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I haven't found many articles written about it yet, but it seems like the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations, which have been around for fifty years, have probably come to an end. Although CAFE hasn't yet been officially repealed, the fines that are supposed to get compliance have been reduced to zero by recent legislation.

When I was a kid reading Motor Trend in the mid to late 1970s I remember reading articles about how car companies were redesigning cars to meet CAFE. CAFE regulations helped bring us downsized front-wheel drive cars with lower weight and more space efficient designs. Of course many of those cars, engineered in a rush, also had quality problems for their first few years.

In the last 15 years or so iirc, the regulations were modified in a way that reduced the number of smaller cars on the market. It's complicated, but rather than having a small car offset the bad mpg of a big vehicle, CAFE was instead made so that each class of vehicle had its own standards.

But anyway, those CAFE standards were supposed to go up quickly in the next five years, and now they've been zeroed out.

I feel mixed about the apparent end of CAFE. The regulations were kind of a mess, and brought unintended consequences.

For instance, our former 2018 CR-V with the 1.5 turbo, which we've passed on to our daughter, has oil dilution issues and is rather noisy. Plus I really doubt that the turbo will last as long as the Honda engine it replaced, which was their famously overbuilt 2.4 liter naturally-aspirated engine. The 1.5 turbo in the real world I think only gets maybe 1 mpg more than the 2.4 it replaced, and yet the 1.5 is noisier, more complex, more expensive to repair, and almost certainly won't last nearly as long. So it seems like we lost a legendary engine to get a rather flawed one because of CAFE regulations.

The bottom line now is that however you feel about CAFE it seems to have been nullified.

As we know, it takes 3-5 years for what's decided at car companies now to reach the streets in terms of new vehicles. Now that CAFE is not something that needs to be worried about nearly as much, I wonder what we'll see in the new car market in a few years as a result.

For instance, our former 2018 CR-V with the 1.5 turbo, which we've passed on to our daughter, has oil dilution issues and is rather noisy. Plus I really doubt that the turbo will last as long as the Honda engine it replaced, which was their famously overbuilt 2.4 liter naturally-aspirated engine. The 1.5 turbo in the real world I think only gets maybe 1 mpg more than the 2.4 it replaced, and yet the 1.5 is noisier, more complex, more expensive to repair, and almost certainly won't last nearly as long. So it seems like we lost a legendary engine to get a rather flawed one because of CAFE regulations.

I think the 1.5L Turbo "L15" engine also suffers from head gasket issues if not properly maintained. Engines cannot remain in production forever. They all get replaced or redesigned eventually. When the K series engines came out (like in your TLX), there was backlash too. "There's nothing wrong with the H-series..."