Nissan To Get 2 Years More Mileage Exemption

Anthony Fontanelle
December 7, 2007

Nissan Motor Co. is likely to get an additional two-year exemption to help it increase fuel efficiency standards. The extension to the Nissan exemption grant is included in the energy bill backed by the Japanese automaker. The said bill is now being considered by Congress.

Within this week, the House is expected to consider the measure that would lead to a fleetwide average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, a 40 percent raise over current levels.

Nissan Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance Dominique Thormann, said last Wednesday that the company supports the legislation because it would give the industry flexibility to meet the standards, raise fuel efficiency for many vehicles and not mandate one specific type of technology. "What's on the table today is a good deal," Thormann said at a luncheon with reporters.

Extending the exemption “will help us bridge from the current standards to the new ones,' Nissan spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan said in an e-mail.

In 2005, Nissan received an exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from the "two-fleet rule," which requires automakers to calculate the average fuel economy of their domestic- and foreign-made passenger cars. Each fleet must meet the standard of 27.5 mpg, reported Associated Press.

Under the exemption, NHTSA allowed the maker of genuine Nissan parts to combine its domestic and foreign vehicles and then calculate the fuel economy. The exemption applied to vehicles from 2006 to 2010 model years.

The Nissan Sentra, built in the U.S. and Mexico, would have been moved into the automaker's domestic fleet and made it difficult for the rest of its import fleet to meet the standards, according to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG and its allies in Congress are against the waiver. The automakers argue that the bill would give Nissan a competitive advantage.

"There is no reason Nissan should be given an exemption just because they cannot meet the same requirements as other auto manufacturers," wrote Reps. Dale Kildee, D-Flint, and Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, in a May 2004 letter to NHTSA.

In the energy bill before Congress, the exemption would be phased out for all automakers in the 2013 model year, after which all companies would be treated equally. Thormann said "it was a bridge to transition from the current system into the new system." Japan’s third largest automaker has three plants in Tennessee and Mississippi, employing approximately 15,000 people in the United States. NHTSA had said in 2004 that granting the petition would allow Nissan to continue to purchase parts from North American suppliers and retain jobs.

"What we wanted to do was preserve employment and our asset base in the United States. We didn't want to be faced with a situation where we would have to move production out of the United States," Thormann concluded.

Source:  Amazines.com