How Green Was My SUV

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the greenest of them all? There was a whiff of fairy tale to the spectacle of the globe’s two biggest automakers preening over their environmental images last week. For decades, General Motors and the Ford Motor Co. have publicly resisted attempts to tighten fuel economy and clean up toxic tailpipes. All the while, they have outdone one another in launching ever more gas-guzzling behemoths. Yet there they were, suddenly jostling each other over which could produce more fuel-efficient vehicles.

At a hastily called news conference outside Detroit, GM’s pugnacious vice chairman Harry Pearce pronounced himself “annoyed, seriously annoyed” that archrival Ford was positioning itself as “somehow the environmental leader.” The debate, he declared, ought to be “intellectually honest…GM leads Ford today in truck fuel economy, both on average and on a model-by-model basis, including SUVs. General Motors will still be the leader in five years, or 10 years, or for that matter 20 years. End of story.”

If the outburst was a tad obstreperous, Ford had it coming. Six days before, the company’s suave president and CEO Jac Nasser had sailed into the National Press Club in Washington, announcing to reporters, “We’re doing things very differently at Ford Motor Company these days.” Voluntarily, the company would improve the fuel economy of sport-utility vehicles 25% over five years, he said, saving an average of 1,700 gals. of gas over the life of an average vehicle. “We welcome other automakers to join us.”

The venue for this ecoposturing was no coincidence: for the sixth year in a row, automakers are backing a House Appropriations bill rider forbidding the Department of Transportation to study fuel-economy increases. But this year, for the first time, the Senate is forcing a compromise to allow a National Academy of Sciences assessment of the issue. Ford and GM “have definitely seen the writing on the wall,” says Senator Slade Gorton, a member of the subcommittee on transportation. “Consumers want cleaner, more efficient sport-utility vehicles.”

Cars and trucks are a major source of global warming, as each gallon of gasoline pumps more than 25 lbs. of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But because of a loophole in the 1975 fuel-economy law, today’s trucks are allowed to meet a laxer standard on miles per gallon than cars: 20.7 vs. 27.5 on average. The difference mattered less two decades ago, when light trucks–including sport utes, minivans and pickups–represented less than a fifth of new-car sales. Now they account for nearly half. “The industry was claiming it didn’t have the technology to boost fuel economy,” says Jason Mark, a transportation expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What is revolutionary in Ford’s and GM’s announcements is that they are calling their own bluff.”

The reason may be genuine environmental concern. Ford’s new chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., an avid fly fisherman and vegetarian, has vowed to make the company a better corporate citizen. Stung by attacks on his new Excursion–a 12.5-m.p.g. guzzler dubbed “Ford Valdez” by critics–he has expressed fears that auto companies could be scorned like tobacco companies if they don’t clean up their act. Similarly, GM has sought to position itself as the greenest car company, beginning in 1996 when it launched the nation’s first modern, mass-produced electric car, the EV-1. But both companies, which account for half of the SUVs and other light trucks sold today, rank lower in fuel efficiency than Asian companies such as Toyota and Honda.

Such competition may be one reason for the p.r. skirmish, but another factor is the rising cost of gasoline. “All of a sudden people are saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, what a horrible price to fill up my tank!'” says Senator Richard Bryan, a Nevada Democrat who is pushing for tougher gas-mileage rules. “Fuel economy has crept back onto the radar screen.”