About Us

The U.S. DOT Volpe Center's Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Program Office develops and executes analyses to assess 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 manage and implement all aspects of NHTSA’s fuel economy program. We also provide key technical support to NHTSA 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 significant role in the CAFE program for nearly four decades, conducting detailed analyses and modeling to help determine the feasibility of these standards. 

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

• Evaluate potential technologies to reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions
• 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, fuel consumption, as well as CO₂ and other emissions 

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 webpage. 

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 cost-benefit analyses

Environmental Analysis, Science, and Engineering

• Conduct emissions estimations and fuel consumption reduction for new technologies
• Support rulemaking and program analysis and alternatives to drive reductions in transportation energy emissions 
• Manage fuel economy program

Applied Data Science

• Collect data to estimate deployment rates
• Analyze data to provide recommendations for future vehicle model redesign 
• Evaluate impacts of new technologies and alternative rulemakings 

Meet Our Team

David Pace

Acting Chief

David Pace is the Acting Chief of the CAFE Program Office. He also serves as a senior economist in the Economic Analysis Division, where he has led numerous modeling efforts and the development of the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s economic forecasting practice. Recent projects have focused on developing and managing a global aviation fleet forecasting model for FAA that is being used for emissions analysis. As part of this project, Pace played a lead role in the technical working groups supporting commercial aviation analysis for the International Civil Aviation Organization. He also organized and led an FAA conference on building a U.S. aviation forecasting model, which included forecasting airport choice, aircraft choice, and network evolution. Pace has led multiple studies for USTRANSCOM, including examining the financial risk of oil and currency fluctuation associated with transporting U.S. military goods overseas via commercial vessels, and providing guidance of the reauthorization of the Maritime Security Program. In addition, he led U.S. DOT Volpe Center teams developing econometric models to forecast motor vehicle travel demand and GIS-based models to calculate vehicle hours-of-travel by cars and trucks.

Prior to joining the U.S. DOT Volpe Center, Pace was an economist at Global Insight, where he researched, forecasted, and analyzed the short- and long-term prospects for the state and local economies of the New England region. He wrote a quarterly analysis on the region’s economies and presented Global Insight’s opinion of New England economies to regional media, governments, and business groups. Pace has worked extensively with Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics data and with statistical software such as EViews and SQL. He has a MS in international economics from Suffolk University (Boston, MA).