Andy PottsCar and Driver
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created by President Richard Nixon in 1970 to curb confusing and often ineffective local and state environmental laws. The EPA stopped the use of harmful leaded gasoline, and worked with automakers to put a catalytic converter under every new car for the 1975 model year—an action that resulted in fewer tailpipe emissions, cleaner air, and more fuel-efficient vehicles today. Although leaded gas stuck around until the late 1990s, according to this year’s EPA automotive trend report, “All vehicle types are at record high fuel economy and record low CO2 emissions in model year 2020,” and that’s true, despite a resounding shift away from the more fuel-efficient sedan and wagon segments and toward large trucks and SUVs with lower fuel economy and higher CO2 emissions.
The EPA has tested 4230 different 2021 model-year vehicles, including fully electric vehicles. Something to know: The big EPA fuel-economy numbers on the window stickers are estimates, driven by test data that simulates real-world driving. In fact, these ratings are mostly self-reported by automakers. Whoever performs the testing, be it the automakers or the EPA, that testing eliminates variables like temperature and traffic. Although these scientific methods are perfect for direct comparisons, the open road isn’t as cut and dried as a sterile testing facility. We pit those simulations against real-world driving, using our own 200-mile highway loop on a stretch of Michigan’s I-94. Our test cars maintain a GPS-verified 75 mph, utilizing cruise control as much as possible, with climate controls set to 72 degrees with the air conditioning on. In the past two years, more than 130 cars have surpassed their highway EPA estimates, with BMW (23), Mercedes-Benz and Mercedes-AMG (15), and Porsche (12) overachieving the most often. Here are the ones that beat the EPA by the most.
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