Tuesday, March 18, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
SIX YEARS AGO, Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., was the target of the car and truck builders of Detroit. They did everything possible to destroy his credibility and hinder his fight to increase the miles per gallon their vehicles would have to meet as a federal requirement. Now, even the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that Bryan fought to increase six years ago are slowly slipping away. "Our problem today," according to Bryan, "is to keep the CAFE standards from being further decreased."
In 1991, the auto industry attacked Bryan and his bill to put a clamp on gas-guzzling vehicles. Detroit's sweetheart, Congressman John Dingell, D-Mich., went after the Nevadan and joined in the effort to dump nuke waste on the Silver State.
In 1995, Business Week writer Paula Dwyer wrote: "Dingell has a staff of respected investigators. But his crack gumshoes have never examined a U.S. auto company other than a Chrysler Corp. subsidiary currently being probed for defense-contract irregularities. They haven't been ordered to stay away from Detroit, but 'they know better than to do something so foolish,' says a former Dingell aide."
Dwyer continued on to write, "Legislators who challenge Dingell on his home ground often come away licking their wounds. Freshman Sen. Richard H. Bryan is sponsoring legislation that would force car makers to increase average fuel economy 40 percent by 2001. Sources say Dingell has been pushing hard to locate a nuclear waste dump in Nevada, hoping to distract Bryan. Dingell counters that Congress first targeted Nevada as a possible nuclear waste site in 1987, before Bryan took office, but adds; 'His position on (fuel economy) might make me somewhat less sympathetic.'"
Bryan, upon introducing his Corporate Average Fuel Economy bill, was proposing another step forward to prevent our nation from continuing its reliance upon the oil of other nations. This upset the powerful automobile moguls because it demanded some badly needed changes on their part.
It was April 1991 that Jack A. Seamonds, business editor of the Detroit Free Press, tried to set Bryan up for a fall when writing: "Trying to disarm a predictably skeptical audience last Friday at the Detroit Press Club, Sen. Richard Bryan, the Nevada Democrat whose fuel economy bill is driving up Maalox sales in Detroit, told of his first car, a 1946 Dodge that his attorney father received from a client in lieu of a fee. After Bryan's speech, one Ford executive was heard to grumble: 'It kind of makes sense that the guy who is trying to do us in bought a Dodge for his first car.' But this gets ever cooler: GM observers wryly noted that Bryan arrived at the Press Club in a subdued red Infiniti Q45, a Japanese car that is, by definition, a 'gas guzzler' and therefore subject to the federal tax. Your spin control, senator, is slipping."
This article resulted in a letter from Paul Eisenstein of the Detroit Automotive Press Association to Bryan. Eisenstein wrote: "Several news outlets have reported that you were driven to the meeting in a 'gas-guzzling automobile.' More specifically, an Infiniti Q45 sedan. That is, in itself, quite accurate. The implications, however, were clearly misleading. I want to state for the record that you had nothing to do with the choice of vehicle sent to pick you up at the airport. The only thing you requested was some form of transportation. It was my choice to pick you up personally. And it was again my choice to do so in an Infiniti which, as an auto writer, I was personally test-driving on the day you came to town.
"I am perturbed by this matter and apologize for any embarrassment this might have caused you. We at the DAPA appreciate you taking your time from your busy schedule to come to Detroit and explain the reasons why automotive fuel economy should once again become part of the national agenda. Clearly, there are other interests who think otherwise."
Today's standards require new cars to average 27.5 miles per gallon and light trucks to average 20.7 mpg. Despite these CAFE standards, a Chevrolet Tahoe only gets about 15 mpg and a Ford F-150 pickup truck with a V-8 engine gets about 16 mpg. The auto industry is now fighting to lower the CAFE standards so more of its gas-guzzlers can be sold without penalties.
This time, the Detroit moguls are telling us that they are only building the kind of vehicles Americans want to buy. They also challenge the proven statistics that present CAFE standards save 3 million barrels of oil daily and improve the health of our planet.
It's going to be another nasty battle which will draw heavy fire from Detroit. Will they get their way despite the already high cost of gasoline at our local pumps? It's been higher and, at a moment's notice, can easily shoot upward even higher again.
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