DETROIT -- After Chrysler Corp. spent more than half a billion dollars to convert a car factory in Newark, Del., to produce big Dodge Durango sport utility vehicles, it threw a party in September to open the new assembly line. The state's political leaders stood with Chrysler's chairman on a podium decorated with red and white bunting and waved victoriously to hundreds of cheering auto workers whose jobs had been saved.
When the Durango went on sale this fall, dealers could not keep enough in stock. And Chrysler, which barely breaks even on ordinary passenger cars, began pocketing $8,000 in profit for every Durango sold.
There is just one problem: The Dodge Durango has a much worse environmental record than the full-sized sedan, the Dodge Intrepid, that the factory used to build. Its gasoline consumption and output of carbon dioxide, a principal cause of global warming, are 57 percent higher than those of the Intrepid. And the Durango's emissions of nitrogen oxides, the main cause of smog, are twice the level of the car it replaced.
If the Durango and most other sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and minivans were classified as cars, they would violate federal standards for pollution and gasoline consumption aimed at protecting the environment and conserving energy. Instead, these vehicles have long been classified as "light trucks" because they were once used mostly on farms and construction sites.
Lawmakers, regulators and presidents back to the Johnson administration have granted special favors to makers and buyers of light trucks. Among those are rules for pollutants and fuel consumption that are considerably softer than those applied to cars for the last two decades.
These lower standards remain in place even though light trucks now account for nearly one of every two family vehicles sold and even though most of them are used by suburban Americans simply for shopping and commuting.
For years, American automakers and their workers have waged a potent campaign to preserve the rules. Now, as President Clinton proposes to reduce American emissions of global warming gases to 1990 levels within a dozen years, the auto industry's lobbying is in high gear.
The manufacturers are worried about a meeting -- beginning on Monday in Kyoto, Japan -- in which 166 nations will try to limit global warming, which has been linked to the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline.
American emissions of global warming gases are increasing even faster than previously expected, in part because of the rise in popularity of sport utility vehicles and other gas-guzzling light trucks. These trucks will be the fastest-growing source of global warming gases in the United States over the next decade, according to a new study by an Environmental Protection Agency researcher, exceeding the increase in all industrial emissions combined.
Already the emissions from 65 million light trucks match those from the 125 million cars on the road, the study found, and truck emissions are expected to move sharply ahead of those from cars in the years ahead.
But automakers oppose curbing gasoline consumption through higher gasoline taxes or tighter fuel-economy standards. On Oct. 2, the Big Three's chief executives and the president of the United Automobile Workers union met with President Clinton. Three weeks after that meeting, when the president announced his position on global warming, he conspicuously omitted any mention of restrictions on vehicles.
That was only the latest case in which American car makers and their unionized workers have mobilized to protect the rules under which light trucks enjoy special privileges, including tax favors that provide incentives for automakers to build light trucks and for Americans to buy them.
That combined lobbying muscle has been highly effective. It was not that long ago, for example, that Bill Clinton, seeking voters with an environmental conscience during the 1992 Democratic primaries, called for the auto industry to achieve much higher fuel economy. Al Gore, his running mate, had even introduced a bill in 1989 requiring a 65 percent increase in the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks as a way to reduce global warming. But after pressure from the UAW, the Big Three and attacks from politicians in auto manufacturing states, the Clinton-Gore team backed off.
The automakers have also set up lobbying groups like the Coalition for Vehicle Choice, which says it includes 6,000 other organizations and 35,000 people. The coalition has persuaded a broad range of nonprofit groups to join its efforts to influence regulators and politicians of both parties.
But the industry does not need to spend a lot of money on coalitions or campaign contributions to achieve its goals. Virtually every congressional district has auto dealerships, while auto assembly plants and parts factories have spread out of the Great Lakes region to the South and both coasts.
General Motors and Ford are so enormous that they each produce more than 1 percent of the nation's economic output, the only two companies to do so. The 800,000-strong UAW is a potent force in Democratic politics. So it is no surprise that the automakers and union leaders generally encounter an open door when they call on lawmakers.
Nor have the automakers been shy about using their position as the nation's biggest advertisers to discourage the news media from criticizing light trucks. The industry, for instance, virtually stopped advertising in the Sierra Club's magazine after an article in it discussed the poor fuel economy of sport utility vehicles.
Here are some of the ways that light trucks are given special treatment:
- Most light trucks are allowed to emit 75 percent to 175 percent more smog-causing nitrogen oxides than even the biggest cars.
- Each manufacturer is required to build a fleet of cars with an average fuel economy of 27.5 miles a gallon, but light trucks have to clear a bar of just 20.7 miles a gallon. Manufacturers can make their trucks much heavier and roomier while using fewer expensive but weight-saving aluminum parts. But those trucks consume far more gasoline than even the biggest cars and spew more gases that contribute to global warming.
- The largest Chevrolet Suburbans and full-size pickups have become so heavy that they no longer even qualify as light trucks under the 22-year-old fuel-economy legislation. That means their fuel economies are not even calculated or included in the manufacturers' averages.
- By building pickup trucks and minivans that can run on ethanol as well as gasoline, automakers plan to win credits from the government that will allow them to build more gas-guzzling light trucks -- even if buyers of the special vehicles never use ethanol, a type of alcohol made from grain and extremely rare at filling stations.
- Until 1989, American-made sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and minivans were protected from foreign competition by a federal tax on imported light trucks that was 10 times as high as the tax on imported cars. That high tax of 25 percent still applies to imported pickups. So American automakers have been under less competitive pressure to develop cleaner, more fuel-efficient trucks, as they had to do with cars.
- Light trucks are exempt from the federal gas-guzzler tax, which covers cars that get less than 22.5 miles a gallon and can add as much as $7,700 to the price of some expensive sedans and sports cars.
- People who use fairly large light trucks on the job -- even real estate agents carrying nothing bulkier than brochures in Lincoln Navigator sport utility vehicles -- are allowed to claim larger tax deductions than people using cars for business.
- A lot of bigger light trucks are exempt from the federal tax on luxury vehicles, now 8 percent of the amount of the sale price that exceeds $36,000.
Many of these special arrangements for light trucks were made during the energy conservation movement of the 1970s, when only 20 million light trucks were on the road, and they were mainly commercial vehicles. Lawmakers and regulators focused on making cars cleaner and more fuel efficient because there were so many more of them.
But as light trucks have become the vehicle of choice among millions of families that use them just like cars, they have grown from one-sixth of those sold to almost half. Today, the 65 million light trucks on the road are more than triple the number in 1975, while the number of cars on the road has only risen by a third since then.
For struggling American automakers, trounced in the 1970s and 1980s by their Japanese and European competitors, light trucks have been a miracle, propelling them from dismal results to record earnings. Detroit and its workers rightly credit light trucks with saving thousands of jobs.
Yet light trucks pose significant problems.
Without the shift toward more and bigger light trucks, the United States would find it easier to make the reductions in global warming gases to 1990 levels that the rest of the world is demanding. Cars and light trucks accounted for nearly one-fifth of American emissions of these gases in 1990, and their emissions are projected to rise by as much as 55 percent by 2010 if the surge in light trucks continues. The emissions would rise by only 35 percent if light trucks were no more popular than they were in the '70s.
As for pollutants that cause smog, regulators in California, which is allowed to set its own tougher standards, have concluded that light-truck exhaust may prevent them from reaching federal goals for smog reduction and are quietly planning to crack down. Finally, because light trucks consume so much gasoline, they make the United States more dependent on foreign oil at a time when oil imports are at record levels.
Government Response: All Remains Quiet on Washington Front
he auto industry has not encountered much resistance to the special treatment of light trucks. The government has raised the fuel-economy standard for light trucks by just two-tenths of a mile a gallon over the last decade, to 20.7 miles a gallon from 20.5. Since 1995, Congress has barred further increases.
And while the government tightened standards for nitrogen oxide emissions for both cars and light trucks several years ago and is planning to tighten them further, the standards remain far more lax for trucks.
The Clinton administration, having backed away from calls for raising fuel-economy standards, has instead focused on supporting research into more fuel-efficient vehicles. The government has been giving the auto industry $250 million a year since 1994 to pay for such work. Yet the research has mainly focused on producing a prototype car by 2003 that can travel up to 80 miles a gallon. Light-truck designs have received little attention even though they have emerged as the bigger problem.
Asked about the issue, President Clinton and Vice President Gore responded through spokesmen that they would have considered increasing fuel-economy standards if not prevented by Congress.
"The industry raised a fuss, and Congress stopped it," said Barry Toiv, the deputy White House press secretary. But the administration has done little to oppose Congress.
Environmental groups have also given the light-truck issue low priority because they think they have little chance of success. For now, they are making only sporadic efforts to raise public awareness.
"Getting Congress and this president to control sport utility pollution is like pushing a Chevy Suburban uphill with your nose," said Daniel Becker, the energy policy director of the Sierra Club.
That so little has been done about these problems in Washington is a reflection of the fact that Detroit is giving people what they want. Americans -- even ones who fancy themselves as environmentally conscious -- have fallen in love with trucks.
Take Henry E. Douglas, a 39-year-old engineer from Hyattsville, Md., who is single. After many years of keeping the heat low in winter to save energy, Douglas compromised with his principles this autumn. He traded in his 1994 Subaru wagon for a 1994 Land Rover Discovery that goes 14 miles on a gallon of gasoline, half as far as the Subaru, and produces twice the pollutants.
Douglas picked the sport utility vehicle so he could drive from his home to New England ski slopes in even the nastiest weather.
"I feel guilty about buying this big truck to drive around in, and I have caught flak from friends for it," he said. "I did a little good old American backsliding, as I think a lot of people have done lately."
The fall in the price of gasoline, after inflation is taken into account, has taken the economic pinch out of driving light trucks. For a family that drives 15,000 miles a year, owning a Suburban, which sells for $26,000 and up, now costs only $550 more in annual gasoline bills than driving a Honda Accord, or less than $50 a month.
Light trucks have many other attractions. They are stylish. They are roomier than cars, with the largest sport utility vehicles carrying nine people. Sitting above the cars around them, they give drivers a sense of power. They make passengers feel safer, although they are more prone to flipping.
Yet because they have grown much heavier relative to cars over the last 20 years, and because they tend to ride higher, light trucks inflict heavy damage when they collide with cars. Even though there are twice as many cars in use as trucks, the trucks now kill more people in cars each year than other cars do. Two big insurers have already begun raising liability rates for light trucks, and others plan to do so.
Automakers are nonetheless building light-truck factories and converting old car factories on the assumption that within a few years half the vehicles sold will be light trucks. Sales of the biggest sport utility vehicles are growing fastest of all. With the introduction of models like the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, sales of full-size sport utility vehicles soared 53 percent in the first nine months of this year compared with figures from the same period a year earlier, even as car sales fell 4 percent.
Americans' infatuation with light trucks alarms some federal and state regulators. A quick comparison of specific models shows why. Both gasoline consumption and emissions of carbon dioxide are 86 percent higher for a Chevrolet Suburban than for a Honda Accord, and 43 percent higher for the Suburban than for even the huge Buick Roadmaster station wagon that General Motors built until last year. The cleanest Suburbans emit twice the nitrogen oxides of the Accord or the Roadmaster.
The EPA's expert on light-truck emissions, John German, has calculated in a new study that because of the shift to light trucks, government forecasts of nitrogen oxide pollution from family vehicles in 2020 should be raised by 6 percent to 23 percent. Projections for carbon dioxide emissions and gasoline consumption by 2010 should be raised by 8 percent. The forecasts have been based until now on the outdated assumption that light trucks would be less than a third of the passenger vehicles in use through 2015, when they already exceed 34 percent.
Regulators in California, which has 7.5 million light trucks, said they would begin drafting rules to require trucks to meet the same antismog standards as cars by 2008.
"We did not expect trucks to be this popular," said Steven G. Albu, chief of automotive engineering studies at the California Air Resources Board. "It undermines our efforts to get to the federal clean air goals."
How It All Began: Chicken Came First, Then Truck Rules
For light trucks, the long line of favors from Washington all started with frozen chickens.
Beginning in 1962, the Kennedy administration accused the European Community of unfairly restricting imports of American poultry at the request of West German chicken farmers. In January 1964, two months after taking office, President Johnson punished the Europeans by imposing a 25 percent tax on all imported light trucks.
The official reason given for choosing light trucks was that American imports of Volkswagen vans from West Germany were close in dollar value to the lost American sales of chickens to Europe. But recently released audio tapes from the Johnson White House suggest that the president may have had another motive. The tapes show that in January 1964, President Johnson was trying to persuade Walter Reuther, the UAW's president, not to call a strike just before the 1964 election and to support the president's civil rights agenda. The tapes also show that Reuther wanted Johnson to respond to Volkswagen's growing shipments to the United States, although the labor leader was more concerned with the Beetle than the vans.
Through three rounds of global trade negotiations since then, import fees on virtually every other manufactured good except clothing and textiles have been reduced to 2 percent or 3 percent or have been eliminated. But Detroit has lobbied effectively to protect the light-truck tariff.
During the most recent round, which concluded in 1993, the American auto industry warned that it would withhold its support from any agreement that reduced the 25 percent tariff that remained on many light trucks, said a senior Bush administration trade official who insisted on anonymity. The Bush administration followed the industry's wishes despite complaints from Japan. To this day, the tax remains at 25 percent for imported pickup trucks, although the government has reduced it to 2.5 percent for minivans and sport utility vehicles -- on the ground that they are not trucks. But Washington continues to classify them as light trucks for all other purposes.
The tax has helped prevent European and Asian automakers from winning a firm foothold in the light-truck market; they are only now catching up by building pickup and sport utility vehicle factories in the United States. While Detroit held only 64 percent of the nation's car market last year, the Big Three sold 86 percent of the light trucks. The barriers to competition have meant less pressure on Detroit to make its models cleaner and more fuel efficient, two strengths of Japanese car makers.
The import tax was just the first of many special favors. The 1973 Arab oil embargo led Congress to set gasoline mileage rules for cars. But the auto industry allied itself with farmers and home builders who said that similar standards for pickup trucks would pose an intolerable burden by forcing automakers to make the trucks smaller and less powerful. So Congress asked the Transportation Department to come up with a separate set of rules for light trucks.
Enthusiasm for regulation has faded as worries about oil shortages have ebbed. Fuel-economy standards for cars rose to 27.5 miles a gallon in 1985 while truck standards have barely changed. In 1975, when Congress passed the fuel-economy legislation, the average fuel economy of new light trucks was 13 percent below cars. Now, it is 25 percent lower.
The rules, combined with rising gasoline prices, forced Detroit to design much smaller cars in the late 1970s and early '80s. But when gasoline prices dropped after 1981, Lee Iacocca and Harold Sperlich, Chrysler's chief executive and president, respectively, made use of the opportunity provided by the separate rules for trucks. In 1984, they introduced the minivan.
Had it been classified as a car, the minivan would have made it hard for Chrysler to meet fuel-economy standards for its fleet. But because it was at least partly based on a pickup design, and came in a cargo version, too, regulators accepted it as a truck.
With America hungering for roomier family vehicles again, the eight-passenger minivan was an instant success, rescuing Chrysler from the brink of disaster. Ford then set off the sport utility vehicle surge with the introduction of the Explorer in 1990.
Now that they are selling ever-bigger sport utility vehicles, Chrysler and Ford are having trouble meeting even the lower fuel-economy standard for light trucks. So they plan to build more than 200,000 minivans and pickups annually that can burn ethanol as well as gasoline. This will allow them to take advantage of generous government fuel-economy credits for such vehicles, even if the buyers never use ethanol.
Why ethanol? Ethanol is commonly made from corn; corn farmers and processors successfully lobbied Congress in 1988 to insert the loophole into fuel-economy laws as a way to increase demand for corn. While the automakers were not especially interested in ethanol then, they were happy to go along. Now they see a way to benefit.
Environmentalists paid little attention to light trucks when fuel-economy rules were enacted or when clean air legislation was drafted during the Carter administration. "We weren't smart enough in the 1977 legislation to take on the light-truck issue," said Michael Walsh, director of the EPA's air-and-radiation division from 1977 to 1981.
Congress also failed to foresee the popularity of light trucks when writing tax laws. When the gas-guzzler tax was drafted in 1978, House members from rural districts insisted that light trucks be exempt to protect farmers' pickups, said Albert Buckberg, a longtime economist for the Joint Committee on Taxation who has since retired. Because the larger light trucks were not seen as luxurious, they were also exempted from the luxury vehicle tax in 1990.
Times have changed. Even the American Automobile Manufacturers Association concedes that only a quarter of light trucks are now used for farming and other commercial purposes. In just the last year, luxury-car makers have been rushing out deluxe sport utility models like the Lincoln Navigator, at $40,000 and up, and the Mercedes-Benz ML320, priced at $35,000 to $40,000. Cadillac announced plans on Nov. 20 for a huge new model next year. When the tax laws were written, Buckberg said, "There were no such things as the Lincoln Continentals of sport utility vehicles."
Fending Off Threats: Aggressive Lobbying at All Political Levels
he year was 1990, and Iraq had just invaded Kuwait, raising fears that the oil lifeline between the Middle East and the United States would be cut. That crisis, and fears about global warming, produced a serious effort by Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., to raise fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks by 40 percent by 2001. The measure won the support of 57 senators but fell three votes short of the total needed to defeat a filibuster.
To help head off the legislation, the Big Three hired a lobbying firm, FMR Group Inc., which organized a campaign of grass-roots resistance in Nevada. Detroit automakers hired another lobbyist in 1990, John R. Bonner, to drum up opposition to the Bryan bill in other states. Bonner set up a news conference in Washington and invited representatives of groups that used big vehicles. A Nebraska farmer pointed out that a Honda Civic could not haul a livestock trailer. A charity official from South Dakota said disabled people needed big vans for their wheelchair lifts. An Alabama sheriff said small cars could not be driven as fast to crime scenes. Each speaker's plane fare and expenses were paid for by the automakers, Bonner said.
To help block any further moves to raise fuel-economy standards, the auto industry set up a lobbying group in Washington in 1991 called the Coalition for Vehicle Choice and has bankrolled its budget ever since. The coalition is headed by Diane Steed, the top highway safety regulator in the Reagan administration.
The next threat to light trucks came during the 1992 campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Clinton criticized President Bush for not raising fuel-economy standards.
But once Clinton had won the Democratic nomination with the support of environmentalists, his position began to shift. Auto industry and UAW officials met repeatedly with campaign advisers through the summer to contend that raising fuel standards would eliminate jobs -- and cost the votes of tens of thousands of auto workers. At a campaign stop in Detroit on Aug. 21, Clinton said that while he wanted more fuel-efficient vehicles, they might not be technically feasible -- the justification later used for subsidizing industry research instead of raising fuel-economy standards.
And the automakers are not reluctant to retaliate against opponents of sport utility vehicles, like the Sierra Club, one of the few public interest groups actively fighting the spread of the vehicles. The club's bimonthly magazine, Sierra, carried ads for sport utility vehicles until it published an article last winter criticizing their poor fuel economy. All of the sport utility ads disappeared, costing the magazine 7 percent of its annual advertising revenue, according to Joan N. Hamilton, the editor in chief.
"We had to shrink the pages of our magazine accordingly," she said. The magazine has continued to publish articles critical of the auto industry.
For many years, Detroit's lobbying in Washington followed one rule: call Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who is the longest-serving House member and served as Commerce Committee chairman for 14 years.
When Republicans captured control of the House and Senate in the 1994 elections, Dingell lost his chairmanship. But the auto industry has lost none of its influence and may have even increased its sway. Many Republicans have long shared the automakers' hostility to regulation. The auto industry's political contributions, while modest compared with those of other industries, have long gone lopsidedly to Republicans.
The manufacturers' latest worry is the conference on global warming. The theory of global warming predicts that the buildup of certain gases in the atmosphere will lead to less of the sun's energy being reflected from earth into space, resulting in a warmer climate. While some scientists have questioned whether global warming is a serious enough problem to justify costly policy moves now, there is broad scientific agreement that some problem exists.
The automakers fear pressure on the United States to curb gasoline consumption through higher gasoline taxes or higher fuel-economy standards. The result has been aggressive lobbying, including in October, when Clinton met with the Big Three's chief executives and the UAW's president, Stephen Yokich.
The White House had hoped that the automakers would thank the president for trying to break open the Korean auto market. But the executives spent most of the hourlong meeting criticizing the administration's desire to secure a binding international agreement in Kyoto. Only the United States, with its strong legal system, would respect such an agreement, they warned, and at the expense of slower economic growth and the loss of thousands of jobs.
But the lobbying extends far beyond meetings with the president. The Durango assembly line party looked like a campaign event, and in a way it was, part of the industry's unending effort to cultivate allies at all levels of politics. Delaware Gov. Thomas Carper, a Democrat, pointed out in his speech that Chrysler's $623 million investment to convert the factory to sport utility vehicle production was the equivalent of $1,000 for every person in the state. Asked minutes later about the environmental issues surrounding light trucks, the governor volunteered to help Chrysler fight any restrictions.
"If they need our help," he said, "we'll give it to them."
After the ceremony, Robert Liberatore, Chrysler's chief lobbyist and a former top Democratic Senate aide, steered Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat, toward a lunch with Robert Eaton, Chrysler's chairman and chief executive, and Delaware's other senator, William Roth Jr., a Republican.
Asked later what they had talked about, the senators said the conversation had mainly involved Chrysler's interest in free trade. But when pressed, Biden said Eaton had also spoken to him about the dangers of raising fuel-economy standards.
A Widening Constituency: Country Truck, City Truck
he Everly family near Bondurant, Iowa, has been using pickups to farm since the 1920s and cannot imagine life without them. Last spring, James L. Everly used his pickup to haul seed corn and herbicides to his fields. This autumn, he used it to transport his crops to a grain elevator.
"You couldn't use a sedan or a wagon because you'd get stuck in the mud," Everly said.
By contrast, Andrew and Jillian Dijak in Westport, Conn., have other expectations for their truck. They traded in their Audi two years ago to lease a Range Rover. They thought the big sport utility vehicle would provide more protection in an accident. Now they are on the waiting list for a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle.
"Winters can be harsh here, and I have two young children," Mrs. Dijak said. "I thought being higher would be safer than the Audi."
Automakers are designing many light trucks these days for two different markets: the original customers who use them as work vehicles and the newcomers who view them as oversize cars. People who need work vehicles want the features they have always counted on -- powerful engines, four-wheel drive and sturdy frames -- to negotiate muddy fields or rough roads.
But commuters, along with soccer moms and dads, also want air-conditioning, luxurious interiors and fast acceleration. The automakers are granting their wishes, making the trucks even heavier and requiring more powerful, gas-guzzling engines. The horsepower of the average light truck has soared 48 percent in the last decade. Chrysler has begun offering a new engine in the Jeep Grand Cherokee that allows it to go from zero to 60 miles an hour in seven seconds -- as fast as a 1978 Corvette.
Most sport utility vehicles and pickups have blocky shapes that make them less aerodynamic, reducing their energy efficiency. Popular four-wheel-drive systems, which allow better control on bad or snowy roads, likewise hurt fuel economy by adding up to 500 pounds of weight. Light trucks even have taller, less aerodynamic passenger compartments than cars -- a peculiar remnant of the days when men wore hats.
"In Texas, you have to be able to wear your cowboy hat," said Tom Baughman, Ford's truck engineering director.
Many light trucks, particularly the larger sport utility vehicles and pickups, are designed to carry heavy cargoes or haul trailers, and have fuel-gulping engines.
But an internal study by the Big Three has found that slightly less than half of full-size sport utility vehicles, and only 15 percent of all sport utility vehicles, are used for towing. Full-size sport utility vehicles may be handy for carrying big families, but three-quarters of the buyers come from households with three or fewer people.
Environmental Problems: Higher Emissions, Lower Fuel Economy
o build trucks sturdy enough to satisfy farmers like Everly and peppy enough to please former car drivers like the Dijaks, automakers have developed bigger and bigger engines. But there are drawbacks.
Two decades of progress in reducing emissions of smog-causing nitrogen oxides from family vehicles is being slowed by the shift from cars to light trucks. For light trucks as a group, actual emissions are 20 percent to 100 percent higher than for cars as a group, with the exact figure ranging from city to city based on the severity of auto inspections, according to the EPA.
Nobody says light trucks have to be this dirty. Albu of the California Air Resources Board said that regulators planned to outfit a Ford F-150 pickup with a better catalytic converter in an experiment intended to show that trucks can meet even the strictest car emissions standards. The upgraded catalytic converters could end up costing manufacturers $100 to $300 a vehicle, said John Dunlap, the agency's chairman. The EPA is required by a 1990 law to cut allowable nitrogen oxide emissions for cars and light trucks in 2004, but has not decided by how much.
All but the smallest light trucks also burn a lot of gasoline. Many auto executives say that Americans are not worried about conserving gas. When Chrysler introduced the Durango, which gets 13 miles to the gallon in the city and 17 on the highway, Eaton declared, "Fuel economy within the area we're talking about here is not an issue to the consumer."
American gasoline use is already expected to grow by up to 33 percent by 2010. If light trucks become as common as cars by then, gasoline consumption will be an additional 8 percent higher than if light trucks remained a third of the vehicles on the road, according to the study by German of the EPA's automotive pollution office in Ann Arbor, Mich.
If Americans were still buying the same proportion of light trucks as in 1975, and if these light trucks had improved in fuel economy as quickly as cars since then, gasoline consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by cars and light trucks in the United States would already be 9.3 percent lower today, according to calculations by John M. DeCicco, a senior researcher at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy in Washington. That translates into 600,000 barrels of oil a day, or 3.3 percent of national oil consumption.
Many environmentalists have advocated tightening fuel-economy rules. The automakers and most economists disagree. Higher gas taxes, they point out, would limit the miles people drove. Light trucks are far less popular in Europe because gasoline there costs up to $5 a gallon after taxes are included. In the United States, said Alex Trotman, Ford's chairman and chief executive, "if fuel were $3 a gallon, for example, I think you'd see a very different distribution of size of vehicles, car and truck."
Yet higher gasoline taxes are unlikely, particularly with the federal budget nearly in balance. Higher fuel-economy standards for light trucks are also unlikely. So for now, light-truck sales keep climbing
"We are in the business," Trotman said, "of supplying customers what they'd like to buy."
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