(Washington D.C.) 4 Feb 2026 — The International Council on Clean Transportation submitted public comments in strong disagreement with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) proposal to rollback the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for Model Years 2022 to 2031 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks. The organization has stated that the proposed rollback is inconsistent with NHTSA’s statutory obligation to establish the maximum feasible standards, and poses major risks to American health and welfare and to the U.S. automotive sector.
The comments from the ICCT outline that NHTSA’s analysis for the proposed standards is fundamentally flawed, fails to account for important, relevant data, and misconstrues benefits to consumers.
The proposed standards are not set at the “max-feasible” level, as required by federal law. NHTSA’s own modeling shows that the agency expects automakers to voluntarily over-comply with the standards, and that the new fleet in 2024 would meet the future standards, indicating that the standards are not maximum feasible.
NHTSA’s omission of zero-emission vehicles from the baseline disregards more than 1.2 million new zero-emission vehicles sold in the United States in 2024, representing about 8% of new light-duty sales. Excluding these vehicles from the baseline unrealistically ignores a large and growing portion of the fleet and is inconsistent with the Energy Independence and Security Act and the agency’s prior and longstanding practices. (....)