Treehugger: So Why is Ford Backing Away from Hybrid Commitment?
Some short-sighted laws intended to encourage automakers to go green is too restrictive.
According to the US Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center, these laws create an incentive for auto makers to build cars capable of using alternative fuels by “[giving] a credit of up to 1.2 mpg toward an automobile manufacturer’s average fuel economy which helps it avoid penalties of the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards.
So, it makes sense that Ford would go towards alternative fuels instead of hybrids that use regular gas, but less of it. It’s certainly possible that, when they wrote the law, they had the best of intentions. I doubt they did, but it’s possible. But now that it’s obvious that the law is having unintended consequences, such as pushing Ford away from hybrids, then we should change the law. It’s already more difficult to make a hybrid than to change an existing car over to flex-fuel, so we don’t need to add artificial barriers on top of the ones that are present already.