Ward’s AutoWorld, both domestic and foreign automakers fear that California’s attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions could cripple the sales of pickup trucks and other large vehicles. And because the proposed regulations could become law in as many as 20 states, your ability to buy a pickup in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and seven others currently considering them could come to an end by the middle of the next decade.

If the proposed CO₂ regulations took effect today, “then all we could sell in California would be Prius,” according to a Toyota spokesman. Most full-line vehicle manufacturers, already pressed by looming new federal regulations, would find it extremely difficult to meet the California regulations without massive restructuring of the models they sell. Though designed to limit the output of the so-called greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the proposed regulations actually impose an escalating set of fuel economy targets for vehicles sold in the states that adopt them. Perhaps the only way to meet the targets is by eliminating larger, more fuel-thirsty models. The controversy could well play out in federal court.