The Most Efficient Fleet of Cars in US History Is Still Embarrassingly Dirty

The fleet of new cars sold in the United States in 2013 was, according to the EPA, the most efficient in American history. The "model year 2013 car and truck fuel economy is at an all time record high," the agency's new report proclaims. So how efficient is the average brand new, modern-age American car? So efficient that it gets 24.1 miles per gallon. A 1913 Model T that rolled off the production line literally a hundred years ago, easily got 21 MPG, and, by some counts, up to 25 MPG under the right conditions.

To be sure, the number's an improvement from the last half-century. In the gas-guzzling heights of the 1970s, American cars got an abysmal 11.9 MPG on average. Smog and efficiency standards—and the oil crisis of 1973—forced automakers to begin building more efficient vehicles.

More recently, the Obama administration's imposed auto efficiency standards, which were enacted expressly to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and are considered by some to be the president's greenest achievement, have driven another sizable fuel economy gain.

But let's put all of this into context. Compared to what is technologically feasible and historically possible, 24 MPG is an embarrassment. In 2009, two University of Michigan professors completed a study that found that over 83 years—between 1923 and 2006—the fuel efficiency of the average American car improved by a paltry 3 MPG.

Ford's Model T reportedly got up to 25 MPG—this New York City Model T owner claims he still gets 40 MPG around town in his vintage 1923 model—making it more efficient than the average car heading to the showroom floor today. In 2008, in support of his proposed fuel efficiency standards, Obama pointed out that a new SUV was less efficient than a 1908 Model T. Politifact deemed the statement 'true.'

It didn't have to be this way: In the 1930s, some 80 years ago, the French carmaker Citroen designed a vehicle, the Deux Cheveau, that got 75 MPG. Sure, it was slow, unsafe, and smoggy—but it was still more fuel efficient than a Prius.

I was reminded of that important pivot point in technological history after I tweeted out the findings of the EPA's new report—the good folks at City Atlas shot back with this video of the MIT-trained inventor Saul Griffith explaining just how meek our auto efficiency ambitions really are in the face of a world that's warming at the hands of fossil fuel emissions.

It's also a reminder that we had—and have—choices about which technologies we embrace.

The case of efficient vehicles isn't dissimilar from that of electric cars; at the turn of the 19th century, electric cars comprised a significant portion of the nascent auto market. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison even tried their hand at building one. But the easy access to oil soon fueled a pivot to gas-powered cars, and by the end of the 1910s, the first-generation EVs were more or less gone.

With the oil flowing, over the next century, Americans would choose decked-out, fuel-swilling, AC-blasting gas hogs, while Europeans took to smaller, efficient vehicles. The technology of comfort superseded the technology of economy.

That needs to change, and fast. Emissions from gas-powered cars are the second-largest driver of climate change, behind only coal-fired power plants. Auto sales may be slowing domestically, but there are still a hell of a lot of cars in the US, and their fuel economy is archaic. Places like China and India, meanwhile, are adding hundreds of thousands of cars a year. Better efficiency is a must.

In the above video, Griffith is explaining how drastically every person on earth would have to limit their driving if they were participating in sharing a sustainable energy budget—one that would prevent us from driving global temperature rise above 2˚C (3.6˚F). We'd all be limited to 20 miles a day, he says—if we were driving 100 MPG Teslas. Which sounds crazy, because we are used to a world with profligate oil and absurdly sized SUVs and relatively cheap gasoline.

But it strikes me as eminently possible. The technology is already here—modern engines produce more power with less fuel than ever, but too often, that energy is spent moving a massive air-conditioned Escalade around. Necessarily, the car of the future will probably look something like this (it may also be autonomous or just become part of a train). If the French could get most of the way there before World War II, and Ford could do it before World War I, certainly we can go all the way before climate change sparks World War III.