As Trump rolls back on fuel efficiency, what might that mean for consumers?

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Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman on this episode of KPBS Midday Edition, rolling back fuel efficiency standards while gas prices continue to rise. A new move from the Trump administration and if it'll cost you. This is KPBS Midday Edition, connecting our communities through conversation. On today's show, the Trump administration announced that it's weakening another Biden era effort to make new cars more fuel efficient. Officials point to affordability as a major reason for the rollback and that more fuel efficient cars may cost more. But some experts are skeptical about that logic. This also comes amid soaring fuel prices, of which are, you know, uncomfortably familiar here in California. So what do you as a consumer need to know? Well, I'm joined by Joseph Yoon. He's a consumer insights analyst with Edmunds. They're a car shopping and research site. Joseph, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So glad to have you here. Let's start with what these fuel efficiency standards actually are. Can you say it out for us?

Yeah, the corporate average fuel economy regulations have been in place for a long time. And basically what their goal was... to do was to bring up the efficiency of vehicles sold in the United States over a long period of time. They've been in place for nearly, I think, 20-ish years or so now, maybe even longer, and each successive administration has had their kind of take on it, and it's kind of been creeping up over time, and what the Trump administration has decided to do is kind of roll back those requirements for the overall target miles per gallon numbers to be much lower than they were before, especially during the Biden administration. So I believe the target now, it used to be, I believe, around 50 miles to the gallon for kind of your, for an automaker's lineup to be able to do 50 miles to the gallon on average. Now I believe the number is, 34.9, um, or something like that. And so that's, that's been the big change, um, in those, uh, regulatory numbers.

So from where you sit and all, you know, will these new rules actually lower costs for the average consumer?

Um, probably not. Um, especially in the current kind of, uh, challenging environment for automakers. Um, They haven't really talked about it much, or they haven't really complained about it much, but the tariffs that this current administration have brought on has had huge impacts on the bottom line, especially for American auto manufacturers, because their manufacturing supply chains include Canada and Mexico and all across the globe. You know, they've had a really tough time kind of managing all of that, plus not trying to pass on those costs to consumers. And so whatever savings they're going to hypothetically get by developing or putting cars to market that are less efficient than before, I highly, highly doubt will trickle down to the consumers.

Interesting. And of course, you