Survey Says: Proposed EPA Letter Grades Suck

Be prepared to see a Federal tax on autos, especially if cap and trade is watered down. Having four grades (actually five if you count A+) makes it easier for the public comprehend the penalty they have to pay. I have yet to see the methodology behind assigning grades and I suspect overseas manufacturers will find themselves in a more expensive category. Call it a hidden tariff.

Uhhh- I'm so tired of dumbed-down measurements. This is especially bad because as soon as a vehicle is rated "A", there is no room to ever indicate any vehicle is better than that one. If they're going to do this, they could at least quantify, say, the amount of energy required to build, maintain, and operate the vehicle, and tell you what percentile that falls in for that model year. I'm also tired of superlative definitions that are meaningless, such as "Low Emissions Vehicle", Super Low, Ultra Low, Partial Zero etc. It's impossible to tell which is better than the other, and why. And WTF does "partial zero" mean. Zero can't be divided into parts! (What it really means is that it is zero emissions while it's turned off. No kidding). Even Zero Emissions Vehicles aren't quite zero emissions, since electric motors emit a little ozone. For that matter, even mpg is a misleading term- especially when mpg numbers get high. Peoples conception of mpg is often that an x-mpg improvement saves the same amount of gas, no matter where it is. E.g. going from 15 mpg to 30 mpg saves the same amount of fuel as going from 30 to 45. In fact, to save as much gas per year as going from 15 to 30 mpg, you'd have to go from 30 to infinity. This means the people upgrading from their 36 mpg civic to their 48 mpg Prius are saving very little fuel, despite the 12 mpg improvement, while someone going from 20 to 32 mpg is going to save much MUCH more fuel. If mpg was replaced with gallons/100mi, similar to what they do in Europe and everywhere else, this would be apparant. This is where it DOES make sense to have a maximum possible score- the limit approaching 0. The dollars per year comes close to this measure, but it depends on how much fuel costs when the label was printed, the difference in fuel price between where you live and the national average, and how much you drive. If they just gave us gallons/100mi, it would be MUCH more useful. As an aside, using gallons per 100 miles is much more useful in illustraing how accessories, like AC or a bike rack, affects efficiency. For instance, a big bike rack on your hummer may reduce mileage from 12 mpg (19.6 liter per 100km) to 11 mpg (21.4 l/100km). The same rack on a gen-1 Honda insight may reduce mpg from 70 mpg (3.4 l/100km) to 45 mpg (5.2 l/100km). Using MPG, the hummer owner would say the rack makes almost no difference, while the Insight owner would say it totally destroyed his mileage. Using l/100km, you can see that the rack requires EXACTLY the same amount of additional fuel on either vehicle- an extra 1.8 l/100km). People do the same thing with AC for instance- barely noticing it on a big car, and noticing a big difference in mpg in a small car, when in reality the difference won't be that big.