Release from the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence and Équiterre

VANCOUVER | UNCEDED xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (MUSQUEAM), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (SQUAMISH) AND səlilwətaɬ (TSLEIL-WAUTUTH) TERRITORIES — The shift in new vehicle sales toward polluting SUVs and trucks has cancelled out more than 80 per cent of the reduction in average fuel consumption achieved by more fuel-efficient engines from 2010 to 2022 in Canada, according to a study commissioned by Environmental Defence, Équiterre and the David Suzuki Foundation.

Canada adopts vehicle fuel efficiency regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and these rules currently allow automakers to get away with selling more polluting vehicles if they are larger in size or weigh more. These loopholes have encouraged automakers to make bigger and heavier vehicles while shifting car sales to SUVs to “game” the system.

This joint Canada-U.S. regulatory policy highlights how the outcome of the U.S. presidential election will affect Canadian climate policy, road safety and cost of living. This is because SUVs and trucks consume, on average, 30 per cent more fuel than gasoline cars, larger and heavier vehicles are more dangerous on the road and larger, gas-guzzling vehicles growing to dominate the vehicle market make life more expensive for families in Canada.

The study uses economic modelling to examine various methods of addressing these regulatory loopholes in President Joseph Biden’s final vehicle emissions standards rule, announced in March 2024, and how effective they might be in the context of new vehicle emissions rules applied in Canada, including the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard, which targets 100 per cent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to scrap Biden’s vehicle emissions standard rules, as he rolled back President Barack Obama’s rules during his last administration.

Key takeaways from the study, conducted by the Sustainable Transportation Action Research Team (START) at Simon Fraser University, include:

• Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard, which aims to increase zero-emission vehicle sales to 100 per cent of the new vehicle market by 2035, is the most effective regulatory policy to reduce vehicle carbon emissions. If Canada did not have this regulation, and only relied on President Biden’s EPA pollution standards for cars and trucks, carbon emissions would be cumulatively 84 million tonnes higher by 2035, equivalent to adding more than 21 coal-fired power plants to the grid or the emissions of 25 million cars in a year. Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard is even more important if the Trump administration rolls back the Biden rules and makes them weaker.

• Design details of vehicle fuel efficiency regulations can have a significant effect on the market share of cars (sedans) versus light trucks (SUVs and pickup trucks) in Canada. The modelling indicates that regulatory policy changes such as re-classifying SUVs as cars rather than light trucks for emissions standards purposes would result in an eight percentage point swing in the overall car versus truck market share of new vehicles (the market share of cars sold increasing by four per cent and the share of light trucks sold declining by four per cent).

• The study modelled the introduction of an energy-efficiency requirement for electric vehicles to encourage downsizing and to increase the supply of smaller, affordable electric vehicle models. It found that this would result in an 18 per cent swing in market share, with the market share of electric passenger cars increasing by nine per cent and the market share of electric light trucks decreasing by nine per cent.

Quotes:

“This study highlights how important the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard is for Canada’s ability to reach its emissions reduction targets. Keeping Canada’s own standard needs to be a political consensus across all Canadian political parties to ensure we reduce stubbornly high transportation emissions despite the American loopholes that have undermined our progress so far. The standard is protection against likely fuel efficiency policy rollbacks on the horizon from a Trump administration,” Thomas Green, Senior Policy Adviser at the David Suzuki Foundation, said.

“This study proves that U.S.-Canada vehicle emissions standards have loopholes so big you can drive a gigantic truck through them. When automakers can get out of emissions standards by gaming the system with bigger and heavier vehicles, families end up paying the price by filling the gas tank more often, breathing more air pollution and living with more dangerous streets for pedestrians, cyclists and young children. When Canada moves to adopt the EPA’s vehicle pollution standards, the federal government should look closely at the policy options available to close these loopholes and explore applying efficiency standards to electric vehicles to enhance their cost-of-living benefits for Canadian families,” Nate Wallace, Clean Transportation Program Manager at Environmental Defence, said.

“The evidence is overwhelming: Steadily improving fuel economy relative to prior-year models has long been used as an industry talking point to defend the shift toward larger and heavier vehicles. As long as policy-makers fail to tackle the shift in our overall vehicle fleet toward SUVs and trucks, technological efforts to improve internal combustion engines will continue to fail to actually reduce carbon emissions. The good news is that it’s possible to remedy the situation while bringing down the cost of electric vehicles by 28 per cent by 2035 without any impact on automakers’ profits,” Blandine Sebileau, Sustainable Mobility Analyst at Équiterre, said.

More information
Regulations needed for SUVs, trucks to keep others safe: report
Équiterre : Understanding the rise of light-duty trucks in Canada
Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard (regulated targets for zero-emission vehicles)
EPA: Final Rule: Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles
Trump’s fuel economy rollback leaves Trudeau in a bind: Follow the U.S., or take a stand

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Media, please contact:
Theresa Beer, David Suzuki Foundation, tbeer@davidsuzuki.org, 778-874-3396