Editorial: A Big Job for Regulators

Having produced 5,000 pages of regulatory proposal and analysis on greenhouse gases from trucks, two federal agencies must now wade through more than 140,000 comments on the Phase 2 plan.

We wish good luck to the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration personnel who must do this important work because a great deal is riding on how they handle the torrent of opinion and data tossed their way.

U.S. trucks burn nearly 39 billion gallons of diesel fuel each year and more than 15 billion gallons of gasoline. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the combustion process.

We’re not sure of precisely how this affects climate, but it’s probably not totally irrelevant. Comments to EPA and NHTSA from two major truck makers and from American Trucking Associations did not challenge the basic assumption of being concerned about CO2 emissions.

But those same comments and many more like them did ask the government to be cognizant of some other important issues.

Unless an extremely large fleet buys in great quantities, it’s probably very difficult to find a new Class 8 for less than $140,000, and they can be even more costly.

Tractors and the trailers they pull are the core of any fleet and the means by which nearly all Americans get most of the goods they buy. This expensive machinery must be dependable, and that’s especially the case the more expensive it becomes.

Regulators need to be very careful about making certain technologies mandatory across all aspects of trucking. What works well for a parcel carrier might be worthless for a heavy-haul specialist. Likewise, aerodynamic fairings on a longhaul dry van cannot even be attached to an auto hauler.

We’ve met people who love 6x2 powertrain configurations and others who sneer at them. The same applies for double-wide, super-single tires.

More CO2 regulation is clearly coming, but we ask the regulators involved to pay careful attention to the comments before then.

One sensible suggestion we read about is the use of a midcourse review. Predicting the progress of vehicle engineering 12 years from now is extremely difficult.

The idea of long-term goals is fine, but the assumptions on which they stand, in this case, are far from certain. What will people want in a decade? What options will be around, and how worthwhile will they be?

It’s impossible to say now.

The idea of a pause around, say, 2021 to match up technological progress and the rule’s mandates is worthy of consideration.