Zowie: 35mpg by 2020. Pitiful to say the least. And yet , the auto lobbyists were apparently caught by surprise when the Senate passed the Energy bill by a large enough margin to defeat a veto. Of course the bill was gutted of practically everything that would make any difference in order to get those votes.
This is another example of the American car companies being so far out of touch that even this wishy=washy bill scares them. By 2020, 100mpg cars will be normal because the market will demand them. The technology is already available.
What’s going on is that Detroit has been making the same inefficient engines for so long that they are now really cheap to build- they amortized the costs of the design and plants years ago and now they cost little more than the materials. To develop new designs and build plants to manufacture them would raise the price and lower the profitability far beyond what they can handle in their present precarious financial state. Meanwhile the Japanese, Koreans and Europeans moved to constant innovation years ago and no longer depend on economies of scale that take years to pay off. Detroit is dead, killed by lack of strategic vision, unions who would cut off their own noses to spite their faces and terrible design.