Poll: GM’s Support Of Trump’s MPG Rollback Comes With Risks

There’s a potential risk for automakers that have aligned themselves with President Trump’s attempts to roll back current fuel economy standards that were established under President Obama. A new poll of owners of General Motors vehicles found that when people learned that GM sided with Trump (i.e., signed on to a lawsuit against California’s ability to set its own fuel economy standards), they turned against the company and the company suffered “serious reputational damage.”

While this study focused on GM, other automakers that sided with the Trump administration in the lawsuit include Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Isuzu, Maserati, McLaren, Aston-Martin and Ferrari in what was called the “Coalition for Sustainable Automotive Regulation.” Ford, Volkswagen, Honda and BMW made their own voluntary agreement with California last year to keep increasing the average fuel economy of their vehicles to an average of almost 50 mpg by 2026.

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) poll has released a number of highlights from the GM owners it spoke to, but here are some of the takeaway numbers:

• GM’s favorably fell from 93 to 44 percent when the GM owners learned the company was fighting against California’s fuel-economy-setting authority. 
• When the GM owners in the poll were reminded of some of GM’s actions, their support of the company’s actions dropped. When told GM had scrapped the Cruze (one of its most fuel-efficient models) and laid off 15,000 people while making a $2.8-billion profit in the same quarter, support dropped by 63 percent. When reminded that GM made a commitment to produce more fuel-efficient, lower-cost vehicles when it accepted a federal government bailout in 2008, their support dropped 65 percent.
• Perhaps most worrying for GM, over half of GM owners (51 percent) said they would consider another brand once they were reminded of the company’s actions listed above.

The UCS plans to make sure this information is widely available and there is likely to be a large scale public awareness campaign or an education of policy makers to keep the discussion alive. Exactly what this campaign will look like – perhaps as a series of ads, perhaps as a more straightforward education effort to show how allowing dirtier cars on the road will harm public health – is something we will have to keep an eye out for in the future.

The poll was conducted by Matt George Associates between March 27 and April 3 of this year and asked 1,000 GM vehicle owners whose vehicles mirrored the GM’s overall sales in 2019 (as reported by GM), UCS said. Finding GM owners wasn’t the only way this poll did not target a completely random sample, as it also attempted to “mirror nationwide ideology and 2016 vote tallies,” as well as making sure that there was a variety of age, income, geography, and education demographics included.

The UCS did a similar study of Toyota owners earlier this year.