About Us

The U.S. DOT Volpe Center's Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Program Office assists NHTSA in its assessment of the costs and benefits of national fuel economy standards—part of NHTSA’s mandate from Congress since 1975. NHTSA's CAFE standards regulate how far vehicles must travel on a gallon of fuel. These standards consider future-year impacts, including vehicle demand, which have implications for highway infrastructure needs.

Our team serves as a primary technical resource for NHTSA’s CAFE program, partnering with the agency to assist with many aspects of NHTSA’s fuel economy program, centering around technical support at NHTSA's direction throughout the complex federal rulemaking process.

U.S. DOT Volpe Center experts in automotive engineering, environmental science, physics, economics, computer science, and operations research have played a role in CAFE program support for nearly four decades, conducting detailed analyses and modeling to help NHTSA determine the feasibility and economic practicality of these standards.

To support the CAFE program, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center's team collects and analyzes volumes of data in order for NHTSA to:

• Evaluate potential technologies to reduce fuel consumption
• Define a range of regulatory alternatives for consideration
• Estimate potential technology deployment rates
• Estimate how manufacturers could change the design of vehicle models in response to future CAFE standards
• Evaluate the costs, energy and environmental effects, and consumer and social benefits of each technology and regulatory alternative

The U.S. DOT Volpe Center team has developed a modeling system to assist NHTSA in the evaluation of potential new CAFE standards. Given externally developed inputs, the modeling system (the CAFE Model) estimates how manufacturers could apply additional fuel-saving technologies in response to new CAFE and/or CO₂ standards and how doing so would affect:

• Vehicle costs and fuel economy levels
• Vehicle sales volumes and fleet turnover
• National-scale automotive manufacturing employment, highway travel, fatalities, and fuel consumption

Based on these impacts, the system calculates costs and benefits from private and social perspectives.

To learn more about the CAFE Model, and to download the model software, visit NHTSA's CAFE Compliance and Effects Modeling System.

Our Capabilities

Economic and Policy Analysis

• Conduct engineering, economic, energy, and industry analyses
• Collect, analyze, model, measure, simulate, synthesize, and communicate data
• Leverage longstanding institutional expertise and understanding of current economic conditions to conduct benefit-cost analyses

Applied Data Science

• Collect data to estimate technology deployment rates
• Analyze data to inform NHTSA's recommendations for future vehicle model redesign
• Evaluate impacts of new technologies

Environmental Analysis, Science, and Engineering

• Conduct estimations of fuel consumption reduction for new technologies
• Support NHTSA's rulemaking and program analysis of alternatives to drive reductions in transportation sector energy consumption