EPA's m.p.g. ratings get an inspection

Call it a gentler, constructive form of road rage: Helen Shondell has given the Environmental Protection Agency a piece of her mind.

Every workday, Sister Helen - a Roman Catholic nun in Birmingham, Mich. - drives 20 miles round-trip in her 2003 Nissan Sentra. While her new car is comfortable, Sister Helen is not a happy commuter.

When she bought her Nissan, the window sticker indicated a government rating of 31 combined miles per gallon. But the car really gets only 27 to 28 m.p.g.

So, Sister Helen filled out a "citizen survey" organized by Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which ends Monday - part of a wider effort by the EPA to solicit public comment about whether to adjust its decades-old fuel-economy tests.

In an election year when Middle East turmoil has boosted gasoline prices and highlighted America's dependence on foreign oil, a brouhaha has erupted over mileage stickers. The debate boils down to this: Would consumers buy more fuel-efficient cars if they knew the real guzzling potential of America's new-car fleet?

"The fundamental problem is that the fuel-economy test the EPA uses is over 30 years old," says David Friedman, research director of the UCS's clean-vehicles program. "Think how you drove 30 years ago. People drive faster on highways today, there's more urban driving, more congestion in cities."

The result: Fuel-economy numbers the EPA pastes on car windows overstate actual results by at least 10 percent, according to a UCS analysis of Energy Information Administration data. Those sticker numbers are themselves derived, in part, from formulas.

Since the 1980s, the EPA has employed "adjustment factors" to bring test results into closer alignment with the real world. Right now, those factors knock an additional 10 percent from city driving and 22 percent from highway driving results for each model. And each EPA sticker warns that results will vary depending on the driver and the type of driving.

But that level of fuzziness is way too high, critics argue. Consumers end up spending $20 billion more for fuel than they were led to expect, UCS calculates. And there's more at stake than bucks at the pump, some say.

"We think that if consumers knew the actual fuel economy of the vehicle they were considering purchasing, they might make a different decision," says Elisa Lynch, global warming campaign director for Bluewater Network, a San Francisco environmental organization that in 2002 first petitioned the EPA to update its ratings. "It would give more accurate information to policymakers when they're considering raising fuel-economy standards and make a significant contribution toward problems like global warming."

Cars and trucks in the US create about 20 percent of annual US emissions of carbon dioxide - which is about 5 percent of global emissions, Bluewater said in its petition.

At the same time, the US already consumes more than 20 million barrels of oil a day - importing more than half of it overall, much of that from the Middle East.

Even if adjusted, the EPA's adjustment factors would still fail to accurately reflect the real world's range of changes in driving habits and growing diversity in automobile technology, critics charge. The actual test, they point out, seems almost quaint. Flaws, UCS says, include:

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