For each dollar that comes out of the economy in the fuel tax, a dollar goes back in from the refund. Everyone can calculate the tax collected, everyone can verify the amount disbursed. No fear of the government diverting funds (I don’t trust the government too much right now).

No muss, no fuss, no stupid CAFE provisions and loopholes.

It seems to me that what it being proposed, at least as the article presents it, is actually disproportionately low and fewer gas guzzlers will be subsidized by EV credits than under your proposed system.

So honest energy-based CAFE scoring will actually make EVs look quite good in automakers’ CAFE tallies. What I’m critical of is extra credit, beyond their measured energy efficiency; that’s what will lead to distortions of the sort that JohnM points out, whereby disproportionate credits for EVs will lead to excess guzzlers and undermine overall fuel savings.

But if you look at this as a way to diversify how we “fuel” our vehicles it may encourage more development of EV’s. Hopefully this credit skips plugins and requires producers of all EV’s to not lease battery technology to a consumer.

For policy makers and policy in general, the smart thing to do is to give the AAM the profit margins of monster SUV’s while making them sacrifice something, even if you don’t agree with this idea… Eg. applies to EV’s not plugings, EV’s must meet a certain level of production (meaning no games in production or deliberate holding back from consumer demand) Batteries not leased to customers and the E85 provision removed. Again the question is what does the AAM give up in order to produce the same SUV’s under the new rules. That is where the discussion needs to be not one side is better than the other junk that people fall into.

If people were better informed and demanded politicians be tough negotiators with these private firms we would get a better result out of policies like this instead of typical backroom deals between lobbyists and the politician they want to influence while spinning the debate so the public is ill informed about the issue and only focuses on narrow moral opinions of right and wrongs of a potential policy change that in all likelihood will be included at some point in the new CAFE standards.

People make personal economic decisions. Raise the price of fuel and the mileage will go up. Half of all cars built are still on the road after 15 years. We’d better get started.