Image by Julien Tromeur from Pixabay
Journal of Science Policy & Governance | Volume 18, Issue 01 | March 24, 2021

Policy Memo: Smart Policy for Smart Vehicles: Regulatory Revisions to Incentivize Efficient Autonomous Automobiles​

Martin J. Wolf

Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, Yale Law School, and Yale School of the Environment, New Haven, CT

Corresponding author: [email protected]
Download PDF
https://doi.org/10.38126/JSPG180116
Keywords: autonomous vehicles; transportation policy; fuel efficiency; greenhouse gas emissions
Executive Summary: Transportation accounts for nearly 30% of the United States’ annual greenhouse gas emissions and is currently the fastest growing source of emissions by economic sector. National policies are therefore needed to mitigate the climatic impact of vehicular travel. Autonomous vehicle technologies, such as adaptive cruise control and real-time route optimization, can potentially improve fuel efficiency. However, many emerging technologies remain too inefficient to meet federal fuel economy standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The current regulatory framework therefore hinders vehicle manufacturers from researching and developing greener autonomous technologies. In this analysis, we argue that these federal agencies should adopt policies like technology waivers, regulatory credits, environmentally preferable purchasing, and educational programs to stimulate the development of more efficient autonomous vehicle technologies. These policies would incentivize manufacturers to widely develop and deploy fuel-saving technologies that could potentially realize substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

-Read the full article through download.-
Download PDF

References

  1. 58 Federal Register 203. 1993. Executive Order 12873, Federal Acquisition, Recycling, and Waste Prevention.
  2. 75 Federal Register 25324. 2010. Light-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards and Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 40 CFR Parts 85, 86, and 600; 49 CFR Parts 531, 533, 536, et al.
  3. Alarfaj, Abdullah F, Michael Griffin, and Constantine Samaras. 2020. “Decarbonizing US Passenger Vehicle Transport under Electrification and Automation Uncertainty Has a Travel Budget.” Environ. Res. Lett 15: 940–42. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7c89.
  4. Baxter, Jared A., Daniel A. Merced, Daniel J. Costinett, Leon M. Tolbert, and Burak Ozpineci. 2018. “Review of Electrical Architectures and Power Requirements for Automated Vehicles.” In 2018 IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference and Expo (ITEC), 944–49. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ITEC.2018.8449961.
  5. Beresford, C. 2020. “Other Automakers Paid Tesla a Record $428 Million Last Quarter.” Car and Driver, July 22, 2020.
  6. Brown, Austin, Jeffrey Gonder, and Brittany Repac. 2014. “An Analysis of Possible Energy Impacts of Automated Vehicles.” Road vehicle automation, 137–53. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05990-7_13.
  7. Caldart, Charles C., and Nicholas A. Ashford. 1999. “Negotiation as a Means of Developing and Implementing Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety Policy.” Harvard Environmental Law Review 23 (1): 141–202.
  8. Chan, Gabriel, Robert Stavins, Robert Stowe, and Richard Sweeney. 2012. “The SO2 Allowance Trading System and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990: Reflections on Twenty Years of Policy Innovation.” Cambridge, MA. https://doi.org/10.3386/w17845.
  9. Chen, Yuche, Jeffrey Gonder, Stanley Young, and Eric Wood. 2019. “Quantifying Autonomous Vehicles National Fuel Consumption Impacts: A Data-Rich Approach.” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 122 (April): 134–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2017.10.012.
  10. Clean Air Act Advisory Committee. 2010. “Permits, New Source Review and Toxics Subcommittee, Climate Change Work Group, Phase II Report.”
  11. Congressional Research Service. 2010. “EPA’s BACT Guidance for Greenhouse Gases from Stationary Sources.” www.crs.gov.
  12. EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency). 2020. “Green Vehicle Guide.” www.epa.gov/greenvehicles
  13. Executive Office of the President. 2010. “National Security Strategy of the United States.” Washington, DC.
  14. Foster, Jody, and Rob Brenner. 2013. “Clean Air and Technology Innovation: Working Concepts for Promoting Clean Technology Innovation Under the Clean Air Act NI R 13-05.” Durham, NC.
  15. Gawron, James H., Gregory A. Keoleian, Robert D. De Kleine, Timothy J. Wallington, and Hyung Chul Kim. 2018. “Life Cycle Assessment of Connected and Automated Vehicles: Sensing and Computing Subsystem and Vehicle Level Effects.” Environmental Science & Technology 52 (5): 3249–56. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b04576.
  16. Gilman, Ekaterina, Satu Tamminen, Anja Keskinarkaus, Theodoros Anagnostopoulos, Xiang Su, Susanna Pirttikangas, and Jukka Riekki. 2020. “Fuel Consumption Analysis of Driven Trips with Respect to Route Choice.” In 2020 IEEE 36th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (ICDEW), 40–47. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDEW49219.2020.000-9.
  17. Greenblatt, Jeffery B., and Samveg Saxena. 2015. “Autonomous Taxis Could Greatly Reduce Greenhouse-Gas Emissions of US Light-Duty Vehicles.” Nature Climate Change 5 (9): 860–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2685.
  18. Heimrich, Martin J. 1997. “Demonstration of Lean NOx Catalytic Converter Technology on a Heavy-Duty Diesel Engine.” SAE transactions Jan.: 282–292. https://doi.org/10.4271/970755.
  19. Kerry, Cameron F., and Jack Karsten. 2017. “Gauging Investment in Self-Driving Cars.” https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-self-driving-cars/.
  20. Lang, Dominik, Roman Schmied, and Luigi Del Re. 2014. “Prediction of Preceding Driver Behavior for Fuel Efficient Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control.” SAE International Journal of Engines 7 (1): 2014-01–0298. https://doi.org/10.4271/2014-01-0298.
  21. Leard, Benjamin, and Virginia McConnell. 2017. “New Markets for Credit Trading under US Automobile Greenhouse Gas and Fuel Economy Standards.”
  22. Leard, Benjamin, and Virginia McConnell. 2020. “Interpreting Tradable Credit Prices in Overlapping Vehicle Regulations.”
  23. Libby, Tom. 2020. “New Vehicle Registrations Show Record Share Levels for SUVs | IHS Markit.” IHS Markit, October 6, 2020. https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/new-vehicle-registrations-show-record-share-levels-for-suvs.html.
  24. McAllister, Lesley K. 2009. “The Overallocation Problem In Cap-And-Trade: Moving Toward Stringency.” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 34 (2): 395–445. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1276405.
  25. McFarland, B.J. 2010. “Carbon Reduction Projects and the Concept of Additionality.” Sustainable Development Law & Policy 11: 15 – 18.
  26. Mersky, Avi Chaim, and Constantine Samaras. 2016. “Fuel Economy Testing of Autonomous Vehicles.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 65 (April): 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2016.01.001.
  27. Mohan, Aniruddh, Shashank Sripad, Parth Vaishnav, and Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan. 2020. “Trade-Offs between Automation and Light Vehicle Electrification.” Nature Energy 5 (7): 543–49. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0644-3.
  28. Nasri, Moncef Ilies, Tolga Bektaş, and Gilbert Laporte. 2018. “Route and Speed Optimization for Autonomous Trucks.” Computers & Operations Research 100 (December): 89–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2018.07.015.
  29. National Research Council. 2015. Cost, Effectiveness, and Deployment of Fuel Economy Technologies for Light-Duty Vehicles. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/21744.
  30. Nunes, Ashley, and Kristen Hernandez. 2019. “The Cost of Self-Driving Cars Will Be the Biggest Barrier to Their Adoption.” Harvard Business Review, January 31, 2019. https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-cost-of-self-driving-cars-will-be-the-biggest-barrier-to-their-adoption.
  31. Pavlov, Alexander A, James F Kasting, Lisa L Brown, Kathy A Rages, and Richard Freedman. 2000. “Greenhouse Warming by CH 4 in the Atmosphere of Early Earth.” Journal of Geophysical Research 105 (11): 911–81. https://doi.org/10.1029/1999JE001134
  32. Randle, R.V. 1979. “Forcing Technology: The Clean Air Act Experience.” The Yale Law Journal 88: 1713–34.
  33. Rubin, Jonathan, Paul N. Leiby, and David L. Greene. 2009. “Tradable Fuel Economy Credits: Competition and Oligopoly.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 58 (3): 315–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2009.05.002.
  34. Russel, Trevor. 2017. Greener Purchasing: Opportunities and Innovations. New York: Routledge. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YGRQDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Russel,+T.,+ed.+Greener+purchasing:+Opportunities+and+innovations&ots=br_f9EAAOH&sig=4rZ8CrvLmb24JUIwSa4Fk3fuO5U#v=onepage&q=Russel%2C T.%2C ed. Greener purchasing%3A Opportunities .
  35. Seidel, Stephen, and Jason Ye. 2012. “Leading by Example: Using Information and Communication Technologies to Achieve Federal Sustainability Goals.”
  36. Stephens, T. S., Jeff Gonder, Yuche Chen, Z. Lin, C. Liu, and D. Gohlke. 2016. “Estimated Bounds and Important Factors for Fuel Use and Consumer Costs of Connected and Automated Vehicles.” Golden, CO (United States). https://doi.org/10.2172/1334242.
  37. Taiebat, Morteza, Austin L. Brown, Hannah R. Safford, Shen Qu, and Ming Xu. 2018. “A Review on Energy, Environmental, and Sustainability Implications of Connected and Automated Vehicles.” Environmental Science & Technology, September, acs.est.8b00127. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.8b00127.
  38. Tesla Inc. 2020a. “Q1 2020 Update.”
  39. Tesla Inc. 2020b. “Q2 2020 Update.”
  40. Tesla Inc. 2021. “Q4 2020 Update.”
  41. Thew, R. 2007. “United Evidence and Research Strategy: Driving Standards Agency.”
  42. U.S. Energy Information Administration. 2017. “Study of the Potential Energy Consumption Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles.” Washington, DC. www.eia.gov.
  43. U.S. Energy Information Administration. 2020. “Annual Energy Outlook 2020 with Projections to 2050.” Washington, DC. www.eia.gov/aeo.
  44. Wadud, Zia, Don MacKenzie, and Paul Leiby. 2016. “Help or Hindrance? The Travel, Energy and Carbon Impacts of Highly Automated Vehicles.” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 86 (April): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2015.12.001.
  45. White, William J. 2004. “Measuring Benefits from the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act, RTI Project Number 08628 .” Research Triangle Park, NC.
  46. Winston, Clifford, and Jia Yan. 2020. “Vehicle Size Choice and Automobile Externalities: A Dynamic Analysis.” Journal of Econometrics, August. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2020.07.032.
  47. Yilin Zhao. 2002. “Telematics: Safe and Fun Driving.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 17 (1): 10–14. https://doi.org/10.1109/5254.988442.
  48. Zhu, Lei, Jeffrey Gonder, Eric Bjarkvik, Mitra Pourabdollah, and Bjorn Lindenberg. 2019. “An Automated Vehicle Fuel Economy Benefits Evaluation Framework Using Real-World Travel and Traffic Data.” IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine 11 (3): 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1109/MITS.2019.2919537.
Martin Wolf is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Principal Investigator of the 2022 Environmental Performance Index. He received a Ph.D. in Climate Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020. His research focused on the climatic impacts of industrial pollutant emissions. Prior to joining Yale, he was a Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Environmental Change and Society in Washington, DC.
 
Acknowledgements
This work is based on research performed in Jody Freeman’s Climate Change Law and Policy seminar at Harvard Law School. The author would like to thank Professor Freeman for accepting him into the seminar and for providing background materials on transportation policy.
 
Disclaimer
The views expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent endorsement by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy or Yale University. 
DISCLAIMER: The findings and conclusions published herein are solely attributed to the author and not necessarily endorsed or adopted by the Journal of Science Policy and Governance. Articles are distributed in compliance with copyright and trademark agreements.

ISSN 2372-2193
© 2022 Journal of Science Policy & Governance, Inc. All rights reserved. The opinions, findings and conclusions from JSPG publications, additional article commentaries and related events do not necessarily reflect the views of the journal.