Remember, the marked is 54.5 mpg by 2025. Today, the CAFE level is a little over 30. The way you get from this point to there exists something america Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is monitoring closely. Thus, the EPA just released an annual flash report about how the auto sector is progressing towards meeting the nation’s fuel economy goals.

Overall, the market is doing almost 10 grams per mile (equivalent) a lot better than the rules require.

The industry is a little ahead of schedule. That’s the good news. In the report (see page iii), the EPA breaks things down by automaker based only on MY12 numbers. Tesla is near the top of the list (which can be ranked by over-compliance with 2012MY CO2 standards), but also for our money, the real leader is Toyota. The Japanese automaker built the second-highest number of vehicles (2,020,248, after General Motors’ 2,364,374) but racked up the most net 2012 over-compliance credits (13,163,009 metric tons). That’s an average of over 6.5 metric tons per vehicle. The next closest is Honda, with just over five metric tons of credits per vehicle. Given the MPG fiasco with Hyundai and Kia, the EPA says, “”our company is excluding Hyundai and Kia data because of the ongoing investigation into their testing methods,”” but overall, the rest of the industry has credits worth 25,053,168 metric plenty of CO2, meaning it’s doing almost 10 grams per mile (equivalent) better than the principles require. Go team.

For the time being, the numbers in this report (and there are a variety more of them – obtain the 59-page PDF for yourself here), can’t really be used to understand everything from the first year in the new CAFE program. “”Because the program allows credits and deficits to be carried into future years, on the close of your 2012 model year no manufacturer is considered to be out of compliance with the program, the EPA writes. … Compliance with the 2012 model year standards can’t be fully assessed till the end of your 2015 model year.””

There is a more interesting tidbits from the report, for example the fact that Fisker produced 1,415 model year 2012 vehicles, Tesla made 2,952. Remember, too, that CAFE numbers don’t equal the fuel economy you can see in your daily drives. In real life, the 54.5 CAFE level will probably be about 40 mpg, as well as the average fuel economy today is around 25 mpg, so we have a approaches to go, no matter how you measure it.