WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government on Friday imposed the first increase in mileage standards for passenger cars and boosted the floor for sport utilities and pickups beginning with model year 2011 vehicles.
The regulation is an abbreviated version of the initiative launched by Congress and the Bush administration in 2007 to reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil and cut tailpipe emissions.
It also comes at a time of deep uncertainty about the future of domestic auto manufacturers General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler LLC.
The Detroit Three profited for years from larger and less efficient vehicles but now face the double wallop of a market downturn fueled by recession and a consumer shift away from their bread-and-butter products.
A copy of the standard obtained by Reuters would require compacts, sedans and other passenger cars to average 30.2 miles per gallon, up from the 27.5 mpg standard that was established in the late 1970s.
Light trucks, which include pickups and SUVs, would have to average 24.1 mpg.
The new standards would save nearly 900 million gallons of fuel and cost the industry $1.4 billion, according to the regulation.
Congress has required the U.S. fleet of cars and light trucks to average 35 mpg by 2020, a 40 percent increase over today's performance.
The Bush administration sought to establish annual goals between 2011-2015, but the Obama administration cut that back to one-year, 2011, while it assesses the future of GM, Ford and Chrysler and contemplates a new method for calculating mileage efficiency.
(Reporting by John Crawley. editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Steve Orlofsky)