Debbie Dingell: “this wonderful amendment, it just does not work. Although I love my good friends, the authors of it, they are dead…”

“this wonderful amendment, it just does not work. Although I love my good friends, the authors of it, they are dead wrong. It is going to cost jobs. The UAW says so. It is going to hurt the auto industry. The auto industry says so. It is going to force every American to ride around in a mini-car. It is going to fix it so that SUVs and decent-sized pickup trucks are not going to be available to people. It is going to mean that the auto industry is going to have to produce larger vehicles, such as larger than light-duty trucks, for purposes that ranchers and farmers and businessmen will have need of. And it is going to require unsafe vehicles, or at least less safe vehicles to be available to the American motoring public. The simple answer is, it is going to require almost exclusively the production of mini-cars. The result is going to be a significant loss of safety. The thing that we must understand about this is that the law on CAFE is now working. Automobiles and light pickup trucks and so forth are about twice as efficient as they were before we passed it. That has been an enormous advance of great benefit to the American people, and it has been something which has been of great help and done at great cost to the auto industry. Something else that needs to be known: These cars are not manufactured on the basis of arithmetic averages.”