Being Hard-Nosed Can Pay Off : In the face of California’s unyielding clean-air rules, an ‘impossible’ auto comes to be

Detroit has warned Americans time and again since 1970 that it takes an engineer, not some environment-oriented policy-maker, to say how clean a car engine can run. Fortunately Californians, at least, never got the message, and the result may well say something positive about both clean air and better mileage.

Last week Ford Motor Co. displayed, with justifiable pride, a Ford Escort that meets nearly all emission standards that the California Air Resources Board will be imposing on cars over the next four years.

It took no sweeping breakthroughs. Building the cleaner engine was basically a matter of tinkering and improving existing hardware.

Achieving similar results with larger cars than the Escort will be difficult, but Ford does not say it cannot be done.

As for the old warnings that nobody but engineers can dictate cleaner air, a Ford executive explained how the new Escort came to exist: When the air board adopted stricter standards, “we concluded they were serious. So we went back home and did the best we could. . . . “

Getting more miles to a gallon of gasoline is a different challenge, but the principle is the same.

Manufacturers have managed to beat back a plan in Washington to require car makers to raise from 27.4 to 40 the average number of miles their cars will run on a gallon of gasoline in 10 years. Such improvements, they say, will require massive breakthroughs and mean smaller and more dangerous autos.

But a recent National Research Council study says existing technology could raise fuel efficiency to 37 miles per gallon in 10 years and that there is no need to sacrifice safety for higher mileage.

The better-mileage campaign has faltered because Congress’ backbone is made of weaker stuff than the California Air Resources Board.

The proposal in Congress would prod auto makers to meet stricter mileage standards or face big fines. A better approach, the council says, might be to dry up the market for gasoline guzzlers. That could be done with higher gasoline taxes or a formula that would penalize buyers of fuel-hungry autos. Such market incentives could strengthen mileage standards or replace them altogether.

By doing one or the other, Congress could cut oil consumption by the end of the century by 2 million barrels a day. But Congress instead has enacted a law that makes it difficult and perhaps impossible for states to make such changes in mileage themselves. All of which seems to us at least as good an explanation for public outrage over American politics as the check-kiting mess on Capitol Hill.