After Barack Obama was caught (see earlier post) for incorrectly stating that Japanese cars get an average of 45 miles per gallon, the left-wing blogosphere swung into action attempting to defend the Illinois senator. Far-left groups cited a report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change which took official numbers from Japanese auto manufacturers and "corrected" them to appear similar to U.S. fuel economy standards. Trouble is, that "correction" doesn't seem to be accurate as John Hinderaker points out:

What's going on here? Why is the Pew report being cited for a 46.3 mpg average? The answer is that Pew rejiggered the numbers. Pew noted that different countries use different test procedures to measure fuel economy, and it devised a system to normalize those different procedures. The Pew formula says that Japanese mpg numbers are to be multiplied by 1.3. It is this multiplication that generates the 46 mpg figure that apparently has been relied on by Obama and others.

I haven't had time to research the logic underlying Pew's conversion, nor do I intend to. The claim that the Japanese automobile fleet had an average fuel efficiency of over 46 mpg as of 2004, or now, is ridiculous. You can see the top ten fuel efficient cars here. The site lists their EPA city and highway fuel efficiency ratings. There are only two vehicles that allegedly get more than 45 mpg, both hybrids (although in fact, the hybrids have been found to do much worse in actual driving conditions than in EPA tests). After those first two hybrids, there is not a single vehicle on the list that gets 45 miles to the gallon. The Honda Civic, a good example of a Japanese economy car, gets 30 mpg in the city and 40 on the highway. The Ford Focus gets 27/34; the tiny MiniCooper gets 32/40. You can see all of the EPA's 2007 fuel efficiency ratings here; I can find exactly two cars on the list, both hybrids, that purportedly get 45 mpg.

This is why I said that Obama's comment shows that he lacks common sense. Anyone who pays attention--certainly anyone who contemplates delivering a speech attacking the auto industry--should know that a claim that any country's vehicle fleet averages 45 miles per gallon is patently false, as any American understands the words "car" and "miles per gallon."

The Pew report is also inaccurate in another way since it includes as "cars" vehicles that most Americans would consider to be the equivalent of glorified ATVs, thus artificially driving up the "average" fuel economy. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison as Thomas Lifson writes:

[T]he vehicle mix in Japan contains many machines that Americans would not even consider cars. [Hinderaker] is quite correct in that regard. I have lived in Japan, and was even a car owner (a very hot Nissan sports model, one not sold in the USA, if you care to know, which got around 17 miles to the gallon of premium gas). Way, way back in time, before I had the financial ability to own a car, I used to borrow a friend's Honda N360, which had the same basic design as a Mini Cooper, only much smaller. I even drove it once all the way from Tokyo to Niigata, on the Japan Sea coast. That was the last auto trip I ever took in such a small car because it scared the wits out of me. American drivers would never accept such a vehicle. In Japan, where urban streets can be extremely narrow (some of them so narrow that a full size American sedan cannot physically fit), and where people are smaller on average than Americans, such vehicles make sense as city cars. Incidentally, such cars not only save money on gasoline, they are taxed at a significantly lower level than cars with larger engine displacement.

—Matthew Sheffield is the creator of NewsBusters and its Executive Editor.