Note: Fuel Economy Increase Will Not Result in more Mini Cars

Sometimes, people just know things, even if the evidence shows they're wrong. One example of this is that American conservatives know that increasing fuel economy standards will necessarily cause car companies to stop making big cars in favor of little econoboxes that will kill people. Eric Peters over at the American Prospect, in a post "CAFE Spells RIP for Trucks" says:

The government's pending (2016) 35.5 MPG CAFE fuel economy requirements -- which for the first time apply to trucks as well as passenger cars -- are going to make it very difficult for any automaker to sell trucks in volume in this country.

The problem is that's not true.

Unfortunately, there isn't a bias for more Fiat 500s

On the contrary, in 2006, when Congress was working on the new fuel economy standards [disclosure: I was staff at this time of a Senator helping to write this legislation], they wrote the law to take this concern into account. CAFE miles-per-gallon (MPG) requirements are not based on a strict one-size-fits-all manner that Peters assumes they are. Instead, automakers are assigned a fuel economy standard based on the 'footprint' of their cars. Literally: its measured by the length times the width of the car.

This footprint-based approach actually means that there is a bias in the new standards in favor of larger cars over smaller ones. A study  from the University of Michigan says "that there may be a substantial financial incentive to produce larger vehicles".

So, although Peters' concern may have been true for previous efforts to increase fuel economy standards, it isn't now.