- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has just published a rule document that changes the way a “truck” is defined starting with the 2030 model year.
- The change would reclassify many of today’s vehicles from “light trucks” to cars, on the basis that they can’t realistically be used for off-roading and cargo hauling but are primarily passenger vehicles.
- The intention is to loosen fuel-economy standards, but in practice the rule change could mean it makes more sense for automakers to build vehicles overseas and import them.
We’ve all known that the way the government classifies trucks and cars has been a bit of a moving target, so NHTSA is finally forcing trucks to actually do truck things.
The changes—which would reclassify today’s 70/30 truck-to-car ratio into a 30/70 situation—were made as part of the government’s loosening of MPG rules.
But the different rules for cars and trucks could mean that it will make sense to build a vehicle overseas and import it, given different rules for the domestic and imported fleets.
Some questions are difficult to answer. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Do crabs think fish can fly? Is a light truck a passenger car?
Whatever your responses are to the first two, the government made it clear that its legal answer to that last one will soon change. The announcement came in the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule III for Model Years 2022 to 2031 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks, which was published in the Federal Register at the end of September and goes into effect on November 30. While the change was made in the context of the Trump administration’s loosening of fuel-economy regulations, it might also force automakers to move some production outside the U.S., depending on the political winds.
The latest SAFE Rule updates fuel-economy standards for model years 2022 through 2031. Under the Biden administration, the standard had been set to a U.S. fleet average of around 50.4 mpg, but the new rules lower that to 34.9 mpg. Some of this change comes from new rules about what defines a car and what makes something a truck.
A Quick (Legal) History of Trucks and Cars
Since federal fuel-economy rules were established in the 1970s, the government has divided noncommercial road vehicles into two categories of light-duty vehicles, passenger cars (legally: passenger automobiles) and light trucks (non-passenger automobiles). How the government technically defines these vehicles has been a cat-and-mouse game between regulators and engineers. The SAFE Rule says that the back-and-forth led “manufacturers to reshape the market in unanticipated ways—such as by almost eliminating the production of station wagons (passenger cars that generally have more robust cargo capacity, adding mass and reducing fuel economy) in favor of vehicles like minivans and crossover utility vehicles (considered light trucks, and subject to less stringent standards).”
Today, the rule says, “The classification system that has long divided the fleet between passenger cars (intended to move passengers) and light trucks (intended to move cargo or operate off highway) no longer lives up to its anticipated use.” It states that while 68 percent of the light-duty fleet technically meets the regulatory definition of a light truck, the majority of them “cannot realistically operate off-highway and have little value moving cargo. Instead, most of these vehicles are designed and intended primarily to move passengers but have additional features solely to meet regulatory definitions —resulting in little added functionality, reduced fuel-economy performance, added cost, and a homogenous design lacking in creativity.”
Under the updated regulatory definitions, which will go into effect for model year 2030 vehicles, NHTSA said it expects trucks to be trucks and cars to, well, not be trucks. Light-duty non-passenger vehicles will “exhibit true non-passenger capabilities that display relevant off-highway vehicle attributes such as approach angle and running clearance or include design features that provide higher payload and towing abilities for transporting cargo,” the rule states. The agency expects the current fleet mix of 70 percent light trucks and 30 percent passenger cars would be classified as 70 percent cars and 30 percent trucks under the new rules.
The Impact on Production
A vehicle’s category matters from the production side, which is where unintended side effects start to crop up. As noted by Automotive News, a “truck” today that has lower fuel-economy numbers than a car won’t have to change to meet the new, lowered fuel-economy standards imposed by the Trump administration. But if a future administration revives Biden’s 50-mpg target or otherwise raises the standards, these vehicles will need a lot of engineering effort to be compliant because they’re now considered “cars.”
One alternative that automakers might choose in that situation is to import more vehicles through recontenting. That’s because while domestic passenger vehicles need to be produced to meet a CAFE standard minimum, imported passenger vehicles do not. A company’s overall average target remains the same, but since the rules allow automakers to move credits between imported and domestic fleets, there could be benefits to building outside the U.S.
Tom Stricker, senior policy adviser at Van Ness Feldman, told Automotive News that if an automaker were to offshore part of the part supply chain or work for a model in order to get it reclassified as an import vehicle, “the net environmental impact and fuel consumption impact has not changed one bit; all you’ve done is potentially, in this scenario, offshored certain production.”
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Sebastian Blanco has been writing about electric vehicles, hybrids, and hydrogen cars since 2006. His articles and car reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Automotive News, Reuters, SAE, Autoblog, InsideEVs, Trucks.com, Car Talk, and other outlets. His first green-car media event was the launch of the Tesla Roadster, and since then he has been tracking the shift away from gasoline-powered vehicles and discovering the new technology's importance not just for the auto industry, but for the world as a whole. Throw in the recent shift to autonomous vehicles, and there are more interesting changes happening now than most people can wrap their heads around. You can find him on Twitter or, on good days, behind the wheel of a new EV.