Hybrid Pickup Truck

Like a Rock

In the early 1970s, when Congress was pushing for fuel-efficiency standards as a response to the oil crisis, scaremongering on this issue fell to auto executives. A Chrysler vice president told Congress in 1974 that, trucks aside, fuel economy could outlaw full-sized sedans and station wagons and that within five years, Detroit would exclusively produce subcompact cars. Pick-up trucks would be no more .

For as long as legislators have tried to raise fuel-economy standards, conservatives and car companies have fought against them. But since 2007, when President George W. Bush signed an energy bill that called for an increase in the standards, saving money at the gas pump has been more popular than preserving gas guzzlers. President Barack Obama already has raised fuel-economy standards twice, in 2009, for model years 2011 to 2016, and now for vehicles made the decade after that. Automakers have fallen in with the Obama administration, and the White House deserves credit for corralling them into a deal. Not only did car companies agree to put average fleet-wide fuel economy -- called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard -- at 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from 39 miles per gallon for cars and 30 miles per gallon for trucks in 2016, but Ford and Toyota joined hands and announced this week that the two companies would work together to build, of all things, hybrid trucks.

With car companies in sync with the administration, the duty of defending the American pickup has fallen instead to a handful of congressional Republicans. Although they've been quiet about it since the administration announced the fuel-efficiency deal in August, Republicans have included a provision, sponsored by Representative Steve Austria of Ohio, in the interior and environment appropriations bill that could undermine the agreement. It would defund the fuel-economy regulation process and is just one of dozens of anti-environmental riders attached to funding bills this summer.

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The Pickup

The pickup