If you watched the State Or The Union Address last night you might have had a problem with a claim or two. Most notably for the spies might be the claim that we doubled our MPG in 4 short years. Really? I guess I missed something there.
While it sounds good on paper and in a speech, the facts simply don't measure up. A simple glance at FactCheck.org will reveals the truth:
Car Mileage Double-talk
The president claimed that “we have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas” — which isn’t remotely close to being true right now.
In fact, according to the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute, the average EPA city/highway sticker mileage of light duty vehicles sold last month was 24.5 miles per gallon. That’s quite good — a record, in fact. And it’s 17 percent better than the 21.0 mpg for vehicles sold four years earlier, in the month Obama took office. That’s an impressive gain, but it’s a far cry from having “doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas.”
Obama was referring to his administration’s actions for raising future federal fuel efficiency standards, which call for cars and light trucks to achieve 54.5 mpg by the model year 2025. But it remains to be seen whether automakers can produce — and consumers will buy — vehicles that achieve such a doubling of average mileage a dozen years from now.
So was it political Double-Talk or just a slip of the tongue or maybe a complete disconnect with reality?
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