It’s Open Season On Fuel Economy

Happy Thursday! It’s July 17, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at our new Wild West for emissions regulation, as well as Volvo’s scaled-back U.S. offerings. We’ll also look at how Japan is faring in the face of our auto tariffs, and Tesla’s commitment to doing the wrong thing at all times. 

Time was, automakers had to hit certain fuel economy averages across their fleet —if they failed to meet the bar, they’d pay hefty fines to the United States government. That time lasted from 1975 until just this month, when Donald Trump revoked the ability for the government to collect those fines. Now, automakers can more or less build whatever they want in terms of fuel economy without penalty, and that freedom actually extends back to the 2022 model year. From Reuters:

Automakers face no fines for failures to meet fuel efficiency rules dating back to the 2022 model year under a law signed by President Donald Trump this month, U.S. regulators said.

The tax and budget bill approved by Trump ends penalties for not meeting Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules under a 1975 energy law.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a letter to automakers seen by Reuters it is working on its reconsideration of fuel economy rules. The decision is one of a number made by Washington to make it easier for automakers to build gasoline-powered vehicles and to make electric vehicle sales more costly.

I feel like I write some variation of this every day, but let’s reiterate; Electric passenger cars are at best a half-measure towards meaningfully reducing climate change, but seeing as there’s no political will for more radical change they’re a half-measure we’ll all have to live with. EVs are the future, and the rest of the world is still building them. If we follow down this path, the United States will end up some smog-choked backwater nation where no tourist dollars flow and where citizens are too broke for multinational corporations to bother operating. It’ll be like if the “Mad Max” movies left Australia to show that, actually, everywhere else was perfectly normal. 

Remember when Ford owned Volvo? Imagine how wild it would be if that was still the case. Can you imagine a Volvo run with Ford’s current business strategy? No S60, S90, V60, or V90, just crossovers and crossovers alone? Well, now you don’t have to wonder. Thanks to tariffs, that’s exactly how Volvo looks in the States now. From Reuters:

Volvo Cars said it has scaled back its U.S. model lineup this year, among the first examples of a major automaker halting U.S. shipments as President Donald Trump’s tariffs make it harder to sell a broad range of vehicles profitably.

The Swedish carmaker, which is owned by China’s Geely Holding, told Reuters this week that it has been pulling sedans and station wagons from its U.S. portfolio as interest has waned.

The V90 is actually being killed off globally, which is a true shame to see. It’s a beautiful car, the prettiest of the big wagons, and it’s dying. Better to have loved and lost than to have never gotten the V90 at all, I suppose, but I’d sure like to keep loving for a bit longer. We don’t all need crossovers. 

Our wanton imposition of tariffs has rattled seemingly every nation and industry on the planet, but Japan seems especially hard-hit by our capricious executive branch. Without a special tariff deal in place, the country’s national exports are already measurably dropping — an ill portent for what’s to come when the full tariff rates kick in on August 1st. Unless they get pushed back again. Again, capricious executive branch. From Reuters:

Japan’s exports fell for a second straight month as sweeping U.S. tariffs took a toll on the country’s manufacturers, with its fragile economy exposed to greater risks from the global trade war in coming months.

Japan failed to clinch a deal with the U.S. before the July 9 expiration of the temporary pause on the country-specific tariffs after it focused on eliminating the existing sectoral 25% tariffs on automobiles, a mainstay of the export-reliant economy.

Can you imagine being Japan right now? A foreign nation drops a heretofore unseen bomb of unimaginable destructive power on two of your cities, and in the literal and figurative fallout decides to restructure your entire government to better fit its interests. Then, on someone’s whim, it decides to clamp down on trade with you? The country it worked so hard to reforge in its image and its global interests? I’d be upset. 

Back in 2019, a Tesla Model S running Autopilot blew a stop sign and hit a parked Chevy Tahoe, killing one person and injuring another. The trial around that accident has become a debate around the safety of Tesla’s automation systems, and now experts are chiming in to say their peace: Autopilot is not nearly as safe as advertised. From Bloomberg:

Tesla Inc. hasn’t done enough to protect against drivers misusing its Autopilot system, a safety expert testified at a trial over a 2019 fatal collision.

Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University, told jurors in Miami federal court that the Tesla owner’s manual, which contains critical warnings about how the system works, is difficult for drivers to access.

She also said that prior to the crash, the company was having problems with drivers ignoring computer-generated warnings and had not embraced so-called geo-fencing already in use by other car makers to block drivers from activating driver-assistance functions on roads they’re not designed for.

…

“I believe they were using that as a way to sell more cars,” said Cummings, who previously served as a senior adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Prioritizing sales over safety is the American way, but usually you’re supposed to hide it better than this. At least a little bit better. You really don’t have to try that hard, just harder than Tesla did. 

Of course, after that day in 2014, we all remember how policing radically changed across the United States into a less punitive, more community support-based role. The underlying causes of crime like economic instability were all addressed, and no one voted to fund a nationwide unaccountable secret police force with the power to revoke citizenship without provocation. We learned our lesson and fixed everything. 

New Purity Ring! Let’s all give it up for new Purity Ring.