I think what's more at stake is the trajectory to get to 54.5 MPG by 2025. To be clear, last year, the EPA, NHTSA, and CARB came to the conclusion the auto industry wouldn't be able to hit that target despite making faster progress than expected. Yes, Trump is the face of it now since he said it and everyone pays attention to everything he says and all of the scrutiny that comes with it these days, but the government agencies came to this conclusion awhile ago before him.
That and OPEC went on a price war in order to maintain market share once North American shale became an actual player. Now that they care about prices again, they've agreed to production cuts in an attempt to raise prices, but they're finding that global production hasn't slowed, which is keeping prices down still.
Think about this. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, the estimated vehicle miles traveled was 256.7 billion and June 2016 it was 282.3 billion. Retail sales of gasoline were 50,420,000 and 26,711,000 gallons per day, respectively. So we're traveling 10% more miles on almost half the gasoline. Diesel sales have slowed, but nearly as dramatically, which have only declined by 500,000 gallons per day.
A lot of this is people finally getting rid of their pre-2004 (or whatever year) vehicles and buying new(er) ones over the last 5 years.
I don't think we'll see a decline in MPG from new cars and become guzzlers again. I think the psyche of the US auto market has changed pretty permanently in this regard as the manufacturers have figured out how to squeeze MPG without or very little performance loss (and in some cases performance gains). We're not longing for the performance of 5 years ago at the expense of MPG like other cycles have produced.
So what's in your stove now?
