Apologies for the severe lack of posting lately, but here’s something that’s awesome: CAFE averages! Woooo!

In short, they’re going up. Trucks, in particular, will have to reach an average of 30mpg by 2016. There are all sorts of asterisks involved (one major one is that CAFE is, by definition, an average of each class’s fuel economy), but it’s a good start. Further out, it could push more ultra-sized or long-haul vehicles, which are generally ill-suited for electric powertrains, toward diesel or hybrids (or, dare to dream, a diesel-electric hybrid, which apparently made that guy really happy). Combined with Daimler’s new stake in Tesla, it looks like I’ll have some interesting options by the time I’m ready to actually buy a car.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Crash test dummies.
2. “Hybrid vigour.”
3. Let’s go, Toyota.