Update: It appears that there's CAFE and then . . . there's NEW CAFE!! (This could be good news or bad news, depending on how politically astute Nissan is at the time and/or how much you really wanted fuel economy to improve.)
Under the NEW CAFE, trucks and cars will receive individual testing regimen (NOT standardized) which make allowances for the intended use of the vehicle. Trucks and luxury cars will be given certain "allowances." The testing regimen will be NEGOTIATED by the manufacturer and will be different than the window sticker MPG listings. And the NEW CAFE regimen will be run without air conditioning, without temperature variances, using extremely gradual acceleration. In short, it will have NOTHING to do with real-world MPG or even window-sticker MPG.
The word I heard from one of the administrators was, "It is entirely possible that today's 370Z could be rated at 35 mpg for NEW CAFE purposes. We fully expect that a large car or pickup rated at 26 real-world highway mpg will be negotiated into a 35 mpg NEW CAFE rating."
In other words, NEW CAFE isn't as much about engineering as it is about lobbying. If you really care about fuel economy, it's an illusion. Just a political game.
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