Small, efficient cars are increasingly rare, thanks to overly aggressive fuel-economy standards.
O ver the past two decades, the American car market has undergone a dramatic shift. Sedans, once a common sight on American roads, have vanished, replaced by an endless parade of oversized SUVs and crossovers. What happened?
It wasn’t consumer demand alone that drove this transformation. Policy played a pivotal — and ironic — role. During the Obama administration, beginning in 2009 and culminating with major rule expansions in 2012, changes to federal economy regulations inadvertently encouraged automakers to build bigger, heavier vehicles instead of lighter, more efficient ones. These rules, particularly the shift to a footprint-based formula, reshaped the American auto market from 2012 through 2020 — and their structural incentives remain embedded in today’s regulations, surviving through the Trump rollback and into the Biden administration.
Under the revised Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, fuel efficiency targets were tied to a vehicle’s physical footprint. The larger the vehicle, the easier the target became to meet. So-called light trucks— a category that miraculously expanded to include nearly anything with four wheels and a squarer back end — were given significantly lower efficiency requirements than passenger cars. As a result, automakers responded exactly as rational actors do under irrational rules: They made everything bigger. Traditional sedans were bulked up into crossovers. Ground clearance was raised, cargo space was squared off, and vehicles were quietly reclassified as trucks to game the system that Washington had so thoughtfully built for them.
The consequences are plain to see. Twenty years ago, roughly half of the vehicles sold by major American manufacturers were sedans. Today, that figure has shrunk to just 6 percent. Small, efficient cars like the Honda Fit became regulatory casualties, facing fuel economy targets so aggressive (upward of 67 mpg) that selling them became impractical. Meanwhile, bloated vehicles, weighed down with leather seats, touch screen tablets, and blind-spot warning systems, rolled right past the regulators with a wink and a wave.
Even models that survived have ballooned in size. The new BMW 3 Series is bigger than a ’90s 5 Series — and almost as heavy as an old 7 Series.. Rather than fostering innovation or encouraging conservation, the regulatory changes of the Obama era ushered in a market dominated by bloated SUVs — an entire generation of automotive gigantism — paradoxically undermining the very goals they set out to achieve.
This is yet another case study in how government interventions often produce the opposite of what was promised — particularly when ideology drowns out common sense.
And the pattern continues. The Biden administration finalized the strictest vehicle-emissions regulations in history in 2024, pushing automakers even harder toward electric vehicles. While cloaked in the language of environmental progress, these new standards will probably produce the same old unintended consequences: higher costs, fewer choices, and an even greater burden on consumers. Just like the Obama-era CAFE rules, Biden’s mandates prioritize ideological goals over economic reality — ignoring the practical needs of American drivers and the very real limitations of infrastructure. Never mind the delicious irony that Elon Musk’s Tesla — that gleaming temple of capitalist rebellion — remains the biggest winner of them all.
But here’s the hard truth: Electric vehicles start with a heavier environmental tab. Manufacturing an EV, especially its battery, generates 30 to 70 percent more carbon emissions than building a combustion-engine car. Battery production alone accounts for nearly 40 percent of that, and that production process is resource-intensive. Over time, EVs do claw back the difference: Lifetime emissions are roughly 50 percent lower than a gas-powered car. But if the battery needs replacing after eight to twelve years, that advantage shrinks fast — and the toxic, energy-hungry mining cycle starts all over again. To reach anything close to a truly sustainable electric-vehicle ecosystem, we’d need near-perfect battery recycling — a system that doesn’t yet exist. Until then, every EV sold still depends on ripping new lithium, cobalt, and nickel out of the ground, and every old battery risks becoming just another expensive environmental liability.
The death of the American sedan is just one more example of how progressive policies often undermine the very causes they claim to champion. By tying fuel economy rules to vehicle size, the Obama administration didn’t make cars cleaner or streets safer,
The ripple effects touch everyone. I eventually upgraded to an SUV a few years ago — letting go of my sedan not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t want to lose a battle on the road with a suburban tank. Recently, we had to pressure my mother into buying an SUV as well. My sister and I didn’t want her crushed by a truck the size of a mobile command unit. Recent research shows that heavier vehicles are linked to a higher risk of fatal collisions — with the heaviest 1 percent of vehicles causing nearly twice as many deaths in crashes with smaller cars. Thank you, Obama.
This mess has nothing to do with consumer choice. You can’t really blame Americans for wanting to buy massive SUVs and trucks loaded with every feature imaginable. I don’t blame them at all. But I do blame Washington — specifically, Democratic-led Washington, with its pseudo-intellectual, technocratic environmental piousness, a doctrine as thin as rice paper and twice as fragile.
This is the result of the left’s approach to environmentalism: a blind faith in bureaucratic control, a disdain for economic reality, and an endless cycle of “renewables and EVs will save us” ideology colliding with unintended consequences. Effective environmentalism demands pragmatism and grounded leadership — not the arrogant fantasy that government planners in Washington can override the laws of incentives, markets, and human nature with the stroke of a pen.