WASHINGTON—Toyota Motor Corp., Fiat Chrysler, and other major automakers said on Tuesday they were joining General Motors in abandoning support for former President Donald Trump’s effort to bar California from setting its own zero-emission vehicle rules.
The automakers, which also included Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, Mitsubishi Motors, Mazda Motor, and Subaru Corp., said in a joint statement they were withdrawing from an ongoing legal challenge to California’s emission-setting powers, “in a gesture of good faith and to find a constructive path forward” with President Joe Biden.
The automakers, along with the National Automobile Dealers Association, said they were aligned “with the Biden administration’s goals to achieve year-over-year improvements in fuel economy standards.”
Nissan Motor Co. in December withdrew from the challenge after GM’s decision in November shocked the industry and won praise from Biden.
On Monday, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia to put the California emissions litigation on hold to “ensure due respect for the prerogative of the executive branch to reconsider the policy decisions of a prior administration.”
Biden has directed agencies to quickly reconsider Trump’s 2019 decision to revoke California’s authority to set its own auto tailpipe emissions standards and require rising numbers of zero-emission vehicles as well as Trump’s national fuel economy rollback.
Separately, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, another auto industry trade group, on Tuesday proposed to start talks with Biden on revised fuel economy standards that would be higher than Trump-era standards but lower than ones set during the prior Democratic administration.
The group represents all of the automakers that were involved in the legal challenge.
The Trump administration in March finalized a rollback of U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to require 1.5 percent annual increases in efficiency through 2026, well below the five percent yearly boosts under the Obama administration rules it discarded.
The auto group, representing GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, Honda Motor Co., and others, said a new nationwide emissions framework deal “should achieve improvements in GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions roughly midway between current standards and those of the former Obama administration.”
Ford Motor Co., Honda, VW, and BMW in July 2019 struck a voluntary agreement with California on reducing vehicle emissions that was less stringent than rules previously adopted under Obama but higher than Trump’s rollback.
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