Trump's Gas Mileage Rollback Is a Hidden Tax on Every L.A. Driver

The final rule sets automakers' fleetwide target at 34.9 mpg, below Trump's own first-term standard and far from Obama's 54 mpg goal.

Trump rolled federal gas mileage rules back to 2014 levels on Monday, and every driver in Los Angeles is going to pay for it at the pump.

The Department of Transportation's final rule sets the Corporate Average Fuel Economy target, the fleetwide average automakers have to hit, at 34.9 miles per gallon by model year 2031, Ars Technica reported. That's lower than the 40.4 mpg Trump's first administration settled on in 2020. It's nowhere near the 54 mpg the Obama administration put the country on track for back in 2012.

I'd call it a gas tax, because that's how it works.

Nobody in Washington will mail you a bill. You'll pay a few gallons at a time, every time you fill a car that was allowed to burn more than it had to, for as long as that car stays on the road.

Run the numbers on the government's own yardstick. On paper, a fleet averaging 34.9 mpg burns about 16 percent more fuel per mile than one averaging 40.4, and that comparison is against Trump's 2020 rules, not the Biden-era standards Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declared dead when he took over in January 2025.

The heaviest share of that bill goes to whoever drives the most miles and has no way out of the car. That's the commuter coming in from the Inland Empire, and the Valley family whose days don't line up with a Metro stop. They can't take the train to shrink their fuel bill. Their only escape is a more efficient car, and this rule makes it easier for automakers to sell fewer of them.

Starting with model year 2028, emissions credits go away. Electric cars and plug-in hybrids stop counting toward an automaker's fleet average at all, after years in which a single EV could carry a rating of hundreds of mpg. Ars Technica's Jonathan M. Gitlin raised the possibility that some automakers drop their EVs and plug-ins entirely.

The best case for the rule is the one the administration makes: looser standards mean cheaper cars on the lot and more models to pick from. For a family stretching to afford any new car at all, a lower sticker price is real money, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But a sticker is paid once. Gas is paid every week the car runs, by the first owner and by whoever buys it used after that. And "more choice" is a strange label for a rule that could push the most efficient cars off some showroom floors.

There's one piece of this rule I'd keep. Crossovers have been getting classified as light trucks, which face weaker standards, and that's part of why the roads are full of bigger, thirstier SUVs. The department says it will rewrite the classifications to flip today's mix of roughly 70 percent light trucks and 30 percent passenger cars to the reverse.

That fix doesn't arrive until model year 2030, two years after the credits disappear. The good part comes last. The bad parts come first.

And the department hasn't been eager to enforce even the old rules. In July 2025 it told automakers it wouldn't fine any of them for blowing past the limits, going back to 2022. All this lands, as Gitlin wrote, while fuel prices climb higher than Americans have seen before.

Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, put the family math plainly in remarks quoted by Ars Technica: "Lowering these standards now, when so many families are already struggling with rising transportation costs, will only make things harder for them."

The rule's own regulatory impact analysis carries the government's projection of added fuel use and what drivers will spend on it. Every member of the L.A. congressional delegation should be reading that number out loud.

Source: arstechnica.com, retrieved September 29, 2026.