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By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter

This story appears in the May 21 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

A Senate proposal that would set fuel-economy standards for heavy- and medium-duty trucks conflicts with a current push to reduce engine emissions and would not work without additional research, representatives of the truck manufacturing industry said.

“We’ve got an emissions mandate that’s been pushing efficiency standards on engines the other way,” said James Westlake, executive director of American Truck Dealers. “Part of the byproduct . . . of cleaning up these engines has meant more heat and slightly more weight, more apparatus, a larger engine footprint and a little less efficiency.

“In my opinion, we have government agencies that are pushing on one technology and other agencies pushing on another,” he said.

“The basis that you would need to set up a program doesn’t exist,” said Robert Clarke, president of the Truck Manufacturers Association. “There are no test procedures” for calculating truck fleet mileage, and there’s “no basis for benchmarking on a fleetwide average.”

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) added the truck provisions as an amendment to a bill aimed at reducing overall fuel consumption.

The bill, which passed the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee earlier this month (5-14, p. 4), would create Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for trucks two years after a report on automobile efficiency is delivered to Congress.

That report is due by the end of 2014.

“For the first time, medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks will be subject to fuel-economy standards which will address a significant sector in transportation fuel use,” Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the committee chairman, said in a statement.

The bill calls for the mileage baseline to be set for the first two years after that report at the “average combined highway and city miles-per-gallon performance of” medium- and heavy-duty trucks for the model year “immediately preceding” that period.

The average fuel economy that fleets would be required to attain would be “at least 4% greater than the fuel economy required the previous model year,” the bill said.

Joe Suchecki, spokesman for the Engine Manufacturers Association, said the group was “opposed to what is in the legislation,” citing a lack of research into what a miles-per-gallon standard would mean.

“At this time, there’s not enough information about essentially whether and how fuel-economy standards would apply to heavy-duty trucks,” he said.

Suchecki said that a miles-per-gallon standard probably would not work because “the industry is so diverse and complicated.”

“Would you apply the standard to the cab itself? To the whole truck? What do you do when you have different trailers, which truckers often do,” he said. “It’s much more appropriate to take some time and study the matter before we go down that path.”

But Tim Lynch, senior vice president for federation relations and strategic planning for American Trucking Associations, said the legislation should serve as a warning for trucking about what environmental regulations may be on the horizon.

“The Senate Commerce [Committee] action is really a wake-up call for industry to review what we have done to improve the environment — and that’s been considerable — but also to look at what other steps might be taken,” Lynch said.

ATD’s Westlake also cited trucking’s focus on reducing fuel costs on its own as a reason the CAFE standard was unnecessary.

“It makes no sense. We’ve had some of this dialogue [with the industry], and they are so focused on efficiency on a truck, if there was a way to eke out another one-tenth of a mile [a gallon], by golly, they’re going to be on it,” he said.

The bill now moves to the full Senate.